1. Boundless Expansion
Extropians recognize the unique place of our species, and our opportunity to advance nature's evolution to new peaks. Beginning as mindless matter, parts of nature developed in a slow evolutionary ascendence, leading to progressively more powerful brains. Chemical reactions generated tropistic behavior, which was superseded by instinctual and Skinnerian stimulus-response behavior, and then by conscious learning and experimentation. With the advent of the conceptual awareness of humankind, the rate of advancement sharply accelerated as intelligence, technology, and the scientific method were applied to our condition. We seek to sustain and quicken this evolutionary process of expanding extropy, transcending biological and psychological limits into posthumanity.
In aspiring to posthumanity, we reject natural and traditional limitations on our possibilities. We champion the rational use of science and technology to eradicate constraints on lifespan, intelligence, personal vitality, freedom, and experience. We recognize the absurdity of meekly accepting "natural" limits to our lifespans. The future will bring a graduation from Earth -- the cradle of human and transhuman intelligence -- and the inhabitation of the cosmos.
Resource limits are not immutable. Extropians affirm a rational, market-mediated environmentalism aimed at sustaining and enhancing the conditions for our flourishing. We oppose apocalyptic environmentalism which hallucinates catastrophe, issues a stream of irresponsible doomsday predictions, and attempts to strangle our continued evolution. Intelligent management of resources and environment will be fostered by the Extropian goal of vastly extended lifespan. The market price system encourages conservation, substitution, and innovation, preventing any need for a brake on growth and progress. Migration into space will immensely enlarge the energy and resources accessible to our civilization. Extended lifespans will foster wisdom and foresight, while restraining recklessness and profligacy.
No mysteries are sacrosanct, no limits unquestionable; the unknown will yield to the ingenious mind. We seek to understand the universe and to master reality up to and beyond any currently foreseeable limits.
2. Self-Transformation
Extropians affirm reason, critical inquiry, intellectual independence, and honesty. We reject blind faith and the passive, comfortable thinking that leads to dogma, mysticism, and conformity. Our commitment to positive self-transformation requires us to critically analyze our current beliefs, behaviors, and strategies. Extropians therefore feel proud by readily learning from error rather than by professing infallibility. We prefer analytical thought to fuzzy but comfortable delusion, empiricism to mysticism, and independent evaluation to conformity. We affirm a philosophy of life but distance ourselves from religious dogma because of its blind faith, debasement of human worth, and systematic irrationality.
We seek to become better than we are, while affirming our current worth. Perpetual self-improvement -- physical, intellectual, psychological, and ethical -- requires us to continually re-examine our lives. Self-esteem in the present cannot mean self-satisfaction, since a probing mind can always envisage a superior self in the future. Extropians are committed to deepening their wisdom, honing their rationality, and augmenting their physical and intellectual capabilities. We choose challenge over comfort, innovation over emulation, transformation over torpor.
Extropians are neophiles and experimentalists who track new research for more efficient means of achieving goals and who are willing to explore novel technologies of self-transformation. In our quest to advance to a posthuman stage, we rely on our own judgment, seek our own path, and reject both blind conformity and mindless rebellion. Extropians frequently diverge from the mainstream because they refuse to be chained by any dogma, whether religious, political, or intellectual. Extropians choose their values and behavior reflectively, standing firm when required but responding flexibly to new conditions.
Personal responsibility and autonomy go hand-in-hand with self-experimentation. Extropians take responsibility for the consequences of their choices, refusing to blame others for the results of their own free actions. Experimentation and self- transformation require risks; we wish to be free to evaluate potential risks and benefits for ourselves, applying our own judgment, and assuming responsibility for the outcome. We seek neither to rule others nor to be ruled. We vigorously resist those who use the institutionalized coercion of the State to impose their judgments of the safety and effectiveness of various means of self-experimentation. Personal responsibility and self-determination are incompatible with authoritarian centralized control, which stifles the choices and spontaneous ordering of autonomous persons.
Coercion, whether for the purported "good of the whole" or for the paternalistic protection of the individual, is unacceptable to us. Compulsion breeds ignorance and weakens the connection between personal choice and personal outcome, thereby destroying personal responsibility. Extropians are rational individualists, living by their own judgment, making reflective, informed choices, profiting from both success and shortcoming.
As neophiles, Extropians study advanced, emerging, and future technologies for their self-transformative potential. We support biomedical research to understand and control the aging process. We examine any plausible means of conquering death, including interim measures like biostasis, and long-term possibilities such as migration of personality from biological bodies into superior embodiments ("uploading").
We practice and plan for biological and neurological augmentation through means such as neurochemical enhancers, computers and electronic networks, General Semantics, fuzzy logic, and other guides to effective thinking, meditation and visualization techniques, accelerated learning strategies, applied cognitive psychology, and soon neural- computer integration. Shrugging off the limits imposed on us by our natural heritage, we apply the evolutionary gift of our rational, empirical intelligence to surpass the confines of our humanity, crossing the threshold into the transhuman and posthuman stages that await us.
4. Intelligent Technology
Extropians affirm the necessity and desirability of science and technology. We use practical methods to advance our goals of expanded intelligence, superior physical abilities, self- constitution, and immortality, rather than joining the well- trodden path of comfortable self-delusion, mysticism, and credulity. We regard science and technology as indispensable means to the evolution and achievement of our most noble values, ideals, and visions. We seek to foster these disciplined forms of intelligence, and to direct them toward eradicating the barriers to our Extropian objectives, radically transforming both the internal and external conditions of existence.
Technology is a natural extension and expression of human intellect and will, of creativity, curiosity, and imagination. We foresee and encourage the development of ever more flexible, smart, responsive technology. We will co-evolve with the products of our minds, integrating with them, finally merging with our intelligent technology in a posthuman synthesis, amplifying our abilities and extending our freedom.
Profound technological innovation excites rather than frightens us. We welcome change, expanding our horizons, exploring new territory boldly and inventively. We favor careful and cautious development of powerful technologies, but will neither stifle evolutionary advancement nor cringe before the unfamiliar. Regarding timidity and stagnation as unworthy of us, we choose to stride valiantly into the future. Extropians therefore favor surging ahead -- delighting in future shock -- rather than ignobly stagnating or reverting to primitivism. Intelligent use of biotechnology, nanotechnology, space and other technologies, in conjunction with a agoric free market system, can remove resource constraints and discharge environmental pressures.
We see the coming years and decades as a time of enormous changes, changes that will vastly expand our opportunities and abilities, transforming our lives for the better. This technological transformation will be accelerated by genetic engineering, life extending biosciences, intelligence intensifiers, smarter interfaces to swifter computers, neural-computer integration, virtual reality, enormous and interconnected databases, swift electronic communications, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, neural networks, artificial life, off-planet migration, and nanotechnology.
Conclusion
These are principles not only of belief but of action. We become transhuman only when we have fully integrated these values into our lives, when we have consciously transformed ourselves ready for the future, rising above outmoded human beliefs and behaviors. When technology allows us to reconstitute ourselves physiologically, genetically, and neurologically, we who have become transhuman will be primed to transform ourselves into posthumans -- persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity, self-programming, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals.
As posthumans we will both embody extropy and generate more -- more intelligence, information, energy, vitality, experience, diversity, opportunity, and growth. As we progress from human to transhuman to posthuman, our understanding and application of these Principles will evolve with us. The Extropian Principles are a new operating system for our selves; always seeking to improve upon them, we will avoid dogmatizing them. The Principles derive their value by guiding us to our true goal: the maximization in our lives of extropy
--------------------
Be all and you'll be to end all
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Adamist 
In(di)go 
[Re: 
Edit 
Reply 
1 2 all )
PDU
SneezingPenis
Grok
trendal
exclusive58
MOTH