Transhumanisme dans Philosophie Magazine

Lorsque je lis ce genre de chose, ça me fait revenir en mémoire du Alan Watts. (1969)
Quelques copicollages d’un chapitre

By way of illustration, we can take an excursion into an aspect of science-fiction which is very rapidly becoming science-fact. Applied science may be considered as the game of order-versus-chance, especially in the domain of cybernetics. By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves. In medicine, communications, industrial production, transportation, finance, commerce, housing, education, psychiatry, criminology, and law we are trying to make foolproof systems, to get rid of the possibility of mistakes.
[Voir Taleb pour la robustesse effective de ce genre de « solidité »]

The ease of communication through such mass media as television, radio, books, and periodicals enables a single, articulate individual to reach millions. Yet the telephone and the post office enable a formidable fraction of those millions to talk back, which can be flattering and pleasing, except that there is no way of giving individual replies.

All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. (…) The trend of all this is towards the end of individual privacy, to an extent where it may even be impossible to conceal one’s thoughts.

To most of us living today, all these fantasies of the future seem most objectionable: the loss of privacy and freedom, the restriction of travel, and the progressive conversion of flesh and blood, wood and stone, fruit and fish, sight and sound, into plastic, synthetic and electronic reproductions. Increasingly, the artist and musician puts himself out of business through making ever more faithful and inexpensive reproductions of his original works.

All these eventualities may seem so remote as to be unworthy of concern. Yet in so many ways they are already with us, and, as we have seen, the speed of technical and social change accelerates more than we like to admit.

The question is then whether technical progress actually « gets anywhere » in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life.

Taking, therefore, a longer and wider view of things, the entire project of « conquering nature » appears more and more of a mirage—an increase in the pace of living without fundamental change of position, just as the Red Queen suggested. But technical progress becomes a way of stalling faster and faster because of the basic illusion that man and nature, the organism and the environment, the controller and the controlled are quite different things.