Transhumanism: Should We Try to Live Forever?

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that promotes technological and biological advancement to enhance human capabilities--both physical and mental--as well as to improve our human condition in an effort to surmounting the obstacles of aging and disease. This "posthuman" quest is a pursuit of immortality.

One transhumanist manifesto espouses the following two sets of values or ideals:

(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Is this goal to eliminate aging and mortality a good and worthy undertaking? Or is it a danger to be avoided and even opposed? What are the boundaries we should set or lines beyond which we should not go?

We'll discuss this weighty matter of transhumanism at our next Socrates Cafe gathering. Come join us!

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