Bostrom, "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up," 10 Ways of Life

by Corry Shores
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Will becoming posthuman be like becoming a new species?

Nick Bostrom

"Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"

X. Ways of Life

There is another reason we might think it is bad to become posthuman.

Bostrom illustrates the reasoning this way:

It would not be good for a clover to grow into a rhododendron, nor for a fly to start looking and behaving like a raven. Neither would it, on this view, be good for a human to acquire posthuman capacities and start living a posthuman life. (18)

This argument is based on the belief that humans have a certain "telos" that should not be changed.

This objection is much like the concerns some have with personal identity, which we already addressed.

So, the change is like a clover becoming a rhododendron. We saw how they are teleological different. But instead of one being better than the other, they are merely qualitatively different. So one cannot be more worthwhile than the other. It can only be different.

But, says Bostrom, people are not plants. We think of what is best for plants and other non-sentient things as what helps them function. The plant needs water, the clock needs winding. But human needs are not limited to basic functionality. We may have our own unique interests for what we want to become, for how we want to change.

The fact that someone is a farmer does not at all imply that she must stay a farmer. She might now need to sleep, but if she became posthuman perhaps she would no longer have that need. So just because right now she needs sleep does not mean she should always have that need.

There could be other inexplicit needs to remain unaltered in essential ways. It is possible that we have a "human nature" that should not be deleted. Bostrom will now address this line of argumentation.

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Nick Bostrom. "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up." Forthcoming in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Springer), 2007.

PDF available at:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/posthuman.pdf