Biological Limitations

Phillipe Verdoux has an illuminating post up on IEET about how we define “limitations:”

Take a closer look at what sort of things transhumanists identify as falling within the extension of “biological limitations.” In my perusal of the literature, I have often come across transhumanists complaining about such things as: the slow speed of cerebration, the mind’s limited data-storage capacities, the unreliability of love and other interpersonal relations, our inability to “to visualize an [sic] 200-dimensional hypersphere or to read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress,” and so on. While I am not (at least not necessarily) arguing against the claim that such features are limitations, I am urging special caution in labeling them as “limitations.” Why? Because, as far as I can tell, many of the values hiding behind the transhumanist’s list of limitations derive from (the domain of) technology itself—or at least it is not unreasonable to be suspicious of the origin of such values.

There is nothing more exciting than people saying “this philosophy is interesting, here are all the problems I see, let’s get to fixing them!”