Day 32: Ivan Niccolai responds to Leela Gandhi & Bhrigupati Singh, “Botched Enlightenment: A Conversation”
“How would the post-humans of the future cope with immortality and unlimited leisure time? Or access to interplanetary travel? While techno-scientific innovations would be indispensable for achieving these ambitious aims, and the dismantling of the myth of the given not only makes such ambitions possible but demands their realization, it is pure fantasy to imagine that the psychopathologies that haunt the present would not continue to manifest themselves in other guises, even in a post-scarcity and post-mortality future . . . Even if the myth of the given is fully dismantled, and scientific nihilism is taken to its final conclusions, with the human fully ‘hacked’ and programmable as the biological machine that it is, the question still remains as to what we ought to do with this amplified power of self-transformation.”
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