Words&Dirt

“The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’ An M. I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments or break out stores; this is a solder’s ancient right.

But all ‘soft, safe’ jobs are filled by civilians; that goldbricking private climbs into his capsule certain that everybody, from general to private, is doing it with him. Light-years away and on a different day, or maybe an hour or so later––no matter. What does matter is that everybody drops. This is why he enters the capsule, even though he may not be conscious of it.

If we ever deviate from this, the M. I. will go to pieces. All that holds us together is an idea––one that binds more strongly than steel but its magic power depends on keeping it intact.”

––Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein, loc. 2849-57

“When I was a young child I was a very different sort of being from what I am now. In one sense, it is true to say this: when I was 4 or 5 years old, the life of an adult was not a good life for me. That is, it would not have suited me as I was right then. I was not ready for it. However, I am physically and psychologically continuous with that same entity, and I think of myself as the same individual, though radically transformed. Through a series of changes, a child becomes an adult, and lives an adult’s life. It can be a good life for the adult, though it would not have suited the child. That acknowledged, there is another sense in which adult life was, indeed, always a good life for the child…only not yet, and not for reasons that the child could fully understand.

I suggest that we should not be disturbed at the prospect that we (or our descendents) might ultimately become beings whose capabilities and values are radically different from our own at the moment. Nussbaum repeatedly states that a more-than-human life would not be a good life for us, but I see no reason why it might not be a good life for the beings that we could become incrementally, beginning from decisions and changes that are indeed good ones for human beings.”

–– “The Great Transition: Ideas and Anxieties,” by Russell Blackford, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 425