humanity is the awkward prepubescent phase between animal and machine

16513 2319

5513 0310 : Human is a gradual process

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos.

Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you've committed a holocaust of potential human beings.

Let's say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it's also morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should.

I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.

/S. Hariss, par embrionālo cilmes šūnu pētniecību/

4513 1901

4513 0332 : Transhuman privilege

29413 1102 : Into submission

25413 1824 : Acts of idiocy

In general the animal rights is a heavyweight and serious issue, and it is in this light that the damage, already far greater than these perpetrators most likely can imagine, becomes even more severe. Not only have they managed to stymie valuable and much needed research, they have also further stained the already tarnished image of animal rights activism.

Our hearts go out to the researchers at the University of Milan, and our hopes are that by gradually raising the sanity waterline and the herd immunity against anti-intellectualism - and by raising the security procedures necessary for entering the premises of such laboratories - we can avoid these steps toward a new Dark Age.

With deepest sympathies, Latvian Transhumanist Association.

Kārtējo reizi dzīvnieku tiesību aktīvisms vienas grupas izpildījumā atkal ir pāraudzis terorismā.

22413 2349 : The history of life, the Universe and everything else, so far, in 200 words or less

22413 1502

19413 1357 : You have to know your genes better than makes of cars

If we had total control over the genome, living matter would be like play-dough, which we could use to create a body with any properties we wish. Then humans would stop being victims of their inheritance. And then ageing would become history.

http://mariakonovalenko.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/you-have-to-know-your-genes-better-than-makes-of-cars

18413 1411

17413 1727 : Empyrean matters

15413 1349

10413 1524

4413 1519 : From people

4413 0155 : Far too soon

2413 1418 : Conspiratorial cosmology

31313 2115 : Ἀληθῶς ανέστη;

21313 2011

18313 1743

18313 1220 : Being more cerebral