Philosophy and Such

"Transhumanism" refers to a wide array of inter-related commitments, but here I am concerned with the assumption that, in the future, we will transcend our biology by "uploading" our consciousness onto computer hardware. While this is a beautiful idea, as I shall argue, it won't happen. ---- Lieutenant Commander Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" seems to represent a future stage of human evolution. His brain is positronic - not biological. As such, he is free of the kinds of biological constraints we have, including degradation and eventual brain death. As technology progresses exponentially, we might think and hope that we can become more like him. Indeed, some think that this is inevitable and will happen in our lifetime. If we are to be like Data, it must be possible for non-biological hardware to run our mental software. Given the advances in Artificial Intelligence, we might think it is only a matter of time before this happen...

When I think about certain political issues, there is a tiny libertarian in the back of my head taunting me and giving me room for doubt. That is, from a philosophical point-of-view, libertarianism is quite attractive, as it is simple and easy to apply. For instance, we might wonder with uncertainty as to whether or not a given regulation will have good consequences. For the libertarian, this is inconsequential. If the regulation, say, requires one party to help another party, it is impermissible - simple as that. Since I am not quite sure exactly what I should think of this view, in what follows I shall discuss a particular (possible) problem for libertarianism with the hopes of making some progress on the issue. 'Libertarianism', of course, gets used in different ways. So, for my purposes, I shall use the term to refer to a view that is committed to the following principle NO (no obligation): we have no (non-derivative) obligation to help others . (The reason for adding ...