I read the Heidegger on Techno-Posthumanism chapter of the book Perfecting Human Futures and identified 30 key quotes that will help to better understand its meaning. They are presented below:
1. By midcentury, he tells us, humans will merge with artifi cial intelligence that will be billions of times smarter than ordinary humans.
2. According to Kurzweil, science and technology are turning out findings—especially in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, nanotechnology, and robotics—at an exponential rate, which he calls “the law of accelerating returns”
3. Enhancing the human is the central goal of transhumanism or transitional humanism.
4. Technoscience is an exceptionally powerful way of comprehending and deploying the forces of nature.
5. The possibility that super AI poses an existential risk to humanity’s future can no longer be consigned to the realm of science fiction, but instead must now be taken seriously.
6. Cybernetics redefined the human being as a kind of complex computer and purged from “meaning” all traces of subjectivity.
7. In this manner, self-conscious beings—which may be rare even in our vast universe—will survive the possible destruction of the biosphere.
8. A central motivation for transhumanism and techno-posthumanism is to avoid death.
9. As we drill down to the very substructures of matter, energy, and life, the prospect grows that humans can (a) construct life, (b) extend life, perhaps indefinitely; and (c) create a new, noncarbon-based form of life, endowed with AI that will bring about the Singularity.
10. Insofar as humankind is increasingly understood from the vantage point of technoscience—that is, as highly complex matter-energy that can at first be emulated and then dramatically enhanced—Heidegger would say that techno-posthumanism is the latest and perhaps most dangerous phase in the era of techno-industrial nihilism.
11. Super AI would be, in effect, the ultimate ontical embodiment of what Heidegger—drawing on Nietzsche—calls the Will to Will.
12. Heidegger’s study of the origins of nature of modern Technik constitutes an important instance of technology, in the way just defined.
13. In his famous “Letter on Humanism,” published shortly after the end of World War II, Heidegger contrasted his view with humanism, which has evolved to the point that humans regard themselves as potential masters over the whole of beings.
14. The clearing makes possible human finitude, mortality, and receptivity, thereby allowing us to be affected in ways that lets things matter to us.
15. Human Dasein exists as—or perhaps better—within the temporal-historical clearing needed for the self-showing, that is, the Being of beings (Sein des Seienden) to occur.
16. We do not create the natural phenomena that encounter us but depend on them for our continued existence.
17. Plato initiated the metaphysical tradition by defining Being as eidos, the permanently present (eternal) form that reason alone can discern.
18. For metaphysics, Being names the foundation and origin of beings, that which allows them to endure, that which forms and structures them so that they persist.
19. “Consummation,” so Heidegger writes, “means the unimpeded development of all the essential powers of beings, powers that have been
reserved for a long time, to what they demand as a whole”.
20. The quest for infinite power, the Will to Will, increasingly forecloses the finite receptivity that makes us specifically human.
21. Heidegger suggests that several centuries will probably unfold in accordance with “machination,” the reducing of all beings to fungible raw material, as demanded by what Nietzsche called the Will to Power.
22. The metaphysics of the Will to Power is discernible in Kurzweil’s prediction that
the first thing an artificially intelligent computer will do is to redesign itself, so that
it can become far more intelligent than all human beings collectively.
23. The prevailing power in the presence of what-is-present needs the human being.
24. This is what Parmenides’ saying means: To gar auto noein estin te kai einai. “Perceiving and Being are the same.”
25. In coming decades, so Heidegger surmised, the Will to Power will allow and even demand that humans generate what today is depicted as autonomous, super AI.
26. Heidegger indicated that beings primarily reveal themselves as ready-to-hand (zuhanden), that is, as always already involved with human productive activity undertaken with tools, whether in the workshop or in the field.
27. Heidegger writes,The basic form of appearance in which the Will to Will arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can be stringently called “technology.”
28. When machination attains ultimate dominance, when it pervades everything, then there are no more circumstances whereby the bewitchery can be sensed explicitly and resisted.
29. The hex cast by technology and by its constantly self-surpassing progress is only one sign of this bewitchery that directs everything toward calculation, utility, breeding, manageability, and regulation.
30. As Nietzsche once put it,Preludes of science—Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?
Source: The book Perfecting Human
Futures
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