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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Such is the trap of value systems, you can't really live without one and any sort of conscious change to yours may run against your current one, like in the tale of Gandhi and the pacifism-reducing pills. Even those mindsets that the orthodox consider "deviation" and "degeneracy" are, by definition, part of the human condition. There is nothing in the Codex of Transhumanism that says we ought to keep our minds so open that anything can fall in.

Sure, and that's not an argument against what I pointed out. Again, there's no particular reason to believe that those societies would be "failure modes" of a transhuman future.

Like, the whole house elf analogy just reminds me of Brave New World, which was a novel that played around with that concept quite a bit more than in Harry Potter. I don't see any good reason why a transhumanist wouldn't consider that society a perfectly cromulent one. And personally, I would see that world as a very good one to live in, if not to aim for achieving in our own.

Perhaps if you interrogated a perfect spherical example of a transhuman whose literally only value is "transhumanity", they'd agree that a transhuman future that replicates the power inequalities and the downtrodding of the below by the above is no less good than a transhuman future which exemplifies Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

I don't see how this responds to anything I wrote. The idea that a house elf in Harry Potter or an elevator operator in Brave New World is "downtrodden" due to "power inequalities" is, in itself a rejection of transhumanism. It just seems to me like you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too.

To get back to the topic of this scifi gender-dysphoria-B-gone pill vs sex-change-down-to-the-molecular-level surgery, I still contend that a desire for transhumanism can't support the latter without supporting the former. There could be other reasons for supporting the latter without supporting the former, but that'd be something like believing in the sanctity of the mind over body. Which many people do believe in, on the basis of the eternal soul. But which also isn't convincing to people who don't believe in souls.