My mind feels like the littering of concepts and ideas is in a state of utter confusion.
As with my animal project, I think it might help if I try to give my enhancement project some shape here.
Human enhancement implies either that what is being enhanced is a human or that 'human' is what is being enhanced. In the case of the former, well, I'll address that later. As for the latter, despite claims that there is some essence to being human - perhaps spirit, morality or dignity - there appears little empirical backing for such a claim. Darwin himself noted that species are populations rather than rigorous categories. At what point, for example, did the wolf become the dog? Now we can determine between wolf and dog, but during the transition, surely it would have been arbitrary to have defined White Fang from Snoopy.
In addition, there are humans who lack the 'special' qualities which we claim define us. There are humans who are not rational, moral, autonomous; humans who do not have a consistent conception of themselves through time; humans who cannot use memories from the past to create plans for the future; humans who cannot conceptualise what is not possible.
As a population, humans are distinct from chimpanzees, but there are some chimps who are smarter than some humans; orcas who are more social than some humans (if not all); birds who can problem solve better than some humans.
Thus, to enhance 'human' is to enhance a chimera.
But humans can be enhanced through the betterment of existing traits. Even this is a little problematic. For to enhance the IQ of a person from 60 to 80 would be therapeutic (taking her up to the outside of the statistically normal range). But what would 80 to 100 be? Or 100 to 120, 120 to 140? These are enhancements for the individuals, but the new state remains within the normal range. However, to take a person from 180 to 200, it seems, would be... something different... would it qualify as 'human enhancement' if no human had been up to 200 before?
That sort of might suggest, though, that running a four minute mile for the first time was a human enhancement. And that does not seem plausible. But surely there's a distinction between enhancing within the range found in existing humans and beyond it?
So I want to create some new terms. Enhancement of humans and Super-enhancement of humans.
Now, were a human to be enhanced across many areas, but all within the range found in existing humans, that human would be a comprehensively enhanced human. But if the human had been enhanced beyond this range in... one? Or more than one?... area, then, perhaps, that person might be a post-human. If, as transhumanists like to imagine, the possible range is infinite, then perhaps, over millennia, there could be post-post-humans... I mean, doubling capabilities is one thing, but multiplying them by six or twelve or a hundred? There is potentially far more variation between an existing human and a post-post-human than between a wolf and a dog.
OK. This has made the situation more confusing rather than less.
Oh dear.
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