Neuronymph writes, "Truthfully I had not even considered the environmental impact of having a child."

Well I don't want to lay some enormous guilt trip on you or your friend. Please, find joy in the children you've both had. As I said, it's really a matter of choice.

Children can also be an indirect incentive towards environmentalism because they make you care more about the world than you'd otherwise do.

Neuronymph writes, "Radical ecology types argue that the human population should be dramatically reduced (mentioned in Citizen Cyborg, I believe) if humanity and the environment are to survive at all."

Or we should just leave. I'm the founder of VEEM (Voluntary Earth Evacuation Movement. A play on VEHMT.) and so far it's only member. We need to get off this rock and leave it alone. We shouldn't force people to leave but we should provide strong economic inducements for them to do so.

Neuronymph writes, "My boss lamented that only the right-wing crazies are having children and this is clear when you look at what is going on with the Christian Reconstructionists and their ilk...."

So lefties should breed them into ground to retain control of the global culture? I don't buy it. Eugenics from the left is still eugenics.

There are many other ways to influence the culture aside from fecundity.

Think of all the famous figures of history. Do we remember them for their kids or do we remember them for what they did? Who here even remember Einstein's kids, or Grace Hopper's? Few would deny the influence of Newton, who was childless. There are a few famously fecund families, Kennedys or the Bushs but, most prodigious families have vanished to history. Their effect has been very indirect. Dynasties, large and small, just aren't reliable enough.

I'm just asking you to remember the reasons why you and your husband had the kid. I don't really know but, I'm guessing almost none of the reasons had anything to do with some "duty to the culture." To think that way is messianic and silly.

We are seeing a trend in the advanced nations towards lower birth rates. I personally don't have nor want children, and we are a growing minority.

The economic advantages of remaining childless are clear in non-agrarian societies.

Among most people in the U.S. that have children, very few are having more than 2.

In Germany, 48% of women reaching age 40 have no children at all.

It could be argued that some nations need redical life extension to prevent the eventual decline of thier native, ethnic population.

I personally like the idea of holding back reproduction (by personal lifestyle choices and not government coorcion) and increasing the desirability of promoting life extension.

Mr. Farlops:

All I can do is point to historical waves of immigration in the United States and say, "See? Didn't hurt so much, did it?" It's true that waves of immigration do change the country immigrated to. The US cultural character did change somewhat. At the same time the country changes its immigrants as well.

It is not immigration that I am afraid of, or that I object to. However, the historical waves of immigration that you are referring to also occurred in context of a "native"-- or at least naturalized-- population that was also vigorously growing.

I am an avid supporter of immigration and the interaction between and mingling of cultures; memetic evolution, like genetic evolution, is driven by the interactions of different combinations of traits.

However, for our memes-- like our genes-- to be made stronger by absorbing outside influences, we have to ensure that they survive. While memes are not as heritable as genes, and there are alternatives to passing them down to future generations, raising children is still the primary and most lasting means of ensuring the survival of our ideas.

I fully support the idea that our country should accept immigrants, and that our culture should absorb them-- but we should not allow our population or our culture to be replaced by them.

Mr. Farlops:

Gibson's truism that the future arrives unevenly does have a lot of weight but what kind of time gap are we talking about here--merely years or long centuries?

Ask the people living in Sudan, where the slave market is still flourishing, or Laos where some groups still practice marriage-by-abduction.

Hell... ask the people living in Colorado City, where they still practice polygamous arranged marriages and marriage-by-abduction. They're not even foreigners.

Now, on an intellectual level, I can acknowledge that no culture is objectively superior to any other culture-- but I can tell you absolutely that there are some cultural practices that I don't want my sons, or especially my daughters, to be subjected to. If we want to protect the freedom of speech and thought, the equality of the sexes-- and the equality of races, which you seem to think I am attacking-- and the other "enlightened" traits necessary for transhuman ideals, we need to ensure that the people who believe in them outnumber the people that do not.

We can not accomplish this if more children are being raised to reject those values than to accept them.

Mr. Farlops:

Do they all fear the emerging global culture, the culture of the future? It seems like they all want to reject change and shut the world world out.

What do you think I am doing here, if I am "rejecting change" and fearing "the culture of the future"?

All I want is for the "culture of the future" to not include the worst parts of the "cultures of the past"; I don't want the "culture of the present" to grow into something that sickens me more than it already does. There are a lot of things I cannot stomach about American (or European) culture right now, but it is still a better starting point than any of our other options.

Mr. Farlops:

I prefer to use the rather discredited word "modernity" instead of "Western ideals" because modernity isn't tied to any specific culture or geographic location.

That's actually why it was discredited. It's based on the-- ironically ethnocentric-- notion that some cultures are "more advanced" than others, and thus are superior to them. It assumes that cultural change only goes in one direction-- toward "progress"-- and that more "primitive" cultures will eventually catch up and imitate more "advanced" cultures.

Korimyr the Rat:

...but we need to be having and raising children as a group, or else the posthumanity we're fighting for can never exist.

Mr. Farlops:

Well, I have to ask you who do you mean when you say "group?"

I mean "us". The set of those members of the human species that generally share our cultural and philosophical ideals, not only of transhumanism but our general notions of what constitutes freedom, justice, and progress.

As much as I am a man of generally nationalist sentiments-- a fact I make no bones about-- that isn't what I'm talking about here. If anything, we as transhumanists need to reach across national borders and form our own new tribes around the ideals we share. We shouldn't turn people aside based on national, tribal, or religious differences, because as I am sure you would agree, these are the irrational prejudices of the past.

But we sure as Hell shouldn't let ourselves go extinct, either, because we can't tell the difference between "us" and "them".

Mr. Farlops:

If by group, you mean all humanity, then we are having plenty of kids.

If it were even remotely possible that that was what I meant, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Mr. Farlops:

Personally I don't think human diversity is in any danger of diminishing yet. I don't think it's necessary to personally sow my oats to somehow protect human diversity. The connection is so vague and indirect it's essentially meaningless.

Ain't worried about the genes of Western civilization. The Americas-- especially North America-- are more genetically diverse than any other continent on the planet. For that matter, our culture would still be preserved if all of the people here forsaking biological reproduction adopted their share of foreign babies instead.

I don't care if my children are human; why do you think I would care if they're White?

I would've said the "meme pool" instead, but people around here just don't seem to understand how important our childhoods and our upbringings are to what we believe in. Maybe a leopard can change his spots-- but panthera pardus as a whole can not.

Mr. Farlops:

If we're so concerned about about humanity loosing our unique genetic combination ... donate to a sperm or egg bank. And pay to have your genes cloned.

I would in a heartbeat, if I weren't genetically defective. I'm still not entirely certain that I shouldn't sire children naturally; it depends on how far genetic therapy comes along in the next few years.

Mr. Farlops:

Just please don't frame it in terms of this vaguely ethnocentric and racist "duty to the race." That's just ridiculous.

You know what happens to groups of organisms that will not or can not reproduce. I don't accept this "duty to the race" garbage any more than you do-- but I do think that we have a duty to society to help to preserve and to improve it, and a duty to our families to ensure that they are perpetuated.

If for whatever reason you do not wish to reproduce, by all means abstain-- but at the very least, adopt and do your damnedest to raise the best children you can. This trend toward small families and total childlessness isn't just selfish, it is cultural and societal suicide; promoting it in the name of "progress" and "evolution" is the worst possible thing we could do.

First I'd like to make an apology to Korimyr and Neuronymph for the holier than thou tone in the my last two posts. I looked them over just now and it generated a few winces of embarrassment.

I guess the current controversy over amnesty for illegal immigrants in the States has got me fired up and looking for a fight. My patrotism, a vague, complicated and hand-wringing thing such as it is, is more of the old Emma Lazarus/Woody Guthrie school.

But I still stand by my point that the idea of religious fanatics breeding intellectuals into oblivion is alarmist. I'm simply not afraid of this. I say let 'em try to win the culture war that way! It's only a hunch but, I think they are doomed to fail in the long run. They'll find that their elitist eugenics-like ideas will fail.

This all reminds me of that Kornbluth story, "The Marching Morons." Or Adams' B Ark Golgafrinchams. Or Wells' Eloi and Morloks. We all realize those stories were satire, right? Just like Swift, right?

Korimyr writes, "If for whatever reason you do not wish to reproduce, by all means abstain-- but at the very least, adopt and do your damnedest to raise the best children you can. This trend toward small families and total childlessness isn't just selfish, it is cultural and societal suicide; promoting it in the name of "progress" and "evolution" is the worst possible thing we could do."

Okay, I won't preach about it--well, not much anyway--but I will point out statements that I think are unsupported alarmism. Having a child or not really should be a very personal and carefully thought out decision and, in the best of all worlds, shouldn't be tangled up in abstractions like "winning the culture war."

But this is the real world. And people do have children or avoid having children for very abstract reasons.

Also, I have been and still am something of an informal uncle and elder to a lot of my friends and relatives kids. They seem to think I'm a trustworthy guy and a good influence. So maybe, in a small and subversive way, I am doing my part to protect intellectualism from being bred into oblivion. I've been told on numerous occasions that I have good talent for teaching and explaining things.

If it's really true that intellectuals (right or left) are facing some kind of cultural extinction, I say let 'em try it! Not on my watch!

It's not about merely having kids; it's about teaching kids. It's not fecundity; it's about economic, political and cultural power. And if we view it this way, the odds are heavily in favor of transhumanist ideals winning in the long run.

Mr. Farlops:

First I'd like to make an apology to Korimyr and Neuronymph for the holier than thou tone in the my last two posts. I looked them over just now and it generated a few winces of embarrassment.

No apology necessary on my account. We're still good, and a man of my moral sentiments tends to develop a high tolerance for sanctimony.

Mr. Farlops:

I guess the current controversy over amnesty for illegal immigrants in the States has got me fired up and looking for a fight.

If you could persuade me to broach that subject-- on this forum-- for all the gold in California, you would probably have that fight on your hands.

Mr. Farlops:

But I still stand by my point that the idea of religious fanatics breeding intellectuals into oblivion is alarmist. I'm simply not afraid of this. I say let 'em try to win the culture war that way!

The problem is, they don't see that as part of the cultural war; it's simply a part of their overall moral reasoning.

Our disdain for large families and our increasingly obsessive individualism are leaving us with a culture that cannot sustain itself. There won't be a "culture war" at this rate; the fanatics are going to march in and occupy our ruins without firing a shot, naming all of their new towns after their languages' word for "office building" or "strip mall" like all of those lovely "-field" names in New England and the Midwest.

Korimyr the Rat:

This trend toward small families and total childlessness isn't just selfish, it is cultural and societal suicide; promoting it in the name of "progress" and "evolution" is the worst possible thing we could do.

Mr. Farlops:

Having a child or not really should be a very personal and carefully thought out decision and, in the best of all worlds, shouldn't be tangled up in abstractions like "winning the culture war."

I'll agree with you that it ought to be personal and deliberate. I agree absolutely.

But instead of "winning the culture war", we should be wondering what all of our fine accomplishments are worth if we have noone to leave them to. Maybe our parents really are going to be the last generation of human beings to die of old age-- but there are still millions of other ways to die. It doesn't matter how long-lived a species is... if it stops reproducing, it is going to go extinct eventually.

Not to mention, if we're going to live forever, we're going to have to find some way of maintaining dynamism. "Forever" is a long time to have to put up with the same six billion people.

Mr. Farlops:

Also, I have been and still am something of an informal uncle and elder to a lot of my friends and relatives kids. ... It's not about merely having kids; it's about teaching kids.

You've got yourself a point here. Honestly, as concerned as I am about declining reproduction, I am far more concerned with the loss of strong family bonds and the increasing isolation of individuals and nuclear families.

It's not the childlessness so much as the rootlessness. The tribelessness.

If I can make more money, enough to interest someone of childbearing age, I may indeed have more kids. If not by marriage then by contract to protect my property from parasitic females. If I were to live centuries via some unexpected breakthrough I would certainly space out having kids a bit more and would want them to be "designer babies" with specific abilities. Thus maybe only a couple per century -- people will still die, after all.

I already have one and she has 3 kids, so my darwinian fitness cannot be questioned.

Korimyr the Rat:

Mr. Farlops:

Immigration can fill out the ranks of workers needed to support the Social Security System, at least in the United States.

Yeah, we can get immigrants for the labor pool without causing much of a problem.

The problem is, immigrants come from their cultures and have their ideas, while we have ours. You may dismiss this as ethnocentrism-- valid enough, I suppose-- but how many people outside of the Western First World hold to transhumanist ideals, or even the basic humanist ideals necessary to support transhumanism?

Evolution isn't about improving ourselves-- though it's an admirable goal-- it's about improving our species one generation at a time. We can't do that if we remove ourselves from the gene pool.

Now, I ain't so keen on having biological children myself, unless some of my genetic defects can be corrected-- but we need to be having and raising children as a group, or else the posthumanity we're fighting for can never exist.

some questions...

Should we create children (using darwinian breeding) in order to support a dream? Are we thinking about the well-being of these future generations?

How does it make one feel to think of having children and why is this a motivating factor?

Korimyr the Rat:

The problem is, they don't see that as part of the cultural war; it's simply a part of their overall moral reasoning.

Our disdain for large families and our increasingly obsessive individualism are leaving us with a culture that cannot sustain itself.

But you seem to keep ignoring that these processes are also cultural as well as  biological. If they could totally isolate their children from the subversive influences of the emerging global culture, they might be able to maintain the stasis they want but, they can't.

Or they can but, only out of deference from the outside culture. The Amish, for example, are allowed to exist. We could choose to repress or destroy them if we wanted to. The government could pass laws that say that home schooling or religious schools are illegal. The Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries gave us ample evidence of violent repression of all kinds of cultures, Turkey and the Armenians, the Soviets, the N-a-z-i's, Pol Pot, the genocide of Native Americans, etc. etc. etc.

The world is shrinking all time.

If they have to fly airplanes into buildings to get our attention, they are already fighting on our terms.

And what is a family? Is it merely biological ties? Or can a family, subculture or nation be constructed out of a mixture of long time friends, some relatives and like minded people?

I think one of the clever things of this emerging, global culture is that it doesn't have to rely on biological ties to propagate itself. Like minded individuals can join together and make common cause. I would argue that people who join a subculture by their own choice are more loyal than people who merely find themselves in a culture by birth.

Notice that people want to immigrate to Europe, North America, Taiwan, Japan and so on. They don't want to immigrate to Sudan or North Korea. The French may have recently made several stupid mistakes in dealing with their Muslim and Arabic immigrants but they are far more enlightened than the Saudis or the Burmese. 

In the end, I can't get past this silly image that your position seems to imply to me--that I must somehow knock out 8 or 9 kids in order spread and defend the global culture.

Why is it that necessary when the global culture already has most of the economic, scientific and political power and seems to be vigorously, and occasionally violently and crudely, defending it? The dynamism seems to be in the global culture, not the xenophobic and neophobic ones.

Notice also that this process of cultural subversion is much, much faster than mere biological reproduction. Static, regressive cultures can breed as much as they want, that just gives us more minds to infect with our junkfood, gadgets and bad television.

China and India, two of the largest and longest lived cultures in human history, have already adapted to the global culture in an astoundingly short period of time. If a hack like that can be pulled off, evangelicals, the Pope, the North Koreans and al Qaeda don't scare me that much. They can all be dealt with if we are careful and clever.

Note that I'm not saying this struggle between cosmopolitianism and xenophobia will finally end some day. It will go on and on forever. There will always be historical periods and pockets of regression and decline as well as much larger realms and periods of dynamism and expansion. Culture, like life, tends to expand into all the niches it can occupy.

As long as there is energy to support the proliferation and alteration of minds, the expanding culture will remain diverse and full of activity. Stasis is unstable even it though it sporadically and endlessly reappears.

Alot of the dialoge here has shifted to whether the breeders and dyers are going to outnumber those of us in the future who choose to be non-breeder/immortals (as will be my choice, if it is available).

The way I see it, genetic reproduction is critical to non-conscious life like lower animals but not to humans who have indefinite life spans that also are accompanied with evolving memes and expanding intellegence.

I believe that people like Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand (yes, put those two together, for they have a diametrically opposed philisophical premises, and influence our thinking dramatically), Frank R Wallace ( in the Rand camp to be sure), Bertrand Russell ( got to love him! He has problems with all religions INCLUDING communism and capitalism!), and also Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Casimar, Dirac, John Koza, John Holland ( the genius who invented the first genetic algorithm in the 60's, who's work John Koza has improved upon), and all other thinking individuals who either just influence our thinking memes on the phililosiphical level, or create the really great things that change the course of history and dramatically improve our human condition might in reality be, well, billions of times more effective in preserving their true essence throughout history than just breeding.

Also, the breeders and dyers may out number us, but many of thier children, over the course of the next several decades/century would join us. Many of these "Christian Reconstructionist" will remain un-enhanced and will present very weak arguments to thier own children, many of whom wll question thier parents idiology (oh, yeh! That never happens by the way) and someone, like myself, with my ehanced intellegence will present to them an alternative to thier parants very narrow and coercive view of reality.

Also, if anyone  ever wants me to be even more vehement about NOT having children, tell me that I should do it for some goddamn "higher cause" , "society", and because it is "selfish" not to have children.

Also, even if Earth can support a half-trillion people in relative comfort, why should we mindlessly breed like bacteria in a jar until all the resources are converted to more copies of itself?

If the Earth could support a half-trillion people in comfort, but the population just levels of at 19 billion instead, we could have a very good life with a clean world and beautiful wilderness for the next 5 billion years ( more or less).

Mementic, not genetic evolution is our future.  

 

Abolitionist:

Should we create children (using darwinian breeding) in order to support a dream?

Is there any other reason? Some people just have different dreams.

Abolitionist:

Are we thinking about the well-being of these future generations?

Hmm. I would say you're putting the cart before the horse-- there has to be future generations before we can concern ourselves with the well-being of future generations.

On a more direct note, for a social and slow-developing species like ours, it does us very little good to have children without keeping a sharp eye out for their well-being. It is especially self-defeating if you are trying to preserve your family name and your cultural ideals-- as opposed to simply propagating your genes.

Abolitionist:

How does it make one feel to think of having children and why is this a motivating factor?

Can't speak for anyone else, and since this is an emotional matter I sorely doubt I could explain myself properly, either.

Suffice it to say that eventually, the balance of fear and joy will tip one way or the other and I'll make up my mind for certain.

I kind of skimmed through the latter part of this thread but id like to comment on the idea of feeling the need to perhaps out-breed "right-wing crazies" who raise their children in a manner suiting their own lifestyle. In my opinion, in the long run it really doesnt matter where the kids come from. Sure, some of these children will be coded into growing up just like their parents, but i think that nearly any child with the intelligence and curiosity to grow into a full-fledged so-called "intellectual" will eventually get into the world, see whats up and do so.

      If the Earth could support a half-trillion people in comfort, but the population just levels of at 19 billion instead, we could have a very good life with a clean world and beautiful wilderness for the next 5 billion years ( more or less).  

There are indications that the world can not support 6 billion people. Perhaps naturally the world can scale population up, but social systems, or lack of them, are not able to meet the needs of whole populations of citizens in a specific country or countries to bring each citizen up to and into the middle class.

I think replacement value, or creating two children over a lifetime is good. If we live 1,000 years or more, perhaps you could create more children if you paid the enviromental impact fee, or government would allow you replacement value (2) kids and every 200 or 500 years an additional kid or an additional two kids.

So even if you lived to 1,000 and had two kids every 100 years, you would have fathered:

2 x 10 = 20 and if each of your kids did the same, 20 x 2 x 10 = 400 kids... :)

I plan on having two kids, at least one before I die. I have held off on creating kids because of lack of economic resources. Hopefully my situation will change. If not, I think I will still have kids. The need to create offspring is more important than paying for the offspring once created.

Not everyone has a middle class lifestyle, or can "buy" a life, wife, house and "buy" the access needed to attain a middle class position in society.

 

 

Alethinos:

Sure, some of these children will be coded into growing up just like their parents, but I think that nearly any child with the intelligence and curiosity to grow into a full-fledged so-called "intellectual" will eventually get into the world, see whats up and do so.

This casual contempt for the ideals and values of our enemies is a weakness.

There are intellectuals amongst those opposed to human self-transformation, those opposed to genetic self-determination, and those opposed to the development of human-like artificial intelligence. There are intellectuals who choose to place religious values over secular values and intellectuals who choose martyrdom over peace and progress.

Yes, the intelligent and the curious will grow up and learn. They will become rational, persuasive speakers in defense of the things they believe in, and they will become credits to their faiths, their nations, and their organizations.

None of this even begins to suggest, however, that they're going to agree with you.

I guess i should have thought out my response more carefully...

I hadnt meant to imply any specific political- social etc. leanings on the part of the children i was referring to or that what some people like to call "intellectuals" only think in one specific way; id thought that the person whoever was referring to earlier was implying that the children that "right-wing crazies" are supposedly attempting to fill the earth with wouldnt be doing any thinking of their own. By all means have different opinions than me, i love a good argument.

At any rate your point is well made and i apologize for being unclear.

Btw "our enemies"?

Alethinos:

id thought that the person whoever was referring to earlier was implying that the children that "right-wing crazies" are supposedly attempting to fill the earth with wouldnt be doing any thinking of their own. By all means have different opinions than me, i love a good argument.

Certainly. The problem is, they will be predisposed by their upbringing to disagree with us, and while some of their independent thoughts will lead them to our side, the majority of them will remain firmly entrenched.

There is no logical advantage possessed by us that means that "independent thought" is going to bring people into our side except, marginally, for our tendency to tolerate more radical lines of thought. Even then... we do have specific values that are neither automatically nor objectively superior to theirs.

We won't win by default, no matter how enamored we are of the fruits of our own mental labors.

Alethinos:

Btw "our enemies"?

We, as transhumanists, stand for some very specific moral and ethical values concerning "progress", the shape the future should take, and evolutionary self-determination. There are groups of people who, for various reasons, are opposed to those values and will use varying means of coercion-- from social disapproval to legislation to terrorism-- to prevent us from applying those moral values.

Regardless of whether or not we want to fight on that level-- and even if we are entirely unwilling to do so-- we will be attacked on that level.

We should recognize this, and recognize that if the future we desire is to come to pass, we will have to fight for it.