Retos bioéticos del mejoramiento humano (original) (raw)
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Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology. The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one's own subject in favour of blending with other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these p...
In the modern world an individual deals with different technologies and products of scientific and technological progress and becomes more and more dependent on them, spending considerable time to understand changes and to keep up with progress. In general, the entire human history especially in the last few centuries is the history of victories and triumph of science, technology, and information technologies. Moreover, the humankind being a father of technology at the same time became more and more dependent on it. Today technologies penetrate almost every aspect of our life: private, family and intimate, as well as our mentality. But even more serious transformations are awaiting us in the future when devices and technologies are introduced into the human body and consciousness thus putting strain on all our biological (nervous, physical, and intellectual) adaptive capacities. Today they give a serious thought to seemingly strange ideas about whether mobile phones, computers, and organizers can become a part of our body and brain. In fact, technology has become one of the most powerful forces of development.
This article identifies four different types of posthumanism that run through the current literature on the implications of new biotechnologies for what it means to be human: a ‘dystopic’, a ‘liberal’, a ‘radical’ and a ‘methodological’ posthumanism, which correspond roughly to bioconservatism, transhumanism, cyborgology and STS scholarship. I argue that dystopic and liberal posthumanism, although they are the dominant discourses in the debate on emerging biotechnologies and human enhancement, cannot provide sound theoretical frameworks for this discussion insofar as they are grounded in the humanist divide between humans and the world – and humans and technology – that is precisely being undermined by the technologies in question. Radical and methodological posthumanism offer important non-humanist alternatives to these discourses. Their rejection of the humanist distinction between autonomous human beings and a world of objects, and a recognition of the intricate enmeshing between humans and technological artifacts, allows them to develop non-essentialist models of human/technology relations that can better account for how humans engage with biotechnologies. But these approaches also present some important shortcomings. Radical posthumanism tends to frame biotechnologies as either inherently deconstructive (i.e. liberatory) or inherently disciplinary; a framework that makes it difficult to account for how foundational categories like ‘nature’ and ‘the human’ are being transformed and reinterpreted today. And methodological posthumanism too often does not carry through the implications its analyses have for subjectivity. This critique forms the platform for a final perspective, a ‘mediated posthumanism’. On the one hand this perspective draws on radical posthumanist readings of the shuffling around of foundational terms, but seeks to explore how the meeting of deconstructive and disciplinary tendencies can result in the creation of novel understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘the human’. On the other hand, it carries through the transformative implications the notion of technological mediation has for subjectivity by linking it to Foucault’s later work on care of the self and ethical subject constitution.
Human Existence, Biotechnology and the Challenges of Transhumanism
-Human existence is a complex phenomenon. Through the course of the development of human thought, there has been diverse ways and attempts at offering insights into the complex phenomenon of human existence. Humanism is a discourse on human existence. In the contemporary age of scientific and technological advancement, the Homo technologicus model is becoming more and more the dominant paradigm, and the challenges set forth by the transhuman agenda is profoundly unsettling. The transhuman agenda challenges the very concept of human nature, the relationship of persons to nature, science, technology, medicine, genetic engineering, and cultural values. In the context of transhumanism, the human person has become the "supreme being" for humanity. But the paradox is that transhumanism maintains that, humanity itself must be transcended, there is neither male nor female, human nature, human biological constraints must be superseded, there is neither scope nor destiny, the merely biological must be transformed. Transhumanism sets forth serious challenges and calls attention to significant issues in relation to the nature and meaning of human existence. It also generates important discussions in relation to induced pluripotent stem cells, genetic enhancement, human cloning, human biotechnological transmutation, in vitro gametogenesis, embryo splitting, embryo editing, cybernetics, pro-longevity, bionics, perpetual youthfulness, unfading beauty, super-intelligence, personality-type-transformation, nanotechnology, and the creation of chimeras just to mention these few. This paper maintains that development in science and technology is existentially important for human persons, but this development needs to be accompanied by a proportionate development in moral responsibility, ethical thinking and the understanding of the dignity of the human person.
About the technological forms of life and biopolitical practices
Observaciones filosóficas, 2012
In Critique of information (2002), the sociologist Scott Lash stated that our time matches the trending development of "technological forms of life". Talking about "forms of life", Lash suggests, implies positioning oneself on the crossroads between natural-biological and socio-cultural realities (Lash, 2002: 40). And referring to "technological forms of life" implies including a third term in that scene, technique, which enters a composite regimen with the other two and points toward a movement of action "at a distance", beyond the anthropomorphic limits of the own body. In that book, Lash put that term in the scene, but did not develop it further than a few paragraphs. I intend to deepen that notion sketched out by Lash succinctly, since I consider it particularly fruitful due to various reasons. Mainly because it allows to highlight the intimate connection between two processes that have been frequently analyzed separately: on one side, the progressive politicization of biological life (or biologization of politics; that is, the biopolitical thesis developed from certain writings, courses and conferences dictated by Michel Foucault in the decade of 1970) and, on the other side, the growing technification of productive processes, of human capacities and even of the modes of life. Synthetically, the process of technification in its restricted aspect appears, in our age, bound to the extension over the human life and body of principles regarding autonomization, improvement, optimization and individual responsibilization regarding the caretaking of the psycho-physical endowment (of inherited or acquired "human capital"), characteristic of a particular combination of the technical industrial-capitalist code (Feenberg, 2002) and the emerging modes of neoliberal governmentality.
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY / ESTUDIOS DE PSICOLOGÍA, 2023
This article argues that there is a crisis in the conception of what is human, resulting from the growing tendency to uncritically accept the assumptions of the technological paradigm or episteme and the model of the future that this approach takes for granted. In the authors’ opinion, this state of a!airs derives from successive scis- sions that have taken place in the history of our development as a species (the scission of the cerebral hemispheres) and in the history of thought and science ("rst-order cybernetics versus sec- ond-order cybernetics; inert matter versus living matter; the tech- nological versus the organic; natural intelligence versus arti"cial intelligence). In the face of the apparent triumph of the mechan- istic assumptions that support transhumanism, the principles that have governed the origin and evolution of life are recalled, as well as the constitutive principles of the human psyche, among which the construction of consciousness and freedom, called for from Vygotskian Acmeist psychology, should be highlighted. These principles are those which, in the authors’ opinion, should govern any alternative for the future. // Se plantea en este artículo que hay una crisis en la concepción de lo humano, fruto de la tendencia creciente a aceptar acríticamente los supuestos del paradigma o epistema tecnológico y el modelo de futuro que en este enfoque se da por asumido. A juicio de los autores, este estado de cosas deriva de sucesivas escisiones que han tenido lugar en la historia de nuestra constitución como especie (la escisión de los hemisferios cerebrales) y en la historia del pensamiento y la ciencia (cibernética de primer orden frente a la de segundo orden; materia inerte frente a materia viva; lo tecnológico frente a lo orgánico; inteligencia natural frente a inteligencia arti"cial). Ante el aparente triunfo de los supuestos mecanicistas que soportan el transhumanismo, se recuerdan los principios que han regido el origen y la evolución de la vida, así como los principios constitutivos de la psique humana entre los que cabe destacar la construcción de la conciencia y la libertad, reclamados desde la psicología acmeísta vygotskiana. Esos principios son los que a juicio de los autores deben regir la alternativa de futuro.
From Technological Humanity to Bio-technical Existence
SUNY Press, 2023
From Technological Humanity to Bio-Technical Existence can be framed as a metaphysics of the present. It starts from the current epoch, an era increasingly marked not only by technology but also by technics in the most general sense, and asks how this affects human existence. The book asks what is called technics, and what is called humanity; how to relate these to one another, and how changes in these notions oblige us to revise the philosophical notion of existence. It investigates how the idea of technological humanity – of technology as an extension of the human – is discovered and deconstructed by Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, the book presents a new idea of bio-technical existence, one that underlies these philosophers' works without being fully elaborated. This idea – of techics as a condition of humanity and humans share with other living and technical beings is the author's own philosophical proposition and the final result of the book.
melanieswan.com
The accelerating rate of technology development and its ubiquitous proliferation is leading to a shift that technology can no longer be seen as merely an external object, but rather its new presence must be acknowledged as becoming increasingly and inextricably linked with humans and human behavior, particularly in the areas of health and biology. The ultimate end of this linkage is potentially a full integration of organic and inorganic matter. The interrelationship of humans and technology in the health context is helping to reveal more about the reality of biology, and serving as a tool for how humans interact with themselves and the world, a sort of biotechnical interface or biotechnicity. Biotechnicity 1.0, a passive data collection interface, is already evolving to biotechnicity 2.0, an interactive process that humans are having with technology in contexts relating to their own health and biology. From a computational philosophy perspective, biotechnicity 2.0 can be seen as emergent computation-driven philosophical advance in both epistemology, as knowledge is questioned and generated, and in ontology, as new ways of being are created. New computational tools in the form of hardware, software, and human computing networks are allowing knowledge to be developed and the definition of health knowledge to be questioned through participatory health initiatives, and BIOTECHNICITY 2.0: A COMPUTATIONAL PHILOSOPHY OF HEALTH ontological shifts are occurring through the impact of this new knowledge. Biotechnicity 2.0 is an important tool for practical advance in medicine, and for philosophical advance in truth elucidation, human agency, and the re-conceptualization of the subject-object problem.