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Mr_Nicotine t1_iz22xj1 wrote

I would like to chip in. I do believe that this comes from the idea of our consciousness being "pure" and separated from our bodies. This means that, our consciousness grants our bodies some sort of "ritualness" and pureness...

Do you walk everyday thinking that you are walking everyday by sending signals to your muscles, which contracts via tendons to move your bones? Like, imagine yourself as a container made of skin, and your muscles getting signals/blood, and then contracting and moving your legs? No, you don't, because we see our bodies as a projection of our consciousness.

So, unless we try really hard to achieve this mentality, we will always resort to external agents. This is just my opinion, I know that there are of course tons of more relevant or explicit drawbacks to achieve a biopunk society.

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schizoscience OP t1_iz2a4up wrote

There is a quote from J.B.S. Haldane's Daedalus that I have always liked a lot:

>The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
>
>Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow.
>
>No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.

So yes, I would definitely agree that there is a certain "yuck factor" that people tend to ascribe to biotechnology. I don't know if it's necessarily because we see bodies as "projections of consciousness," but there is definitely a predisposition to see life as somehow being sacred and inviolable. Still, as Haldane says, we have grown highly accustomed to utilizing the tools of life for a lot of things. Milking a cow, producing wine and beer through fermentation, even agriculture itself...

So if biotechnology proves its usefulness, and is shown to have significant advantages relative to other approaches to achieve specific things, people most likely will get used to it sooner or later in my opinion.

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Mr_Nicotine t1_iz2b0d0 wrote

Nice, yes, that's exactly what U was thinking about. I honestly think that the best series that frames this problem is Altered Carbon on Netflix, there is always going to be someone against something.

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Quiet_Orison t1_iz4c0g1 wrote

The entire field of biology is predicated on the fact we are mobile flesh tubes full of sodium, potassium, calcium, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous.

I don't think alienation from nature and the chemistry of life is insurmountable.

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