Why I Am A Bioconservative

"Never before have machines been so perfect, and never before have men sunk so low." (Lewis Mumford)

Ray Kurzweil has said: 'We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more...In fact the non-biological part - the machine part - will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn't make any difference.”

Am I wrong to wonder if this is a cunning way to dodge our actual human biological evolution? To become non-biological machines would certainly do away with those evil eugenicists wouldn’t it? Pushing “singularity,” replacing man with more intelligent machines, seems far more dangerous than eugenics.

I call myself a “bioconservative,” which does not mean I am against human evolution since I am religiously for evolution as the only way to attain Godhood. Bioconservatives don't want technological evolution to supersede biological evolution. They can work together without destroying one another.  I am not a Luddite.

I want to lesson human suffering, which is called negative eugenics, but I also want to evolve healthy more intelligent people in a continuous way out into the cosmos, which is called positive eugenics, and to do so with non-coercive prenatal screening, genetic counseling, genetic engineering, etc. Raymond Cattell's work is valuable in this area.

New designer drugs, cognitive enhancers, etc. will surely happen but that is not the permanent evolution a bioconservative wants. We are evolving biological life to Godhood in the cosmos, not artificial life, even if artificial life seems to mirror biological life.

It looks like another coming competition between advocates of the biological evolution of man and advocates of artificial evolution replacing biological evolution.

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Here is Wiki on Heidegger's take on this from an earlier time:

"...A major critic of technology was German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In The Question Concerning Technology (1953), Heidegger posited that the modern technological "mode of Being" was one which viewed the natural world, plants, animals, and even human beings as a "standing-reserve" — resources to be exploited as means to an end. To illustrate this "monstrousness", Heidegger uses the example of a hydroelectric plant on the Rhine river which turns the river from an unspoiled natural wonder to just a supplier of power. In this sense, technology is not just the collection of tools, but a way of Being in the world and of understanding the world which is instrumental and grotesque. According to Heidegger, this way of Being defines our modern way of living in the West. For Heidegger, this technological process ends up reducing beings to not-beings, which Heidegger calls 'the abandonment of Being' and involves the loss of any sense of awe and wonder, as well as an indifference to that loss. According to Julian Young, Heidegger was a Luddite in his early philosophical phase and believed in the destruction of modern technology and a return to an earlier agrarian world. However, the later Heidegger did not see technology as wholly negative and did not call for its abandonment or destruction...."