[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 09/02

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:28:26 -0400
To: NSG <nsg at marshome.org>
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement 09/02
X-Mailer: MessagingEngine.com Webmail Interface
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>




Meeting notice: The 080902 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic: Dignity

The core argument of bioethicists is that there is a special human
essence and that we owe some kind of allegiance to this essence. Human
beings possess and express X and there are reasons why we ought to
continue to do so. Enhancements that threaten to dilute our stock of X
are to be avoided. There seems also to be an assumption that X itself is
not enhanceable -- you cannot boost your natural endowment of X with
drugs or implants. The term that is now in play for X is "dignity".

I think most of us here regard the use of terms like "dignity" as
convenient ways of confessing the state of having nothing of interest to
say.  Perhaps this is unfair. We all draw some kind of distinction
between humans and other entities; at least bioethicists are struggling
to define their terms, which the rest of us mostly don't.

Perhaps one approach is to look at the evolution of the concept of human
over time to see if there is a trend, extrapolate it, and see where it
goes. Clearly over the past several centuries the concept has become
dramatically more accommodating.  These accommodations have been both
endogamous and exogamous -- the total number of ways to be human has
grown both by internal differentiation (there are many more ways to be
rich) and and external recruitment (women are human now).  Both trends
seem deeply rooted and to have strong cultural tailwinds.  Is it
possible to guess where they will go from here?

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One of the more interesting arguments for the adoption of machine vision
is that the technology can replace numbers of specialized sensor systems
at a stroke:

http://www.designnews.com/article/47899-Machine_Vision_Keeps_An_Eye_on_Workers.php
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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to
majordomo at polymathy.org.  Unsubs follow the same model.

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood




http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

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----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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