Quote Originally Posted by mfckr View Post
That line of thinking is surprisingly common—I've been calling it the 'Appeal to Nature Mystique'. The notion of "what's natural" is little more than a kind of silly religious superstition IMO.
Agree. Not necessarily superstitious, but in certain way, a reification of Nature (from a representative concept to a sort of real entity).

Lynn Margulis developed the endosymbiosis theory, which has been quite a success. But in her later days she became anti-darwinian using arguments which are clearly pseudoscientific. In her eyes, the survival of the fittest was a sort of evil capitalist ideology, and Nature worked necessarily by collaboration...

The fact is that the fittest could be an ant colony or an isolated predator, depending on the particular conditions. The underlying rule applies to both cases and is amoral (morality is a human concept). It works or it doesn't. Period.

FWIW, I'd a transhumanist-related argument in the recent immortality thread w/ Esaman (who self-types LII); he was using a similar line of argument as the one you described.
Interesting. So maybe this could be more common in LIIs than I previously thought.

I'm ambivalent to arguing for/against the ethics of 'transhumanism'. The proliferation of technological means to modify/enhance the human condition is inevitable.
Very Te. And I definitely agree with your conclusion.

Still, I guess this concept could provoke an emotional response in people, despite the strict rationale which could justify supporting it or not (and not neccesarily in the same line). Such response could point if the correlation I was looking for does exist or not, as attraction/repulsion could be influenced by valued/subdued functions more directly than the final conclusion.