The New Atlantis Futurisms blog posted a picture of Audrey Hepburn with the title, “Does Anybody Seriously Think We Can Do Better than This?” Here’s my response. You may have to read the comments thread to gain some background.

The reason that Hepburn seems so great to us is that we’re humans. If lizards could speak, then hundreds of millions of years before humanity, a lizard would be similarly impressed by an image of another, attractive lizard. Does that mean that Creation should have stopped at lizards?

Our evaluations of “goodness” are not objective truths, just subjective facts about the structure of our own minds. The opportunity to modify and enhance those minds will vastly increase the space of things we can understand and appreciate. This will allow us to create new forms of attractiveness and wonder that we lack the facilities to appreciate now.

I disagree with my colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky that civilizations elsewhere in the universe are doing “better” in any absolute sense because evaluations of “better” are necessarily mind-structure-contingent. Humans can arbitrarily define the status quo as the best there is, and who could argue with them? That’s their personal opinion.

However, for the vast majority of people, “better” would indeed include more than the species or technological status quo. Maybe Hepburn would have embraced transhumanism if she lived in a time when safe and beneficial body and brain self-modification and self-improvement were possible. Of course, even though I’m favor of morphological freedom (rather than the morphological fascism that I have to look and think a certain specific way, the way it’s been for over 200K years) doesn’t mean that I discourage people from rejecting transhumanism entirely and living only among other humans. (I do, however, think that children should be able to do what they want with themselves after a certain age, and I doubt that Christian conservative parents will be able to stop their curious and neophilic children from embracing transhumanist technologies.) Today, for instance, there are some people that only choose to live among their own race, for fear that race-mixing leads to irrevocable societal chaos. It is only natural to fear that species-mixing in a society could lead to problems, but I’ll bet that some combinations of species could lead to a harmonious equilibrium.

Yes, I went there, in comparing fear of intelligent-species-mixing with fear of race-mixing. I don’t mean to be demagogic by doing so, just to illustrate the point that there will always be a mix of people who are more into mixing with those unlike themselves and those less into it. We can push everyone to try and accept everyone, but in practice it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people just don’t like each other. This phenomenon can occur between two twins, two tribes, or two or more intelligent species. Conservatives seem to often believe in the hypothesis that we more we’re alike, the better we can get along. Liberals argue that we can get along despite our diversity. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.