limits to

THE EXTROPIAN PRINCIPLES

by

Max More

1. BOUNDLESS EXPANSION - seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and personal power, an unlimited lifespan, and removal of natural, social, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. No limits on our personal and social progress and possibilities.
2. SELF-TRANSFORMATION - both moral and cognitive: critical examination of all assumptions and models. Taking charge of one’s own life. Biological and neurological augmentation. Social conditions for self-transformation include spontaneous order: rejection of central control and maximum sustainable freedom. Fostering of diversity and exploration of possibilities.
3. DYNAMIC OPTIMISM - promotion of a positive, empowering attitude towards our individual future and that of all intelligent beings.
4. INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY - affirmation of the role of science and its offspring, technology, guided by extropian values, in realizing the optimistic, dynamic value-perspective of extropianism.

These principles are further explicated below, and their full meaning and application is developed in EXTROPY.

1. Boundless Expansion.

Beginning as mindless matter, nature developed parts of itself in a slow evolutionary development which produced progressively more powerful brains. With the advent of the conceptual consciousness of humankind the rate of advancement sharply accelerated as intelligence and technology could be applied to our condition. We seek to promote the continuation and guidance of this process, transcending biological and psychological limits into posthumanity.

In aspiring to transhumanity, and beyond to posthumanity, we reject natural and traditional limitations on our possibilities. We champion the rational use of science and technology to void limits on lifespan, intelligence, personal power, freedom, and experience. We are immortalists because we recognize the absurdity of accepting “natural”

our lives. We support biomedical research with the goal of understanding and controlling the aging process. We are interested in any plausible means of conquering death, including interim measures like biostasis/cryonics, and long-term possibilities such as duplication of the self and storage in a computer memory bank for later re-embodiment.

We seek out and support guided development of anything that could augment our abilities and freedom: Biological and neurobiological modification; leaving Earth - the womb of human and transhuman intelligence - and the exploration and inhabitation of space; expansion of our intelligence beyond the limits of our current brains; and an ever-developing wisdom, are also what we intend by technological transcendence of humanity. No mysteries are sacrosanct; the unknown will yield to the intelligent mind. We seek to understand and to master reality up to and beyond any currently foreseen limits.

2. Self-Transformation.

We affirm reason and reject blind faith. Religion, based on systematized irrationality, is rejected. Other knowledge gathering processes are assessed on their merits and checked by reason and evidence. For example, “mysticism” might include some means of coming to know things which are not easily accessible through other means; if so this purported knowledge should be held accountable to known rational procedures. Our commitment to reason, therefore, does not imply a principled rejection of non-logical or nonconscious processes.

Self-transformation means our decision to re-examine our values, beliefs, and natures. To be willing to experiment with ourselves in the quest for transhumanity, without expecting others to fit into our plans. We rely on our own judgement, seek our own path and reject both blind conformity and mindless rebellion. Extropians choose their values and behavior reflectively, standing firm when required but responding flexibly to novel conditions.

Self-responsibility and self-determination are incompatible with centralized control, with its stifling of the free choices and spontaneous ordering of autonomous persons, and requires the fewest restrictions compatible with maintaining the conditions of freedom. Beyond agree-

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ment on these principles extropianism places no limits on the paths one takes in the pursuit of self-transformation.

3. Dynamic Optimism.

We espouse a positive, dynamic, empowering attitude. To successfully pursue our values and to live our lives we must reject gloom, defeatism, and the typical focus on negatives. Problems - technical, social, psychological, ecological - should be acknowledged but must not be allowed to dominate our thinking and our direction. We respond to gloom and nay-saying by exploration of possibilities and their active promotion. Extropians hold to both short and long-term optimism - in the short term we can cultivate our lives and enhance ourselves; in the long run the positive potentials for intelligent beings are virtually limitless.

Where others see difficulties, we see challenges. Where others give up, we move forward. Where others say enough is enough, we say MORE. We espouse personal, social, and technological evolution into ever higher forms. Extropians see too far and change too rapidly to feel future shock. We are the leading wave of evolutionary progress.

4. Intelligent Technology.

Extropians affirm the necessary and desirable role of science and technology. Practical means should be used to promote our goals of immortality, expanding intelligence, and increasing power. Science and technology, as disciplined forms of intelligence, are to be fostered, and we should seek to employ them in eradicating the limits to our extropian visions.

We see technological development not as an end in itself but as a means to the achievement and development of our values, ideals and visions. We seek to employ science and technology to remove limits to growth, and to radically transform both the internal and external conditions of existence.

Extropianism is a transhumanism. Religion has traditionally provided a sense of meaning and purpose in life, but it also destroyed intelligence and stifled progress. The extropian philosophy provides an inspiring and uplifting meaning and direction to our individual and social existence, yet it is flexible and firmly founded in science, reason, and the unending search for improvement.

READINGS

These books are listed because they embody extropian ideas. However, appearance on this list should not be taken to imply full agreement of the author with the extropian principles.

Freeman Dyson: Infinite in all Directions.

Hans Moravec: Mind Children: The Future of Human and Robotic Intelligence.

Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation.

Robert Ettinger: The Prospect of Immortality. Man Into Superman.

FM-2030: Are You A Transhuman?

F.M. Esfandiary: Optimism One. Up-Wingers. Telespheres.

Mike Darwin & Brian Wowk: Alcor: Threshold To Tomorrow.

Jerry Pournelle: A Step Farther Out.

Albert Rosenfeld: Prolongevity II.

Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene.

Jerome Glenn: Future Mind: Artificial Intelligence.

Timothy Leary: Info-Psychology.

Alan Harrington: The Immortalist.

Julian Simon: The Ultimate Resource.

Julian Simon and Herman Kahn (eds): The Resourcefull Earth.

Paul M. Churchland: A Neurocomputational Perspective.

Robert Anton Wilson: Prometheus Rising. The New Inquisition.

Grant Fjermedal: The Tomorrow Makers.

Adrian Berry: The Next Ten Thousand Years.

Fiction:

Marc Stiegler: The Gentle Seduction.

James P. Hogan: Voyage To Yesteryear.

Bruce Sterling: Schizmatrix.

Greg Bear: Eon.

Vernor Vinge: True names.

Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged.

Robert Heinlein: Have Space Suit - Will Travel.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson: Illuminatus! (3 vols.)

See the Resources section in every issue of EXTROPY; this lists many publications and organizations which promote extropian ideas of one kind or another.

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