Technoprogressive Worldbuilding

And the course itself is an attempt to go through some of that history.

We didn't do a lot so far on the Enlightenment, but that's usually where I start the story.

I like rooting all of these ideas in essays like Condorcet's Progress of the Future of the Human Mind, where he, French revolutionary who advocated for longevism as well as getting rid of work.

But you started pretty much with the discussion of Bogdanoff.

Tell us who Bogdanoff was.

Yeah, we actually started with your book, right? Yeah,

we started with...

And the Technoprogressive Declaration.

That's right, that's

right.

But yes, the first kind of deep theory that we dug into was Bogdanov's book, The Philosophy of Living Experience, which... is actually the popular version of a set of essays on the nature and purpose of philosophy and how philosophy interacts with you know human struggle progress and the kind you know like the theories of change and how we should organize and develop society so those are called the there's a bunch of essays there's a collection of essays actually you can get on haymarket There's called Imperial Monism, but it's a very, that's a very tech, there's a very technical collection of essays.

And he kind of, he decided that it was, you know, that, that was really, not going to be not going to speak to the popular people uh who are interested in labor organizing at that time and instead he should do a kind of history of philosophy and situate imperial monism and at the end a theory which eventually became the basis of cybernetics called technology which is the which he called the universal science of organization he was trying to develop a systems theory that would discover the underlying principles that connect all disciplines of knowledge together to create effectively something similar to like a unified, similar to like in physics, you have the unified field theory that is like the Holy grail of theoretical physics.

You know, he was trying to unify all different forms of knowledge by understanding how they organize human thought and action.

So, you know, How do we, and effectively because he wanted to be able to apply the methods of one field of knowledge to other fields of knowledge and to integrate various methods, not according to a discipline, but according to whatever question was at hand.

So that methods would be freed from these contained, you know, these silos of knowledge.

these containers, like, you know, this is molecular biology and this is, you know, astrophysics and to kind of free those methods from those containers and say like any method can be used by any person, depending on what the question requires.

So, you know, we can use, and he gives the example of all these different discoveries that were made by people who applied methods from one field to another.

So he gives the example of like, Darwin was applying Malthus's theory to biology in order to come up with natural selection.

And so that was an economic theory really about understanding food production.

And he gives the kind of somewhat...

He's kind of critical of Malthus, but he gives like the...

He comes up with the idea that Malthus had this theory of the survival of the fittest.

which he sees it as somewhat negative, but then he tries to think about that and he applies it to biology.

And he's looking at the ways in which animals are competing for scarce resources.

And he actually separates humans out and says, well, humans are actually able to develop cooperation in a way that's different from other animals, but other people... which is important for the history of transhumanism argued that humans are very similar to other animals.