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66 Fall 2009 This is why such a flaky, mutable behavior and phenomenon as play has persisted in the human condition. As complex social organisms living with others who are just as complex as us, we've needed the imaginative and hypothetical space it opens up in our daily lives to cope with the strategies, feints and demands of human sociability. We "potentiate" or die. So play is our evolved and natural capacity to test limits; suspend conditions of reality; imagine our way out of tight situations. But how does this sit with the transhumanist agenda? Doesn't transhumanism take, as a point of principle, that our evolved nature itself is permanently up for being played with and amended, its limits made malleable and even transcendable? There is — at the very minimum — a positive and negative spin worth considering in this context. Positively, transhumanist ambition could represent the next level of play's evolutionary development within our human condition. Whatever we have done with our fantasies, our flickering simulations, our imaginatively suffused games, we will be able to do with the raw biomaterial of humanity. We then enter into the world imagined by Scottish SF writer Iain Banks in his space operas describing the civilizational challenges of The Culture. The challenge is: how to live well and ethically in a profoundly post-scarcity society, where we have the ability to "play God" with each others' biology and materiality, as a matter of convivial living, and not just upon or over others. But there's a prior presumption that ethical behavior will kick in at some stage of advancing evolution. The negative spin is that transhumanism may, in actuality, unleash play from its useful psychological netherworld in our species being. In other words, in our imaginations certain types of risk and experimentation doesn't have too much direct consequence. It's just something that keeps the channels of human responsiveness from getting too rusty or ossified, from succumbing to their inherent limits. The fear is that if we make our bodies, our intentions and their extensions illimitable and thus fully expressive of the "phantasmagoria" (as in Sutton-Smith's descriptions of the transgressions and horrors that he often observes in the coping play of children) of play — then we could be in real trouble. Play, as it functions in our sociobiology, has to be amoral/non-moral. That's the underground and liminal job it has do — the job of keeping our "potentiation" open, infusing the constraints of human living with indefatigable optimism and possibility. What beauties — but also what monsters — may be made manifest, with our play-drive connected to the transforming technologies predicted by transhumanists? Could it be, in truth, a Pandora's Box: a toy chest filled with Ray Kurzweil's nano-, bio- and robo- technologies? In 2004, I wrote a book with the pointed title The Play Ethic. The title was partly aimed at addressing the fact that the sheer playfulness of our coming society — our ability to "take reality lightly" in so many domains — compels us to think about ethics at the most basic level. How we decide to act humanely in a field of exponentially growing human possibility was, to me, the most urgent of issues — and was obvious related to much of the transhumanist project. Yet, as the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno says, "there is no objective investigation of human nature that does not carry with it, like a clandestine traveler, at least the trace of a theory of political institutions." The Puritan work ethic presumes a human nature happiest with duty, routine, and social conformism — a useful credo for industrial capitalism. A protean "play ethic" could easily presume a human nature happiest when improvising, being flexible and responsive, exercising imagination: an equally useful narrative, as we know, for informational capitalism. Each ethic has its supporting cast in the mind sciences. The work ethic is currently undergoing a new intellectual revival, in the age of Obama If we make our bodies, our intentions and their extensions illimitable and thus fully expressive of the "phantasmagoria"... we could be in real trouble. "

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