I would like to second Andro’s condemnation of Nick Bostrom’s disgustingly puerile “fable” about achieving earthly immortality. My objections begin with the title: Mr Bostrom clearly doesn’t even know the difference between a fable and an allegory. Aesop, who may have been an insufferable ass of a man, at least had the sense to keep his stories short, sweet, and free of belabored conceits. The wily old crow drops pebbles in the glass in order to drink the water - that is a fable. It takes a peculiarly demented sort of imagination to force each and every thing in a story to take on a specific meaning, to write that the Crow of Human Ingenuity Must Drop the Pebbles of Incremental Scientific Knowledge into the Glass of Religious Superstition in Order to Drink the Water of Immortality.

No one who has any appreciation for literature takes allegory very seriously. Allegory is an attempt at invasion by the worst sort of philosophy into the humanities – the sort of philosophy that seeks to turn the glory of human existence into a crystalline artifice of rigidly defined words. As Andro points out, one of the benefits of cheating death is that we will no longer have to worry about personal relationships. One begins to suspect that these _trans_humanists are simply trying to escape humanity: their own humanity, and that of the people around them.

We can at least thank Mr Bostrom for writing a worse allegory than John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which presents faith as little more than an arduous and lonely hike to some other destination. Bostrom’s facile attempts at literature could be laughed off or even pitied if he were not in fact deadly serious. He and the other transhumanists want to provide philosophical and technological tools for people who refuse to be human, and they have to be stopped.