By “explain” do you mean “communicate” or “persuade”?
Everyone has seen cyborgs, androids, avatars and virtuality in the movies. That aspect of transhumanism has been communicated, as a set of possibilities. If you want to persuade people that they might want to commit tof that sort of thing themselves, then you have to understand them. Value-shifts always start with the values someone already actually has.
A nitpick: Seeing things in movies does not equate to knowing anything about them in real life. Conveying a real understanding of things requires the communication of large amounts of complex information. Communicating large amounts of information to someone in a way that allows them to grasp how that information informs your thought process is probably enough to establish a meaningful dialogue with them about the subject. The difficulty is in persuading them to listen to you intently for a long enough time to get enough information across to them to convey your point. If they are already super interested in what you have to say, this becomes relatively easy and you can assume the role of ‘teacher’. If they are not terribly interested in what you have to say, then you have to be able to persuade them to listen to you.
If they think that they already know something because they’ve watched/read X, Y or Z, but they happen to be mistaken, then it can be very difficult to have a dialogue with them. If they have not thought about their epistemology, and do not practice epistemic cleanliness, then there is often no clear-cut way for approaching their mistaken beliefs without putting them on the defensive, so you have to build a rapport and then convey your message slowly over time; this is the essence of what lukeprog refers to as empathic metaethics.
So persuasion and communication are really inexorably linked in the communication of a complex topic, and persuasion in the sense that we wish to use here is just a means of effective presentation of information with the intent to hold the listener/reader’s interest.
By “explain” do you mean “communicate” or “persuade”?
Everyone has seen cyborgs, androids, avatars and virtuality in the movies. That aspect of transhumanism has been communicated, as a set of possibilities. If you want to persuade people that they might want to commit tof that sort of thing themselves, then you have to understand them. Value-shifts always start with the values someone already actually has.
A nitpick: Seeing things in movies does not equate to knowing anything about them in real life. Conveying a real understanding of things requires the communication of large amounts of complex information. Communicating large amounts of information to someone in a way that allows them to grasp how that information informs your thought process is probably enough to establish a meaningful dialogue with them about the subject. The difficulty is in persuading them to listen to you intently for a long enough time to get enough information across to them to convey your point. If they are already super interested in what you have to say, this becomes relatively easy and you can assume the role of ‘teacher’. If they are not terribly interested in what you have to say, then you have to be able to persuade them to listen to you.
If they think that they already know something because they’ve watched/read X, Y or Z, but they happen to be mistaken, then it can be very difficult to have a dialogue with them. If they have not thought about their epistemology, and do not practice epistemic cleanliness, then there is often no clear-cut way for approaching their mistaken beliefs without putting them on the defensive, so you have to build a rapport and then convey your message slowly over time; this is the essence of what lukeprog refers to as empathic metaethics.
So persuasion and communication are really inexorably linked in the communication of a complex topic, and persuasion in the sense that we wish to use here is just a means of effective presentation of information with the intent to hold the listener/reader’s interest.