Do you agree with transhumanism?

[Narz]

Transhumanism is a very dangerous slope that I'm extremely worried we'll jump at as soon as possible.
Between the obvious attempts at making humans "better" (with all the baggage that comes with even trying to define "better" here) while lacking the knowledge and foresight about the consequences of such modifications, and the fact that the ones who will benefit from it will probably be the ones that shouldn't, it screams of dysfunctional dystopia with a literally inhuman caste in charge of society and molding the rest as convenient for them.

I mean this is already the world we live in

 

[Akka]

I mean this is already the world we live in

This is the allegorical world we live in.
Transhumanism threatens to make it literal.

I think the essence of being human is the capability to improve our own nature beyond purely biological limitations. Wearing clothes, using tools, vehicles, medicine, etc all give us capabilities which are beyond the capabilities we have when we are born. So I don't find anything particularly special about having a bionic arm or some cellphone implanted into the brain. It is all part of the same process.

There is a pretty big difference between using tools and altering oneself. Adding cyber-implants is already pretty sketchy. Now wait until someone think that feeling negative emotion is crippling, or that we should become "smarter", and create humans modified like that, and enjoy the results.

 

[Narz]

This is the allegorical world we live in.
Transhumanism threatens to make it literal.

There is a pretty big difference between using tools and altering oneself. Adding cyber-implants is already pretty sketchy. Now wait until someone think that feeling negative emotion is crippling, or that we should become "smarter", and create humans modified like that, and enjoy the results.

We've already altered ourselves. My communicating w you this way over decades has altered my brain and body and neural pathways.

There was a study of London taxi drivers showing their hypothalamus was larger than average due to memorizing city streets (perhaps nowadays due to cheap Sat nav on smartphones that wouldn't be the case). I'm sure my thumbs muscularity has altered since I got a smart phone in 2015 and my brain much more so.

Obviously genetic engineering is a whole nother level but it's coming, humans are tinkerers. It could be dystopian depending on who's in charge but that's how it always is anyway.

Negative emotion is crippling, pretty much all violence and general harm (from physical abuse to being a dick on the Internet) is caused by someone feeling **** and taking it out on another person. Being overly fearful, suspicious and reactive made sense in our ancestral environment but if we could tweak our baselines of fear, reactivity and pain why not?

An argument is that it would be human life more flat but as David Pearce argues that's not necessarily the case. A "hedonic setpoint" between say 20 and 50 offers more of a range between -10 and +10.

You could literally be burying your mother and feel sadness but also immense joy at the memory of her life that we can't even imagine w our African savanna brains (let's say level 20).

Another argument is that you need deep grief to appreciate the good times but chronic depressives experience grief all day every day and don't have higher peak experiences as a result. Chronic pain tends to lead to more chronic pain

But no doubt things could turn very dark if an uninformed and desperate public allows big business to play around w their brain.

As a child of the 80s and 90s labelled w ADHD and depression I got my brain played w during my developmental stage w all manner of drugs.

In reaction to that I became a bit of a hippie, skeptical of all drugs and the medical system in general, prone to naturalistic fallacies.

But the problem wasn't tweaking the brain, it was doing it willy-nilly and motivated by profit (for pharm corporations) and behavior suppression rather than actual subjective well being.

Anyway, time will tell what happens.

 

[Akka]

We've already altered ourselves. My communicating w you this way over decades has altered my brain and body and neural pathways.

You've altered yourself in the borders of what your original hardware allows modification.
Transhumanism is precisely about getting rid of these limits.

Negative emotion is crippling, pretty much all violence and general harm (from physical abuse to being a dick on the Internet) is caused by someone feeling **** and taking it out on another person. Being overly fearful, suspicious and reactive made sense in our ancestral environment but if we could tweak our baselines of fear, reactivity and pain why not?

See, this is the perfect illustration of the problems we'll encounter. We don't even really know what makes people happy (we can't even measure happiness), but we nevertheless jump into a deep modification with unknowable consequences because it sounds like a good idea.

One thing we know, is that humanity evolved for millions of years, so most of the significant bits we have, have a really good reason to exist (if they are common to most humans at least). Messing with them has much higher chances to blow into our face than to make it better.
A relatively benign consequence of reducing negative emotion could be apathy, where we don't really care about anything because there is no pressure.
A less benign could be making people with stunted morality, as they don't really feel remorse.
Or maybe uninhibited people who randomly act violently.
Or whatever.

But the problem wasn't tweaking the brain, it was doing it willy-nilly and motivated by profit (for pharm corporations) and behavior suppression rather than actual subjective well being.

Anyway, time will tell what happens.

Well, one thing is certain, it's that corporations and their owners will be the first to try, and it will be motivated by profits. Them and dictatorial regimes. So the problem you describe, even if it were the only one, is well and truly here.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Evolution is a try and error process. I am all for experimenting, if it goes wrong so be it, but if it goes well... I mean aren't you tired of all the illness, weakness and death we are subjected to?

 

[Akka]

Evolution is a try and error process. I am all for experimenting, if it goes wrong so be it, but if it goes well... I mean aren't you tired of all the illness, weakness and death we are subjected to?

You overlooked awfully quickly the "if it goes wrong", especially in a domain where it's all but guaranteed to go wrong, and to go wrong in a very messy way.

Also, your desires of changing all that stem from your human brain, and human experience. Who is to say they wouldn't end in a completely different place if you were changed into something not human, making the change self-defeating (that's also one aspect of the central problem of wanting to "improve" humans, that and how imprecise and subject to disputes the very notion of "improve" is to begin with).

 

[Narz]

You overlooked awfully quickly the "if it goes wrong", especially in a domain where it's all but guaranteed to go wrong, and to go wrong in a very messy way.

The thing is it's already set up to go wrong. It's designed to fall apart. Messing with our genome is already underway.

In the future people rolling the dice and having a crapshoot baby will be looked at like they're the wild risk takers.

The difference between humans and evolution is humans are at least trying to maximize the traits we care about, evolution is just playing dice.

 

[Narz]

Also, your desires of changing all that stem from your human brain, and human experience. Who is to say they wouldn't end in a completely different place if you were changed into something not human, making the change self-defeating

Being better than human is the goal.

Do you like being a puny mortal? I don't. I'm greedy. I want better.

I like consciousness & am grateful natural selection allowed me to come this far but if we don't try to take up the reins ourselves from here we're no better than any animal

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Being better than human is the goal.

Do you like being a puny mortal? I don't. I'm greedy. I want better.

I like consciousness & am grateful natural selection allowed me to come this far but if we don't try to take up the reins ourselves from here we're no better than any animal

As animals, humans are far too large and consume far too much energy to survive for thousands of years with a population numbering in the billions.

All the ideas I have seen for "transhumans" do little or nothing to reduce even those two impediments to longevity as a species.
Most ideas seem to me as if their ultimate goal is something akin to a small number of rich "Wolverines" or other comic book mutants - fast, strong, full of metal and stims. And able to control millions of lowly humans because of their superior wealth, or the number of minions ready to do their dirty bidding.

I'd like to hear about how "transhumanity" will cope with all of the creatures that live inside of every human. The ones that have evolved along with us, and that we depend on to stay alive. Doesn't make for a good book with pictures, I suppose.

In the last couple of years we've found more than 3,000 new types of neurons and at least that many new types of cells or variations. It is going to take a lot of people and a lot of "AI" to help humanity understand how they interact with each other. And currently a lot of energy we produce is dedicated to powering AI and digital currency that is of no great use in that quest.

There are billions of species of bacteria and viruses that are all evolving too. Some viruses have spikes that are tipped with single atoms of iron; others have been deliberately engineered with other metals so they can better pierce through bacterial outer layers.
Better start finding some defense mechanisms against those with "transhuman" enhancements.

At present, I have more confidence that endoliths are the future. Tiny, able to live on rock, very slow metabolisms. Maybe they will evolve into large creatures, completely unlike what existed before. But humans? Existing gigantic colonies of ants have a better chance in the long run.

 

[Gorbles]

I'd appreciate it (transhumanism) more if every other person I encountered who advocated it didn't also use it as a launching point for "humans are a plague and need to die".

Yes, yes, we could all be floating Orbs of light. But we're not going to be, because Billionaire #3 took out a patent on Orb Juice so now only him and his pet flamingo get to ascend to Orbdom, and we can all embrace the oncoming heat death of most mammalian life on the planet.

It's a similar issue I have to lines like "global warming means the death of humans, the planet will be fine". Yes, but we're humans! Stop talking in the abstract! Real things have real consequences, dummies!

(meant generally, and not as a reply to anyone here)

 

[Narz]

As animals, humans are far too large and consume far too much energy to survive for thousands of years with a population numbering in the billions.

All the ideas I have seen for "transhumans" do little or nothing to reduce even those two impediments to longevity as a species.

No rush, we're a long way off from living thousands of years & it's not transhumanists job to solve everything, we should try & cure cancer before worrying about all the people in cancer research who will lose their jobs if we do so

I'd like to hear about how "transhumanity" will cope with all of the creatures that live inside of every human. The ones that have evolved along with us, and that we depend on to stay alive. Doesn't make for a good book with pictures, I suppose.

A deep study of the gut biome is already an area of interest for biohackers

 

[Manfred Belheim]

No rush, we're a long way off from living thousands of years & it's not transhumanists job to solve everything, we should try & cure cancer before worrying about all the people in cancer research who will lose their jobs if we do so

Cancer's probably a good thing overall. Keeps people in work researching it, and keeps our numbers down at least somewhat

 

[Akka]

Being better than human is the goal.

Do you like being a puny mortal? I don't. I'm greedy. I want better.

I like consciousness & am grateful natural selection allowed me to come this far but if we don't try to take up the reins ourselves from here we're no better than any animal

But you see, you repeat that word, "better". But as I pointed, it's ill-defined, and many people will have not only different, but downright incompatible definitions. Your very own example, being greedy, could be considered a "flaw" to "fix" through transhumanism. So making you "better" would remove your desire to be "better".

And anyway, even if you take whatever definition you have of "better" and manage to make it, you run the risk (near-guaranteed consequence in fact) of getting inintended consequences. It's already quite often the case with drugs and medicine. Genetic tailoring is the same problem squared, plus the leverage of the powerful to apply these changes to themselves to increase their own power, with the risk of making themselves worse for others (considering the strong correlation of psychopathic/sociopathic behaviour for those who end up in positions of power, I can just imagine which kind of "improvements" they would make, and it doesn't sounds good for anyone else).

 

[Remorseless1]

Humans are silly. This planet, in fact the entire universe, is always going to smack us down. Think about our medical services. Over the past century we have enormous strides for the better. Cancer and AIDS are no longer a death sentence, artificial limbs are so advanced they're fitting on Olympic class sprinters. We can go into a womb and fix a deadly heart defect in a fetus. Transplants are routine and safe.

And then Covid pops up, killing five million humans in one year and still killing about 100 people a week in the US. I imagine that the dinosaurs thought they had it made until they saw that big glowing ball getting bigger in the sky 65 million years ago.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

No rush, we're a long way off from living thousands of years & it's not transhumanists job to solve everything, we should try & cure cancer before worrying about all the people in cancer research who will lose their jobs if we do so

I'm not sure that you've got your personal timeline quite right yet, Narz. E.g.

Do you like being a puny mortal? I don't. I'm greedy. I want better.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

And then Covid pops up, killing five million humans in one year and still killing about 100 people a week in the US. I imagine that the dinosaurs thought they had it made until they saw that big glowing ball getting bigger in the sky 65 million years ago.

If there's a pandemic with >10% mortality rate, imagine how many people will drink bleach and shove lights where the sun doesn't shine.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

...we should try & cure cancer before worrying about all the people in cancer research who will lose their jobs if we do so

You can't "cure" cancer, you can only stave of some types for a while.

Firstly, because it is not one disease.

More importantly though, some DNA and RNA viruses cause cancer, and they are evolving. There could be millions or more types of those viruses. Some will become extinct, others will emerge that have never been seen before.

Humans are locked into many different biological and evolutionary relationships with bacteria and viruses.
Some relationships are symbiotic and benign, others parasitic, some are more akin to predator-prey, and there are other more complex relationships we don't fully understand yet.

Humans are a yummy energy source, a niche that evolution will find a way to exploit.