211–220 of 448 posts
I’ve seen how good we are with tech. I don’t see why we’ll need to cut people open to apply it.
We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn’t have to create a new technology that enabled you to transition to post-adolescent. I think your parent commenter meant “_we_ would have to understand”, as a species, rather than all or any of us individually. In practice just the people creating the technology. But it’s a big leap.
But we did have to invent the (social) technology that enabled us to transition to a post-feudal society. And we did so without fully understanding feudal society. For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse )…
To try again with a more complete answer to your initial question:
Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception for the to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?
In all the examples you’ve given, organic life is the common denominator. Each is a case of the natural progression of life, either the natural life cycles that have existed for billions of years, or of the culture that has emerged out of that.
If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.
If we mean something else then people need to explain what they mean, but that’s really why we get stuck in the weeds on this topic; we don’t have a simple, agreed understanding of what it is we’re transitioning from/to and what is doing the transitioning.
But the simple answer to your central question is that the key difference here from the rule you’re positing is that we’re talking about a departure from the natural biological and cultural evolution that has brought us to this point.
IMHO it's in a trough on the hype curve. Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again. The promises of devices like neuralink are decades away from widespread voluntary adoption, at least. You can get small things done today, as you could 10 years ago, but they aren't ready for primetime. Anecdotally, I got a small coated neodymium magnet implanted in a finger during my youth. It was cool as a college student, I cou…
You're assuming that the technology will still be attractive even as other technologies improve in parallel or as we learn more about how the use of technology effects people.
The article mentions RNA vaccines are partially transhuman, but I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe my concept is wrong, but the perception I got was always more cyborg than biological.
The magnet implants always seemed to have a very, very low benefit to me. Making interfacing with computers even easier seems to have a similarly low benefit. We are already at the point where people go on tech cleanses, your technology gives you screen time reports so you can make sure you are not using it too much, people are abandoning social networks. We are literally trying to use computers less.
We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…
I don't think it's a one-dimensional line with pro/anti modification. For example, if you were against people integrating weapons into their bodies or upward-facing eyes into their feet for looking up skirts, that wouldn't make you anti-transhuman.
We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…
There is a difference between messing with your body and augmenting it. Transhumanists generally believe in augmenting the human body with cybernetic parts, not changing the body's internal chemistry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't reading, or possibly understanding, what I'm writing. Granite seems fine to me, and even if it isn't, it is localized in ways plastic and PFAS aren't. Plastic is very different from almost the entirety of the planet earth. It doesn't occur naturally, and doesn't break down naturally; just like PFAS. You can obscure this fact all you like, but it's trivially true. >Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. N…
Your definition involves setting humanity apart from nature and then inverting the implicit superiority in doing that. Once you’ve taken those steps you can say anything people make that isn’t made by other animals is worse because it is unnatural. To me the essential idea is we have the scale and capacity to move global homeostasis in ways that few animals (at least since dinosaurs) have. Plastics are not unnatural.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granite breaks down about as fast as plastic. No, plastic is not very different from, well, almost the entirety of the planet earth. But for a thin skin of muck. Geodes and dissolved heavy metals and salts and on and on -all entirely 'natural' and been there forever - don't chemically interact, much. Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything i…
You aren't reading, or possibly understanding, what I'm writing. Granite seems fine to me, and even if it isn't, it is localized in ways plastic and PFAS aren't. Plastic is very different from almost the entirety of the planet earth. It doesn't occur naturally, and doesn't break down naturally; just like PFAS. You can obscure this fact all you like, but it's trivially true. >Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. N…
We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…
The transgender community needs to stop pushing the notion that it's healthy and desirable; it's not - it's a devastating hormonal/fertility disorder.
We can't even look into the extent to which the androgenisation of humanity is the consequence of the pollutants that we've introduced into the environment.
Now, comparing this to trans-humanist body mods - how many of those result in sterility?
The changes that trans-humans want are intended to extend the capabilities of the human; but a sex change leaves an individual in a physically compromised super-position of the body that they were born with, and the body that fits the mind.
We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…
>I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. There is a difference between messing with your body and augmenting it. Transhumanists generally believe in augmenting the human body with cybernetic parts, not changing the body's internal chemistry.