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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#251

Post by yarg »

LesZedCB wrote: post #246
yarg wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A disingenuously paraphrasing quote? Sure thing. But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life. Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years. Perhaps there's the potential for this to change, but it'll just be fertility in another form.

who cares though? species have come and gone, and will continue too if you died and then a millisecond after a chicxulub scale asteroid obliterated all mammalian life (again), who would be there to care about fucking fertility or propagation of the species?? the point is we don't have to be limited to biological mandates -- that's what transhumanism is about. moralizing it is just wasted and you clearly don't underst…

Where did I say that they were mentally ill?

(Misremembering other people's arguments is a poor strategy in a technical forum.)

And regardless of what transhumanism as a whole is about, it will always be about continuation of sapience and its evolution through time.

Biological or otherwise.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#252

Post by [deleted] »

yarg wrote: post #229
jeremysalwen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trans people make body modifications that don't prioritize my values (fertility) Doesn't seem like a very strong argument that it doesn't fit into the cyberpunk ethos. Modifying your body for reasons you care about seems very cyberpunk, and exactly the sort of thing that other people would have moral qualms over, especially if they don't share your values. Certainly the technology could be improved for people who d…

A disingenuously paraphrasing quote? Sure thing. But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life. Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years. Perhaps there's the potential for this to change, but it'll just be fertility in another form.

[deleted]

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#253

Post by tsimionescu »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #117
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's accurate. Animals aren't trying to create things that break down easily; they're not trying to do anything but survive. The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that c…

>The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. Er, this is your argument, not mine. Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'." Plastics nor PFAS meet that standard. Those matter types stay static. The animals called 'humans' make pl…

> Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'."

Does this mean that at some point in time lignin was artificial by your definition, as it couldn't be broken down by anything for a few million years as far as we can tell?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#254

Post by space_fountain »

yarg wrote: post #229
jeremysalwen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trans people make body modifications that don't prioritize my values (fertility) Doesn't seem like a very strong argument that it doesn't fit into the cyberpunk ethos. Modifying your body for reasons you care about seems very cyberpunk, and exactly the sort of thing that other people would have moral qualms over, especially if they don't share your values. Certainly the technology could be improved for people who d…

A disingenuously paraphrasing quote? Sure thing. But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life. Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years. Perhaps there's the potential for this to change, but it'll just be fertility in another form.

The human race isn’t in an immediate danger of dying out for lack of babies. People are allowed to and do take many actions with a risk of sterilization. For goodness sake’s people get vasectomies and their tubes tied. This can’t be about fertility or else you should be out campaigning against the pill, condoms, and just plain old normal drinking. Also do you imagine grafting electronics, really progress of any kind to be free of risks? Honestly, I’m sort of anti cyberpunk, because that sort of body modification is on a whole different level of risk

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#255

Post by Rodeoclash »

yarg wrote: post #244
Rodeoclash wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention sterility. As a thought experiment, what if the science was perfected that you could change gender perfectly (ala The Culture novels). Would you still feel the same way about it?

Grow a hollow in a vat and insert the brain? It'd be prohibitively expensive for most, but why not?

It was free in the culture novels. So, the problem is with the fact we can't do it properly yet?

Also, you mentioned environmental factors, is that thinking based on a paper or similar?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#256

Post by LesZedCB »

yarg wrote: post #251
LesZedCB wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who cares though? species have come and gone, and will continue too if you died and then a millisecond after a chicxulub scale asteroid obliterated all mammalian life (again), who would be there to care about fucking fertility or propagation of the species?? the point is we don't have to be limited to biological mandates -- that's what transhumanism is about. moralizing it is just wasted and you clearly don't underst…

Where did I say that they were mentally ill? (Misremembering other people's arguments is a poor strategy in a technical forum.) And regardless of what transhumanism as a whole is about, it will always be about continuation of sapience and its evolution through time. Biological or otherwise.

> 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.

what exactly is your word for unhealthy and undesirable? you are clearly referring to dysphoria. i don't know if you realized, but the DSM has changed in recent years.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#257

Post by viraptor »

mise_en_place wrote: post #231
toofy wrote: post #210

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…

That's arguing with bad faith and framing the argument incorrectly IMO. Nobody is " against trans " people, whatever that means. Many are against children joining that lifestyle, which may result in irreparable harm to the child. As an adult, I am on androgen replacement therapy but I am also very careful with it, regularly checking my labs to make sure I don't torch my liver in the process. I can make informed decis…

> Nobody is " against trans " people, whatever that means.

Have you ever been on twitter? It will take you a couple of minutes to find people who think that's unnatural, sinful, should be forbidden, they're mentally ill, they're sexual predators by default. I know there are some more moderate ideas, but people completely against do exist.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#258

Post by tsimionescu »

nemo44x wrote: post #138
revolvingocelot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior) You think that this describes post-modernism ? I thought post-modernism was all about, well, relativism. Upon looking it up, I'm amazed to discover that Kaczynski wrote "leftists", because the excerpted paragraph sure as hell describes the modern conservative. Raging against science and rationality…

I was going to say leftists of more federally liberals but settled on post modernism since it’s taken up by those groups. Post modernists say there is no truth and that everything comes down to power structures and control. That everything is made up anyways so feel free to throw away all grand narratives and indulge in whatever decadence you want. Because truth doesn’t exist and is a function of power structures. I…

I don't think post-modernism is actually popular in any significant population - it's only popular among some small segment of academia, one that has some influence on literature.

But the vast majority of people, either on the left or right, and even of academics in general, find it pretentious and fallacious. The vast majority of people are decidedly not relativists and instead believe in certain absolutes - truth, right and wrong, etc.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#259

Post by tsimionescu »

Banana699 wrote: post #158
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every day a human spends not killing or blowing up humans is a sin, a day lived by an immoral coward who doesn't deserve to live. First: By your own standard, you don't deserve to live. I'm not telling you to kill yourself; I'm telling you your standard is hopelessly twisted. Second: You condemn Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman, because they killed people . And then you come out with the above sentence. Y…

>By your own standard, you don't deserve to live. Correct. This is something I say myself in the comment, if you bothered to read carefully. >You condemn Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman, because they killed people. And then you come out with the above sentence. You're a bit self-inconsistent here. False. I don't condemn any of those people (not because they killed anyway), I point out your own hypocrisy, a…

> They kill their own number 7 times per year ? I call bullshit.

You think an eagle can live for a whole year while eating less than 7 other animals? If not, then there's a simple calculation: if each eagle in the world survives for at least 1 year, and each eagle needs to kill 7+ other animals to live for that 1 year, then all the world's eagles combined must kill 7+x their numbers every year.

Not to mention that a blue whale gobbles up hundreds of millions of other organisms every time it feeds.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#260

Post by yarg »

space_fountain wrote: post #254
yarg wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A disingenuously paraphrasing quote? Sure thing. But I'm not espousing my values, but values vital to the continuation of life. Values that have been around for thousands of millions of years. Perhaps there's the potential for this to change, but it'll just be fertility in another form.

The human race isn’t in an immediate danger of dying out for lack of babies. People are allowed to and do take many actions with a risk of sterilization. For goodness sake’s people get vasectomies and their tubes tied. This can’t be about fertility or else you should be out campaigning against the pill, condoms, and just plain old normal drinking. Also do you imagine grafting electronics, really progress of any kind…

I can assure you, my only concern here is inate fertility - (idiocracy aside) I don't give a shit about people deciding not to have children.

As for the danger, population collapse is often precipitous - and by the time you notice it, is very hard to roll back.

And it's not just our species impacted by the changes.

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