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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#321

Post by simonh »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #276
space_fountain wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so are you also against birth control and or opt in sterilization, otherwise your position is inconsistent and I don’t claim morals are logic, but they should at least be consistent. Oh also since we’re on a technicality forum. Trans hormones don’t necessarily cause permanent sterilization. Plenty of trans people have children

Citation for plenty needed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1...

> Of the adult trans population, between 25% and 49% of individuals are believed to be parents (Dierckx, Motmans, Mortelmans, & T’sjoen, 2016)

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#322

Post by [deleted] »

jholman wrote: post #119
solveit wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason that I think it's good for people to live in a different culture for a while, I wish it were possible for people to live in a different era for a while. There was a time when it wasn't smoking and obesity that killed people, but smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. When a single epidemic could kill a double-digit percentage of the entire population of whatever unlucky reg…

You think that smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases were major killers of pre-technological hunter-gatherers? I don't think that's correct. But you're certainly right about the problems with child mortality, maternal mortality, birth control, and infected cuts. I think it's not a given whether or not these are necessarily deal-breakers (personally I think the maternal-mortality-plus-birth-con…

[deleted]

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#323

Post by Banana699 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #172
Banana699 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> I point out your own hypocrisy, and that of most people, when they worship those mass killers You're sure free to tell me what I think. You should stop, because you're not very good at it. > They kill their own number 7 times per year ? I call bullshit. You don't think a cat kills 7 birds and/or rodents a year? They've put cameras on cats' collars. They're far more deadly than just 7 kills a year. You don't think a…

>You're sure free to tell me what I think

You mean you don't view any of those 3 people I mentioned as heros? Ok, This still doesn't change anything, unless you're radically anti war in a way very few people are, there is someone you idol who killed far far more than Ted can ever dream of.

>You don't think a cat kills 7 birds and/or rodents a year

I concede this point, see my reply to your sister comment for why its just a bad phrasing of what I meant to say. I give an alternative phrasing there that better makes my point about why humans are uniquely evil.

>It destroys your statement that ...

But doesn't make a difference beyond that.

>I don't see any possible way for you to have a consistent position here

Here is a very consistent position for you : I want to destroy all sentient life or remove sentience from it, whichever is easier\faster. Failing the ideal goal of doing that to all life, a lesser goal is to do it to all humans, because :

(1) they are my own species, their evil and immorality is more my responsibility than the evil or immorality of other species.

(2) they have the tools and awareness to be not evil and moral, unlike most animals, and yet choose evil and immorality.

(3) their number and power are unparalleled and far beyond anything on earth now, so their evil and immorality is a huge proportion of all evil and immorality.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#324

Post by the_omegist »

kerblang wrote: post #76

I have no problem with enhancing our lives thru technology, but seeking eternal life in this universe is incredibly stupid because you're effectively seeking eternal damnation. Eventually someone captures you, locks you away and tortures you for thousands of years if not forever. Creating heaven is hard, but hell is well within reach.

Some type of Dead man's switch [0] could make it safer, if it's your main worry. Of course, it's another source of bugs..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#325

Post by wardedVibe »

yarg wrote: post #219
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…

I really don't feel that's a fair comparison. 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 thos…

Oh, so the reason conservatives are concerned about the birth rate is so they have ammo against gay, trans, and women on the pill. Got it. I was wondering why an issue that won't be a major concern until after 2100 was becoming popular.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#326

Post by yarg »

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.

That was meant to say 'misrepresenting' (the phone said 'misre...ing' since the complete word didn't fit on the screen.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#327

Post by concordDance »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #313
fastball wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undergo their AGAB puberty against their will It's also weird mental gymnastics like this that people are pushing against. For anyone who is not familiar with the acronym, AGAB means "Assigned Gender At Birth", and is push back against the fact that we broadly lump all people into either the male / female camp when they are born. It can be useful when talking about gender norms, etc – which are discussions worth ha…

Denying puberty blockers, which are easily produced, known to be acceptably safe, and can prevent physical changes, is forcing teens through a harmful puberty against their will.

That's besides the point the parent is making.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#328

Post by concordDance »

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…

> I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks

Would those people still be angry at transgender people if they went in the bathrooms (and other sex segregated spaces) they used to go into and didn't complain about being called using their original names, sex and pronouns? I expect the most they'd get in that case is nose wrinkling in disgust.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#329

Post by tomhoward »

the_omegist wrote: post #306
tomhoward wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one person had to understand everything about feudal society for the next stage to emerge. It just emerged, as always happens in an evolutionary process. 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 examp…

> 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. What you mean by that? Except for "mind uploading" I don't see what you referring to... Like the Iron Ag…

Well sure, but as I said, this topic very quickly gets stuck in the weeds over definitions and “what do you mean by ...?” questions, as the above couple of comments illustrate.

I’d regard the augmentations you list in your last paragraph as remedies to help restore capabilities that are present in other humans of normal health/ability, prior to aging or injury. Other augmentations that are commonplace are tools that make us more efficient at doing things we can already do; I.e, computers enable us to do much larger calculations, data operations or information archivals/retrievals. But they don’t fundamentally change our evolved nature, so it’s hard to see how the prefix “trans” applies.

Despite many claims of breakthroughs, we’ve yet to see any technology that profoundly alters human genetics, cognition or mortality away from its state of natural evolution a few decades or centuries ago, and it’s not clear that anyone has serious answers for how such transitions will happen, nor how they could happen without a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underpin them.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#330

Post by kuschku »

concordDance wrote: post #328
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…

> I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks Would those people still be angry at transgender people if they went in the bathrooms (and other sex segregated spaces) they used to go into and didn't complain about being called using their original names, sex and pronouns? I expect the most they'd get in that case is nose wrinkling in disgust.

They would be just as angry in that situation. Have you seen how trans masculine people get treated?

The bathroom laws forbid them from going into the male bathroom (because they're AFAB), bit if they go into the female bathroom while looking like a bodybuilder, they'll also have the cops called on them.

Bathrooms were never sex segregated, and that's not the point of these laws either: the goal of these laws is to make it so uncomfortable to be visibly trans, that it becomes impossible.

That's why this usually goes hand in hand with bans on even teaching about the existence of LGBT people in schools, the goal is eradication.

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