CloudHeadedTranshumanist
No bio...
User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
The occultists speak of change and death and personal alchemy of the soul. Their project is to transcend their limits.
The technologists see the limits of what we are and can be, and their first thought is to wonder how to transcend them.
Every student seeks to learn, to transcend the skills and abilities they presently have.
Every athlete aims to break the human limit.
When someone lacks ambition, we call them depressed.
When someone lacks their tools, we call them unprepared.
When someone lacks their vaccinations, we call them unvaccinated.
If we want to go full Natural Law. Sure. I won't argue Tomas the tank engine in space is the sole telos of humanity. And I certainly wont tell you that you have to like the aesthetic. If we ever reach my future. I promise to do my best to make sure your neo-amish aspirations are respected.
But my point is. If humanity has a telos, it is to become more that what they are.
I would argue that, throughout history and the lives of every human, the human telos has been to transcend, and to integrate the products of that ascension into the self, to prepare for the next ascension.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Are humans supposed to want to defy their nature?
If not-
then clearly I'm already not human. So I'm free to follow my nature.
If so-
then excuse me while I go follow my nature.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Surrogacy for gay couples is transhumanism in the sense of "Redefining the limits of what humans can be and do and how they can interact."
The word is sometimes used like this, but in this broad sense it applies to a vast variety of cultural changes.
Gender transition is vastly more Transhuman than surrogacy.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Transhumanism must be destroyed
Oh Them's fighting words. And-
There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism
Oh hey, I've even posted that meme on The Motte before. I'm in full agreement. Let's pry that door open.
look. I agree that that picture is creepy. Why is the pregnant woman in the background? Isn't this a maternity shoot? The person growing the baby is out of focus... It feels belittling even if it's not meant to be. Actually making the baby is a crucial Job here.
That said,
This whole fear that we'll lose our humanity... What parts do you want to keep?
Most of the transhumanists I am aware of agree that Love, Ambition, Pleasure, and even Pain are things they'd enjoy keeping around. At least in some of their forks.
We don't want less. We want more and more variety with it.
Our ideological vision mostly amounts to immortality, complete morphic freedom (I wonder how many of us grew reading Animorphs?), dyson spheres, forking ourselves... I know more than a few who dream of Living as spaceships as we soar across the stars, soaking in the starlight and interstellar medium. Maybe even populating a neutron star or two if Dragon's Egg pans out to physically possible. We get confused when someone tries to belittle someone with the Attack Helicopter meme. (I mean. Have you tried being an attack helicopter? Don't knock it till you've tried it man. And are you saying you wouldn't want to be friends with a human mind in the body of a badass attack helicopter? I sure would! Too many things that talk share the same bipedal phenotype. It's like eating the same meal every day.)
But an authoritarian singleton hive mind is typically considered a failure state by basically everyone I know. The only tragedy I fear more is humanity remaining basically unchanged for the next 40 millennia.
Although...
'Lovecraftian'. Lovecraft's work has its basis in the fear of the other. We bay area rat transhumanists tend to be high openness individuals. We are less likely to flinch away from the other.
Thus, it's not rare to find transhumanist Rats who are followers of Cthugha
And I know of more than one of us that dreams of life as a squid.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
My favorite take on cringe is JrEg's schitzopost on it.
"'Cringe!' they choke out at the TikTok kids. Do they care that they are cringe? No! they share the cringe they like the cringe they comment on the cringe and then only then do they replicate the cringe themselves. And if no one's cringing then is it cringe?"
Cringe, JrEg goes on to explain, amounts to an emotional box erected by societal norms. Placing yourself subservient to the cringe of others, he argues, leaves you unable to remain consistently based in your own ideals.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Hmm, all the other posters have a lot of good points for why it falls apart in theory. Let me think up some examples in practice...
There are a lot of anti-copywrite advocates, and I'm sure they'll be happy to show you how happy their infinite collection of pirated media and jailbroken software makes them- It doesn't seem to have had an effect on copyright law yet though. If anything it just decreases the pressure to change it and maintains a double standard where consumers ignore it and noone cares but creators are still stifled. And- it doesn't really address the counterarguments that frame this happiness as being derived from theft.
There are a lot of trans individuals living idyllic lives straight out of romance novels on the west coast. And let me tell you it works. I've seen a lot of young adults decide they want to transition after talking to one of them. It turns out this form of activism makes lots of people very angry, to the point that it's become a whole thing.
Whether or not something can produce a good life, does not always address the principles underlying its opposition.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Furries don't go to work in fur-suits. They don't openly express themselves as furries 24 hours per day.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
There are a lot of trans sub-issues I think have gone too far, at least for the philosophical conversation about body modification I'm trying to sort out in my head. But what we have here is really the heart of my conundrum.
As soon as you say "People shouldn't just be legally allowed to change their bodies, they should be socially allowed to change their bodies." you are restricting people's ability to socially enforce their values.
I predict, if people were getting Stalking Cat-esque modifications by the hundred-thousands, there would be a hell of a culture war about that too.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I mean other identities.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I expect AI to reduce safetyism rather than increase it, due to increased safe access to simulations of other people, and simulations of things that become less aversive with safe simulated experience of those things, which is nearly everything.
Changing who you are as a person will become easier as well, as it becomes easier to immerse oneself in a holistic social environment intended to shape the self on a whim. Confidants, expertise, life coaching, all become cheaper and more accessible.
It depends on how we end up structuring AI use in our lives of course. It's hard to predict exactly which social forces will dominate, but your vision is not the only outcome here, there is plenty of room for a world where we use AI to better ourselves in self-expressive ways.
I do expect the ways we interact with each other to become more abstracted through AI though. The most basic way this happens now is via running emails through chat GPT, but moving forward we could see more and more bots that act as cultivated posthuman facets of ourselves and our artistic visions, interacting in communities where those facets interact with similar facets of others. This world still leaves plenty of room to gain value from emotional and social trade with the products of others, to fall in love with aspects of others, and so on.
These forms of interaction will have different limitations, parasocial relationships become more real for instance, as social scarcity becomes less of a thing, but not fully real as your influence over the other person's central nexus of self will still be limited by their willingness to engage back with facets of you. The road to getting up close and personal with the central nexus of a person's self may become longer, or perhaps not, as people who are interested in that sort of connection become easier to find, with the many extra eyes and ears and mouths each person can search with.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
That's reasonable in the sense that I can empathize with you fighting for your dream.
But by 'not disadvantage you in the competition of capitalism' I mean something along the lines of engendering an equitable meritocracy with a central focus on interest groups you are part of.
Engendering an equitable meritocracy is the thing I think most people will find reasonable and empathize with on priors, given our world, and your scenario is its explicit inverse in a way I think most people will not find reasonable.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
This is a bit of a frame shift.
No forms of self identification are legitimate. Zero. None at all.
- Rote Identification
If I perceive myself as a guy who built the tallest possible building in minecraft (given the current height limit), other people aren't necessary to that particular identification. It's just a fact.
- Meta Identification
If I say I am a Beatles fan, I might not actually be a Beatles fan, but I am definitely someone who says they are a Beatles fan.
- Desire Identification
If I want to be a lizard, then I want to be a lizard.
Validation doesn't always mean I need other people to think I'm a lizard. Plenty of validation is on the level of needing other people to accept that I want to be a lizard and not then be cruel about it.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Mmm, I kept rewriting my post because I was having trouble relating it back to trans situations, which are really what all our metaphors are presumably about.
There are lots of object level issues there that play into the social expectations.
I can argue that there are cases where you will be socially punished for not accepting someone as a Muslim or Japanese.
But what I'm really thinking here, is that the analogy isn't useful at all.
Social expectations do exist for all sorts of things, and the expectations and their punishments are very diverse.
Sometimes the punishments come from your local friend group, sometimes they come from formal repercussions.
But whether those expectations and punishments are warranted in the specific case of say, not using someone's pronouns, is really only answerable if we talk about pronouns.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Am I correct that you're a new name in this comment thread? Sometimes I lose track.
But yes. I fully expect people to load their language like this. I was somewhat confused for a moment when I believed the person I was responding to lacked self-awareness on the matter. In any case, the confusion was sorted out.
I think there is quite the conversation to be had on the nature of identity. Certainly it is not true to say "I am of the species Felis catus" but if I say "I am a sapient being who goes 'nyaa', and wears cat ears, and likes pets and scratches." then that is not an illusion. That's objectively correct, nyaa. I might even shorthand that to "I am a catboy."
Unless we want to go deeper, and speak of all identity as an illusion. Or we could have a whole conversation on what constitutes the cultural legitimacy of an identity.
Either way it seems overly simplistic to just say "Their identities are not real" and leave it there. There's just so much to say about identity.
Correct. They should have no such expectation.
Why not? I certainly expect it from all of my confidants and peers.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Fair enough.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
That was someone else.
Ah, yes my bad.
Your right to believe you're a cat ends at my right to not be forced to say "heeereee kitty, kitty, kitty!" when I see you.
This is a bit too abstract to address. We definitely do put social and legal expectations on one another that compel us to do or not do things all the time. And sometimes we hit one another with serious consequences for these things.
Perhaps we could focus it a bit.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
You said they expect others to pander to their self-justified illusions.
calling them self-justified illusions is value-loaded language. When you use that language it communicates the message that their identities aren't real, that you don't think a cat-identifying person should be allowed to expect others to treat them the way they want to be treated.
I do think the culture war has become overly totaling in this regard. Not everyone should have to respect everyone.
But it's reasonable to expect those who want to be close to you to respect you. And it's reasonable to want and fight for a society that respects you enough to not disadvantage you in the competition of capitalism.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
The trans movement has been about lots of things.
I see that your main concern wrt it is:
it insists that some men are already women
I imagine you refer to the many pragmatic concerns regarding how we handle the segregation of men and women as the concepts break down.
The short of it is that I just agree that those are complicated and difficult and have to be hashed out on a practical level.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
But if they expect others to pander to their however self-justified illusions
You're doing the thing again. I get it. You don't think their preferences should be respected. You think their identities are less legitimate than other forms of self identification.
And you don't want people to be forced to respect them, or be forced to do other things they don't want to.
That last line at least I emphasize with.
But as long as people need to eat to live and need respect to get the help of society to live fulfilling lives, people are going to keep finding ways to socially pressure one another to cooperate in building an amenable environment for them personally, nyaa.
I too, would appreciate a less coercive society. But that's not the world we live in. You can't actually live as a cat if everyone around you constantly mocks you for acting like a cat, nyaa.
But I get the impression that the crux of our disagreement here, is at the root of your value judgement, you are set on the idea that people shouldn't be respected for 'acting like a cat', nyaa. You want to be able to keep producing social pressure that reduces the number of people nyaa-ing in your vicinity.
It seems to me that some measure of culture war is inevitable here. Both sides poisoning the environment's ability to support the ideas they find harmful to their personal hopes and dreams.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
We have pet chickens at my house. They are extremely loving animals if you get to know them. They'll roost with you, cuddle, ride on your shoulder... sure, they're the descendants of dinosaurs, and I'm sure you could befriend those too if we still had them.
Sure, the roosters can be insecure bastards. Sure, befriending animals can get you killed.. to say nothing of messing with them...
and sentimentality about farm animals in particular, where if you've had any contact with them you know it's not like that - chickens, man
But seriously. Where are you getting this? Have you ever mothered a chick from an egg?
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I agree with everything you're saying and only get confused when you get to:
mutilate themselves
which is culturally and personally subjective value laden language-
and
Transpeople are creating chimeras and forcing others to respect that.
which sounds accurate, cool and based. Yes I just agree with this, and disagree with the values that seem to be getting laid onto it.
I do think the conversation has lost itself. The ultimate progression of the philosophy of morphological freedom, does not stop at trans people. It shouldn't even really start with gender. But the saturation of gender into society, the fact that it is one of the things we have made matter, has turned it into the central issue. Furthermore, the push to normalize the artistic (read, self expressive) flesh-crafting of the body has become combative. Too combative. Both in the sense that its created push-back and in the sense that it's been pushing an ideological conformity.
Still, I always feel a bit exasperated by these conversations. People are arguing whether people should be allowed to grow tits, and I'm still here in the year 3000 rolling my eyes and waiting for the public to take universal morphological freedom seriously as an ideal so I can become a velociraptor.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Which implies that painkillers and muscle relaxants can relieve pain for far longer than they're supposed to last in such cases by helping to break the cycle.
Which conforms to my personal experience as well. Though I'd expect cases of chronic pain to be filtered a bit against cases where that works.
If you want to claim that poor Americans and residents of Flint lack agency and cannot make good choices for themselves, then the natural question is why do we allow them the freedom to make choices?
Making choices isn't free. We don't just let people make them, we often make people make them. We haven't set things up to give everyone personalized think tank support yet.
Trust is also an issue. If I had a personalized think tank I'd want to be part of the process of personalizing it and so on. Ultimately we give people freedom because we value freedom, and not having to trust or depend on other people. Sometimes to a fault. Sometimes to our own societal detriment.
Yes. It seems that for some folks, idleness (supplemented by wealth transfers) is more fun than work, and that's why we have poverty.
That is not what I said.
For one I'm explicitly avoiding any claims about what the situation actually is on average, or on a case by case basis, because I don't actually know.
But two, fun is far from the only factor in the cost benefit analysis I am describing.
Looking for a job is a cost. You don't actually do anything productive to society while looking for a job. Your cultivation options are limited while actively looking for a job. It's not worth very much to the person looking for a job or for anyone else in the economy until a job is actually acquired. Looking for a job is not always the best way to not die, or even the best way to contribute to society. In some cases, looking for a job is legitimately a waste of everyone's time, because the individual is worth little to employers and their time is worth more elsewhere. I'm not talking about playing video games here.
Which media do you believe is actually conveying this message?
Not nearly convinced of that message but-
Yeah the media is fucked. The main issue is I don't see a way to gain epistemic certainty about the object level of anything politically charged by watching the news.
There might be some outlet that has a complete model of why people are poor. But it's not like I can tell without becoming an expert myself.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
When someone doesn't want you to see deepfakes of them, doing so violates their boundaries.
So, when is it wrong to violate boundaries?
We don't consider all boundaries sacred, and in fact consider some of them dumb or even harmful.
But even when someone violates a non-sacred boundary, we still usually think of them as a jerk.
Where does this one stand?
Funny you should mention- One of those same squids showed off her copy of the eclipse phase artbook to me the last time we were together.
More options
Context Copy link