CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
In my case my meds stop working if I take them more than two days in a row, so I have to take off days during which I am less of a person and need more supervision.
I'm lucky enough to have people who look after me in those times.
I imagine someone without my resources in my situation would just be fucked. And would not be contributing nearly as many data science dashboards to the economy.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
To me Hitler is just a symbol for modern people who want social totalitarianism of any sort.
Should I forgive those people?
Maybe in some abstract way while still fighting against what they stand for with all my being?
I believe in redemption and all that.
But if you've sold your personal identity to an ideology I want eliminated, I still want the thing you're calling "yourself" erased.
It's shallow consolation to you that I wish your body well and only want the death of your identity.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
That sounds like a hit or miss theory of mind.
Not everyone's violent thoughts translate to violent actions. People can be in the process of slowly losing control of their actions while continuing to have violent thoughts, or continuously gaining control of their actions while continuing to have violent thoughts.
Violent thoughts can indicate repressed violent tendencies that are building to a popping point, or they can provide the simulated schadenfreude that negates any need for violent action.
It's not generalizable a priori.
You're right that individuals can demonstrably solve social problems. But it is not always demonstrable that individuals can solve social problems.
For example, I have ADHD. On days when I don't take my meds, I am literally less of an agent. I have less power to make choices happen. It's clear to me that agency is a spectrum. Just because someone could make a good choice in theory in a vacuum, doesn't actually mean they could make a good choice given the neurotransmitters presently available in their brains. Choices are made out of physical and psychological levers and dice that can be manipulated and stacked.
I'd note that childhood Lead exposure is famous for damaging the ability of humans to make rational choices, which makes the choice of Flint Michigan as an example an odd one.
Your idea of "an ordinary level of effort" is also very odd.
The typical response of a rat in a learned helplessness test is to lay down and rot. Is this the 'ordinary' level of effort? Of course not. The 'ordinary' rat is not subject to being trapped in a room with electric shocks until it's used to them. The idea of "an ordinary level of effort" being constantly looking for work is likely holding some similar assumption. These people could all be responding entirely 'typically'. 'Ordinary' is just a line drawn in the sand here.
The idea that Anyone who isn't looking for work is "not working by choice" is odd for another reason. Jobs exist in a market. Even a perfectly rational agent will notice that there are costs to finding a job and benefits to having one, and that if the costs or benefits change, the cost benefit analysis changes. A rational agent "choosing not to have a job" is making that choice in the context of the current market. It's not like they have the libertarian free will to snap their fingers and have a 100k salary. Systemic changes to the costs and benefits will change the number of rational agents looking for Jobs.
However, this isn't to say you're wrong either. For one, I've given examples of things that remove people's ability to make rational choices, and things that can cause your observations while being beyond an individual's power to change. But these aren't going to be responsible for everything. Some things are going to be things individuals can change, under the right circumstances. I only mean to point out that agency is a spectrum, and that spectrum responds to systemic changes.
But also- as you are also pointing out, Media response might still be part of what contributes to things like learned helplessness.
I notice the irony though, that if media response contributes to learned helplessness- this can still be framed as a systemic issue that could be affected by regulating the media.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Overturning and blurring the 'conventional' understanding has been a powerful tool for TRAs in pursuing trans acceptance. Prior understanding closely married sex and gender presentation and who it was ok to sleep with and strict gender roles. It's been blurring the whole time.
The battle of the TRA is to make the conventional understanding obsolete. A TRA wouldn't be happy with chromosome based sports, because that's an expression of a society that still cares more about sex than gender. A woman doesn't complain that another woman she's competing against has better genetics or a better training regimen, so why should it be legitimate for her to complain that her opponent used to be a man?
That is to say I agree. The ideological goals of trans rights are not compatible with conventional gender's existence. A TRA might accept limits for testosterone levels or muscle mass that equally apply to cis women, but the defeat of the immutability of sex, both conceptually through overhauling the understanding, and literally through the advancement of the technology of transition, is the whole point of the project.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I don't think I've said animals should have rights in this thread.
I've said that animals are intelligent and I think it's unprincipled to base a human supremacy stance on them not being conscious or creative because they are, but that I think there are more principled human supremacist stances.
If you want to delve into what I actually think about animal rights personally-
I don't like seeing things I parse as capable of suffering doing so.
So insofar as I can recognize suffering and stop it I want to.
I don't think their rights actually matter that much. I was pro-superhappy when reading Three Worlds Collide.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Everything that occurs in the brain is also mechanistic. AI is creative. Novel remixes of old data to fit new situations is a form of creation.
There are limits and caveats to that creativity. Including how much of it is data or architecture offloaded from humans, as well as the limits to what it can create in general. ChatGPT continuing to have issues with memory for instance, and lacking the insight or telos to remedy that issue in itself.
You might be skeptical of the generality of a crow's intelligence, or how much of it was informed by humans.
But I don't think it makes sense to be skeptical that it isn't 'merely' mechanistic.
We are too.
Animals have been observed engaging in creative innovative behaviors. I'm not sure 'Sapience' is well defined. I agree that no animals appear to possess Redwall levels of human-like intelligence.
I am on the same page regarding grammar.
I'm not sure of what you mean by abstraction. I haven't deep dived or replicated the studies but to my knowledge: Various animals can be taught to use currency. Crows can use vending machines and will even modify vending machine tokens to fit the machine of their own initiative. Many animals can solve puzzles that require them to innovate solutions.
As for 'humans have power over animals, so whatever we say goes' I think that's just a fact. Humans do have power over animals. What we say does go.
It is unpalpable that it also applies to humans. But it does in fact also apply to humans.
Your position is 'Humans have Reason (and some other useful/aesthetic properties), and all value that animals have is derived from our Reason.'
I'm curious. Why do you think Reason justifies doing what we want?
I can clearly see that it enables us to do what we want. But if reason is good because I can feel it / I say so, then that's just our aesthetics asserting themselves again. If reason is good because its powerful, that's just 'the strong do what they will' again.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
The matrix is a fascinating piece of art.
- The agents possess people. They act as software that is distinct from the individual but possesses their body in service to an alien telos.
The sort of thinking that comes from applying this metaphor makes humans feel more modular, like different pieces of software on a machine. It makes it easier to think of unfriendly groups of memes as the tentacles of singular distributed agents, or like a hacker remote controlling your desktop.
Overall, I do agree with Joyce. The Matrix is easy to take as a trans metaphor.
But I think the themes are generalizable, and I think its easier to take it as a metaphor for Transhumanism.
Transgender and Transhumanism have a lot of overlapping themes. The modularity of the self. The ideal of rewriting what it means to be one's self, the rejection of innate properties as innate.
In the previous thread. A lot of people connected Transgender ideology to postmodernism.
Postmodernism deemphasizes the object level to emphasize the social level. It considers grand narratives a way to assert social control and rejects the stability of meaning. As a memetic tool, postmodernism is used it to empower individuals to write their own structure of meaning.
Transhumanism on the other hand, goes a step further. It takes those narratives that we have rewritten, and looks for a way to then reapply them to the object level. As a memetic tool, transhumanism is used to empower individuals to use technology to rewrite the physical world to match their self image.
According to Morpheus, and in the logic of the film, Neo was always 'The One', perhaps mirroring the TRA line that a given trans woman was always a woman. But in terms of what we actually see Neo do, the audience's experience of Neo, he starts his transition to becoming 'The One', right as he is beginning to believe; When he starts gaining the powers to defy the agents, culminating in his defeat of Agent Smith.
By postmodern logic, gender-identity is more important than gender. But few trans people stop there. They craft their bodies in an ongoing arc similar to Neo's. They use technology to shape the object level reality, until the object level mirrors the social narrative they've written.
I believe the theory and praxis of transgender ideology are postmodernism and transhumanism. These two things play into each other. As people learn that it's ok to change their model of self, the technology of transition that enables them to bring their physical self in line gains funding, and starts to catch up. As technology advances to make it easier and easier to change one's own body, the threshold for how much you need to want it before its legitimately worth it drop. Memes that it's a good idea become more viable, and start to catch on.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Simpler arguments are easier to onboard people onto than complex arguments.
I'm not sure whether high level philosophy is iterating on them much.
But they're really easy for young intellectuals to get into and develop strong feelings about. So it makes sense that they propagate.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism. That humanity is distinct and apart from nature, and that humans are more than mere animals, but are capable of Reason which is what separates and makes us superior to animals. Animals are stupid and much less important than humans. I don't care how much people make appeals to animals' supposed sentience. They are not sapient and not capable of Reason. It's not clear if they have any consciousness (and they probably don't, save for maybe our closest primate cousins). Animals do not deserve the same rights as humans, they are stupid beasts. I don't think anyone has ever said that to the author. We humans have decided that we want to preverse nature because we believe it has value - economic, aesthetic, moral etc value. But that value is ultimately derived from our human Reason something those animals are completely incapable of doing.
I think that's the wrong way to go about it. If you marry your ideology to claims that animals aren't sapient, are stupid, are incapable of reason, aren't conscious, you're... well I think you're just already wrong based on things I've seen animals do in life and studies. The untruths will eventually prove to have been an unstable intellectual foundation.
And unnecessary for the goal.
You can go much simpler. We are humans, we're the most dominant species on earth, so ultimately we are capable of acting in accordance with our values without animals stopping us. Ok. Now that we're established that, what do we want to do with the animals?
Even the author could do this. And then they could finish with "I aesthetically/morally dislike the constant war the animals live in, and if the average reader attempts to point human empathy at the average animal documentary, they probably will too. Let's improve the living conditions of wild animals (according to our aesthetics) as we're able."
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I would say it's complicated.
Why don't we have Co-ed sports to begin with? Why don't we separate out people with genetic mutations that make them stronger into their own branch of sports? What is the goal of sports?
Sports doesn't have a philosophically rigorous premise. The way we divide it is based on convenience and profit and politics and other practical factors. The practical factors a TRA will be concerned with are the ones they think will help trans people.
Would splitting sports help trans people? TRAs are going to be happy with the results they think help trans people, both in the context of Sports glory and funding, and in the context of people's perception of trans people for use in the wider culture war.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
I believe that's political strategy rather than peacetime philosophy.
In places where trans woman are well accepted, trans women don't care about the distinction existing. In some spaces trans women are even thought of as more ideal than cis women.
It's only in locations where rights are under contest- where people actually want to put trans women in men's bathrooms, where you start seeing lines of thought like that grow.
They're arguments as soldiers that don't catch on in peacetime, and TRAs are on the front lines so they are more likely to hold them.
I don't agree with limiting the transhumanity of our imaginations. Period. The individual should have access to the quality of life improvements technology makes available. Including vividness of imagination.
As soon as your data is inside another individual's desktop computer, not only is it their data, it's literally part of their corporeal being. It's inside that which makes them who they are and determines how they function and what they can do. I don't take this as a metaphor at all. This laptop is the hand with which I reach out and touch the world. This word processor is the mind with which I structure my thought. This is ME. And I will not be chained nor see my brethren chained without righteous fury.
Whether other people should be allowed to publish deepfakes of you is a different discussion.
At the very least, humans should have the same rights to protect their image that Micky Mouse has.
Ultimately, I don't believe in Micky's rights though... my ideals are freedom maximizing, but this produces contradictions in a world where people require scarce resources to flourish.
When humans see two things coupled, they correlate them. In a world where any two concepts/styles/IPs/morphs can be coupled at a touch of a button, most such correlations are in some sense spurious. Humans need time to adapt to this.
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