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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27867 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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there's a great deal of difference between mere dislike and maximally committed antagonism

One of intensity, not of nature.

Start turning people's children against them, see how much they value their lives over your doom.

You can boil the frog because people don't like to think much about where things are going or don't have the ability to see very far. But when things are clear the moral calculi can become quicker than even conscious thought.

Thus for them this is a pragmatic, not aesthetic argument: a factual claim about ways towards realizing their own genuine desires

And pray tell, what are those "genuine desires" and how are they decided?

I'm sorry but you're just repeating the same objection and it doesn't work. Just because one can make instrumental arguments about what works doesn't answer the underlying question of "works in the service of what?".

We should return to monke

No. Nor are we able. Nor are we able to advance to krab either.

We're not Australopithecus and we're not something beyond either, we're Homo Sapiens, and that's what we must deal with instead of dreaming of reforming humanity in the image of modernism.

That said I'm not against adopting new useful technology. I'm against the idea of pretending that compromising our humanity over it is useful or even possible.

My view of the far future is far closer to Dune than it is Eclipse Phase. We may get more sophisticated or different gizmoes, but for all intents and purposes we'll still be the same great apes and given all attempts at turning us into something different have ended in massive fucking disaster, I'll hold that it is the inevitable consequence until proven wrong.

But as I've often mentioned in this place, if it comes to my descendants having to be space north korea to remain humans, so be it. That's still the preferable option in my opinion.

we're australopitecus, not something beyond

we're homo erectus, not something beyond

we're homo sapiens, not something beyond

(you are here)

we're homo augmentus, not something beyond

??????

Consider how none of the people in question ever considered themselves to be these labels at the time, and how what we categorized as changes took millions of years.

In constrast:

we're something beyond, homo sapiens sapiens

wait, no we're not

deleted

I'm not as polite as @TheDag and not as interested in getting people to agree with me, so don't take this as a definitive response.

What differentiates the human being from other creatures is our teleological and philosophical capacity; if we're going to base our societies on whatever people's last-ditch preferences are when they're terrified of death rather than carefully-laid philosophical understandings of value, I'll take my chances in space Korea same as you.

Needless to say, I consider your perspective ridiculous, not informed but entirely molded by the ancestral terror of death and accompanying learned helplessness in the face of it; everything about your post, from your disgust reactions to your philosophical notions of value, and the idea of appropriateness of decay, and the very concept of «normal», only add up to eddies at the edges of a mindless screaming void, facets of deeply ingrained and perhaps indeed evolved coping with the status quo that's at odds with our very teleological capacity you speak so highly of. Children, though – even children of Christian backgrounds, encouragingly – know what's up before they are taught to lie to themselves and others: they know that death is bad the instant they first pause their playing with life and see it for what it is, and this recognition implies a very plain telos under any decision theory that acknowledges goodness and badness, not just utilitarianism.

Together with your musings on evolution as adaptation to particular environments, where a man and a lamprey are put on the same pedestal of accomplishment, what you propose is a perversion and denial of all that's uniquely interesting about humans by metrics intuitively available to us. Moreover it's technically wrong: we are no longer adapted to a particular environment. We have conquered every environment and purposefully created entire new ones, and have evolved under their pressures (ultimately producing people as diverse as you and I), because we have broken through the limit of adaptation via natural selection. This is what we are, and there is no real philosophical limit to this process that can be grounded in what any of us is at a given point in time.

I take the perhaps unusual perspective of a Platonic approach to the human being, from which much of my gut-level reactions emerge; there is an ideal form against which human beings are evaluated, and deviations from this form are defects, whether they end up enhancing or reducing one's capacity. I actually think this is how the human brain actually interprets and understands humanness, even for itself, as demonstrated by everything from body dysmorphia to phantom limb pain to the uncanny valley to body horror.

That's funny because I often post a link to «What Does a “Normal” Human Genome Look Like?» essay by Maynard Olson, which has influenced my thinking on transhumanism:

Nonetheless, questions about the genetic basis of variability among generally healthy humans will not go away. Public fascination alone will keep it alive, as will the realization that genetics is unlikely to revolutionize medicine until we develop a better understanding of normal phenotypic variation. So, what have our first glimpses of variation in the genomes of generally healthy people taught us? First, balancing selection, the evolutionary process that favors genetic diversification rather than the fixation of a single “best” variant, appears to play a minor role outside the immune system. Local adaptation, which accounts for variation in traits such as pigmentation, dietary specialization, and susceptibility to particular pathogens is also a second-tier player. What is on the top tier? Increasingly, the answer appears to be mutations that are “deleterious” by biochemical or standard evolutionary criteria. These mutations, as has long been appreciated, overwhelmingly make up the most abundant form of nonneutral variation in all genomes. A model for human genetic individuality is emerging in which there actually is a “wild-type” human genome—one in which most genes exist in an evolutionarily optimized form. There just are no “wild-type” humans: We each fall short of this Platonic ideal in our own distinctive ways.

I can recognize that this Platonic form can be a justifiable end of the journey – or, in a sense, the return, for while some might see how God had preordained stray cosmic rays and mutagenic toxins to do their job in heritably crippling us, that's a bit too carefully-laid a philosophical understanding for me to wrap my mind around. For me it's the most humble transhumanist ideal, the Aleph-null of human destinies. It's quite far from where we are today, certainly beyond all of our natural champions and our feeble attempts at augmentation, simultaneously in all ways worthwhile to excel at. It's still just a mortal ape, of course, but an extraordinary one, and hopefully able to develop some superhumanly good opinions on such matters.

What I stuggle to recognize is the apologia for anything less.

Surgery bad

I agree! Sorry on mobile and can’t copy/paste here for some reason.

I have been pushed by doctors to opt into expensive and unnecessary surgeries for issues like TMJ and carpal tunnel syndrome. I luckily decided not to, and after many years of stress management/exercise my issues have largely subsided. That experience also drastically shifted my perspective on modern medicine!

To elucidate my position a bit more, I am not a die hard transhumanist planning to have Elon Musk plant chips in my brain to give me telepathy. I think @DaseindustriesLtd and I are mostly aligned in that I want to defeat the Great Enemy: death itself. My ideal scenario is something like cryonics and/or life extension eliminating death of natural causes. I don’t care too much whether we achieve superhuman powers, as long as like @aqouta has mentioned, we have more time to spend on our loved ones and enjoyable activities.

We already prevent death with pretty much all medicine. I agree the line to artificially bringing us above the “baseline” level of human so to speak is more fraught, but I think the comparison to medicine works perfectly when you talk about preventing death.

One thing I find particularly frustrating about discussions on transhumanism is that attempts to find medical or technological solutions to problems -- like aging, dementia, osteoporosis, etc. -- are often lumped in with attempts to reform or reformat the human species into something that it is not, by technological means.

Viewing aging as a problem to be solved is already essentially transhumanist. But then you go on and call a problem "early knee failure", implying there is a proper time and place for knees to fail. The transhumanist view is that there isn't one. The aesthetic preference of whether the ideal knee is one that looks like your Platonic knee but never deteriorates, or part of a cyberpunk monstrosity that allows leaping over buildings is a minor quibble within transhumanism in comparison.

Why do progressives always act like limiting principles are not for them

Some limiting principles are always broken. Why not strive to have a few of them be ones I want broken?

Hey! This forum is for discussing culture war, not waging it!

It's fine if you state your goals explicitly like you did above, but you're not supposed maneuver us into agreeing with your goals!

And pray tell, what are those "genuine desires" and how are they decided?

The method of revealed preferences, mainly, as described in the previous paragraph.

if it comes to my descendants having to be space north korea to remain humans, so be it.

Yeah, Best Korea is pretty sweet. I guess people there are at most 2 SD less happy than in the West.

That's not a very realistic alternative to transhumanism, in my view. A bit too good to be true.

But we are treading the same water.

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