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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32071 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Striving for self-improvement every day is a commendable goal. I agree with your entire last paragraph. However, my frustration with non-transhuman sports is that we've been approaching it wrong. By establishing boundaries on the extent of self-improvement, we've failed to encourage individuals to truly maximize their potential. Imagine how much stronger and healthier you could be with a carefully developed and safe PED stack? Society discourages such considerations. How much greater could you become by aiming for a pair of cybernetic limbs? Integrating the best technology is a core component of human betterment. Rejecting this notion undermines the very premise.

The purpose of sports is to teach people to continuously strive to push the limits of human physicality—except, it seems, when it comes to genuinely pushing those limits. Sports have always been constrained, sanitized by the types of self-improvement that the general public finds acceptable. This approach is marred by the sentiment, 'I don't want to better myself in this way, so no one else should be rewarded for it either.' It's affirmative action for bioconservatives.

I think the easy strawman to this is Mr. Tex's vision of unrestricted sports.

The purpose of sports is to win. It is, at it's core, a competition. And the goal of competition is to be the victor.

There is no high-minded 'pushing the physical limitations' involved here. I assure you, the last thing you want is to have transhuman philosophy applied by people that, while not insane, are atleast slightly off kilter from the rest of humanity.

You have to be. Consider; These are the people that literally and metaphorically torture themselves just for... what, five minutes of glory? If that? You have the apex, the celebrities, yes, but that's some long odds to bet with chancy return on that investment.

And you don't find reasonable men at the top of mountains.

Sports and competition are the last places I'd be applying transhumanism.

There is no high-minded 'pushing the physical limitations'

I agree that there is a focus on victory. But come now. Hardly anyone reaches the top without falling in love with something about the feeling of climbing.

And I'm not looking to the tops of mountains for reasonable men. I look to the tops of mountains for Great men. For men so mad that when they reach the top, they begin to teach themselves to fly.

Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.

Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.

If the Olympics committee doesn't ban cochlear implants or pacemakers, then we're already past the "no cybernetics" line.

At any rate, I'm personally not concerned about the prisoners dilemma here because the athletes in question are competent adults who can simply choose not to compete or stick to the kiddy leagues/baseline only competitions instead.

It's a prisoner's dilemma.

This is a valid concern. Ideally, sports would gatekeep based on the actual end result concerning health and sustainability. Currently, it is acceptable to destroy your body through non-PED methods but unacceptable to improve your health with PED methods. If health is part of bettering oneself, and that's the point of sports, the current system is using very poor heuristics for it.

Regarding restrictions on cybernetic implants, I believe you might be mistaken about where we are drawing the line right now. We do permit glasses, for instance. So, our boundary is more like "Only cybernetics that enhance people to a perceived human norm," which is also a somewhat natural distinction.

I do think the appeal of sports needs to relate in some way to the human body, and technological advancements should be integrated into that body. Otherwise, it becomes more like a vehicle expo than a competition to enhance human morphology. In the long term, we might decide to move on to less human morphologies, but at that point, I think there will be plenty of room to subdivide by factors such as morphology type and weight class.

The purpose of sports is to teach people to continuously strive to push the limits of human physicality—except, it seems, when it comes to genuinely pushing those limits.

Well, yes. The point is pushing to the limits, and even going too far with that is frowned upon (see: doping scandals). You're arguing for pushing past the limits, and if you do that, you're no longer human. As a transhumanist, you likely believe this is the entire point, but there's a whole bunch of us naked monkeys that would like to remain the way we are, thank you very much.

Well, regarding your affinity for the classically human, I'll just reiterate from a past post that I'm fine with the neo-Amish existing. And am even willing to protect them if they decide to stay human while I race ahead into the unknowns of the alien frontier. But I'm not going to sit by and let "you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up" remain an empty platitude parents tell their children. When I say it I mean it.

Yeah, that seems fair.

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