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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.

It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.

Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...

Moving to Mars, space

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Freezing our body, brain to come back later

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

Changing sex

I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

I think I agree with you.

Transhumanism is a techy way to not have to deal with the Only Serious Philosophical Question.

Handwaving a universe beyond our bodies is a way of passing the buck on living correctly with what we have.

I get the appeal, it's the same desperate escapism that fuels every other utopian religion.

It's just always wrong. There is no escape from the human condition. Life is pain, and anyone tells you different is selling something.

Most people will believe anything that lets them avoid this simple and basic conclusion.

"Because you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love your nature and her commands."

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

I'm puzzled by the opposite view. think of all the things to learn and explore, and that all abruptly must stop when you die. It would not be being forced to living forever; anyone would have the option to discontinue their life at any time.

Changing sex

this is pretty much a reality already .

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-revive-tiny-animals-spent-24000-years-ice-180977928/

https://www.seeker.com/frozen-animal-brought-back-to-life-after-30-years-1770755485.html

Perhaps you think rotifers and tardigrades are not central examples of animals, but animals have been brought back to life after being frozen.

i mean something like a rodent or bigger. something with a circulatory system and a full brain

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/?page=3

Rats, repeatedly.

Yes I've heard a lot of people are in favour of extending it out.

Changing sex is still impossible last time I looked, perhaps you mean sex characteristics?

Given current trajectories, Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the default futures.

Homemade biological modification will become more prevalent and likely, and the tools will become more difficult to regulate as patents and copyrights on the technologies expire. People want to be able to modify their bodies- whether it's injectables like semaglutide for weight loss or the jews of gender taking pills that give them breasts, or women taking injectables for more plump lips and hips, or people injecting magnets in their fingers for little parlor tricks.

If you have the means, you will be able to modify your body as you want. Modify your kids to be in the shape and form you want via embryo selection. These are futures that are happening now and will not go away. The social pressure for access to these tools will not abate.

As such, my position is that attacking transhumanism is a fool's errand.

I'm assuming we'll maintain a concept of medical ethics, and evidence-based medicine. And whatever we do, well still be faced with the same issues we have now around meaning and well-being.

Ah yes, the famously-solved and not at all under debate questions about right of patients and consent toward self-modification.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.

Transhumanism, beyond being generalized humanism, increasingly looks like the Emperor has no clothes philosophy.

Yes, good things are good, and we should have more of them, even acknowledging the nebulous potential where they turn bad. Hell, that's awesome!

People have been gaslit (in the actual sense of the word) into going sour grapes at the prospect of living longer by humanity's impotence in the face of death for millenia, let alone the religious getting upset when we can potentially produce heaven on Earth without the dubious prospect of having to die to see for ourselves what comes next.

I also find this a very strange comment indeed. I guess 80 seems a long way away when you're 30? I suspect the number of 80 year olds who would turn down a second youth and another 80+ years (and more besides) is near zero, especially if you could bring along your spouse etc. Culture shock is hardly such a terrible condition.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Part of what you seem to be missing, which is core to the transhumanist philosophy, is that most humans are dull, weak, and most of all stupid. The transhumanist vision sees Earth as a trap, because it's only a matter of time, from their perspective, before we all destroy ourselves. They may have a point, but that is the primary motivation to go to space. Even if it's often hidden behind other motivations in the public sphere.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I've lost faith that longevity will meaningfully increase in our lifetimes, but fear of death is pretty rational imo. I'm always puzzled as to why people are afraid of eternity. I mean sure life is full of suffering, but if you can grow up a bit and handle the shit in your life, you'll see that you can outgrow what your younger self thought was possible. I want to keep growing as long as I can.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

A theory others have discussed here that I'm finding more and more credible is the idea that the trans-urge is less of a fetish, and more of a denial of self. It's a sort of attempt to destroy the current self and be reborn as something new, coming from a fundamental place of self-loathing.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I find that explanation much more compelling than the fetish side of things.

Yes, I agree with the denial of self as a part of the new cohort- that makes sense. With the fetish I was actually talking about society generally, seems to be many people see it as the next cab off the rank as a lifestyle+ option...

You can’t separate “colonizing space” from a kind of frontier, Wild West fantasy. That’s why it captured the imagination of Americans in particular to such an extent. Life on the homestead, on Mars - it even has desert, just the like the real Wild West! You only need to draw a very large dome over the ranch and add some solar panels, and there you have it, ten acres for every family. (Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!)

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable. Unless or until the technology is developed to quickly travel to other solar systems with planets that might actually support life, there is no reason to settle space - it won’t stop x-risk (as @self_made_human suggests, most sources of x-risk would also affect a Martian colony) and even a nuked, irradiated earth would be easier for humans to live on than Mars. The other planets in our solar system are immeasurably worse than earth in every way for life. Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine. And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans. Any resource gathering or scientific work that one might need to do in space can be done by robots/probes/AI in tandem, there is no need for humans to be out there at all.

I'm not opposed to NASA, planting the US flag on Mars might well be justified from a national pride perspective, or because of technology invented along the way. But let's not fool ourselves that colonizing space, in and of itself, is the solution to any of humanity's major challenges.

space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

In the 10 seconds it took you to type this, over 10^21 kWh of Sol's sunlight was lost to humanity forever. That's $10 million trillion, at cheaper than wholesale energy prices; that's a hundred millennia of current world GDP.

Develop a bolder imagination.

If you read my comment I say that resource extraction in space (presumably including sunlight) might well be justified, but that this can be handled by robots, and does not require people living in space.

Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.

It's a lot easier to get the resources to people when the people are in space too, I assume.

Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!

So where would you do that? In the continental US, you can't escape the Sword of Damocles of a something-studies graduate coming along and saying that your homestead is built on stolen Indian land, or the law school graduate coming along and finding some tax code or ADA regulation that you can get extorted over, and nowhere on Earth can you escape the environmentalist arrogating to himself the right to regulate how you eat and heat and breathe lest your sinful vapours sully the planet. Sure, these events might be unlikely/trifling/easily worked around, and it's not like space is without its perils. I'm still sure that a big part of the visceral appeal of the frontier is the idea that you can actually escape this and go somewhere where nobody can argue that you owe them anything, because many people's psychology is such that losing their house to unfeeling nature is bearable in a way in which losing their house to a smug and self-righteous sentient being is not; and conversely a large amount of the opposition to it seems to me to be carried by lazy rationalisation (wasteful! won't help you against the gamma ray burst anyway! why don't you start in the deep sea!) for what is really a visceral aversion against the same (because there is no greater hubris than plotting to escape the great web of obligations).

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

Man does not live on bread alone. Space colonization is and always has been about presenting a compelling vision of the future, stretching our capability, captivating our imagination and giving the human race hope. That's the best reason I can think of to do anything.

Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine

I've heard much shorter time spans suggested for terraforming Mars, on the order of a century or two. That would involve cometary bombardment to restore surface oceans, which would be mildly inconvenient for anyone on the surface.

Other reasonable candidates include Venus (reversing the greenhouse effect), or Europa (living in one ocean is much the same as any other).

Still bad ideas, when orbital living is far more convenient, especially when you're doing ISRU off asteroids.

And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans.

We're on track for 10/11 billion people with business as usual forecasting. That is almost certainly not going to happen, things will go either very well or very poorly.

I strongly expect that AGI will bypass the physical and memetic restrictions on population growth we currently face, in a world of artificial wombs, robot nannies and so on, children will cease to be the same timesinks they are today, and that will likely emancipate us from concerns about biological clocks and women not having as many kids as they claim to want.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be, we can have as many kids as we like, without compromising QOL.

That's completely ignoring things like mind uploading, which renders population growth largely a function of energy availability.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.

And yet.

There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.

Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.

Except poor people have more children than rich people, at least until the very high end of the income distribution.

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.

Inflation means that's a million doesn't mean what it used to.

There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.

There are a lot fewer poor people around. Humanity has indeed become incredibly rich, and poverty rates have plummeted.

The problem you mention is largely that of psychology, because humans have raised more children on less in the past, and still do so in most of the world.

Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.

The same reason some person on welfare in the US today leads a better life than most medieval peasants or even Victorian gentry. They have electricity, healthcare that works, cars and the like.

As Jesus said, "For you have the poor with you always". Poverty isn't a measure of absolute wealth but a measure of relative wealth. Taking some measures of absolute poverty the number of people in extreme poverty (under a real $2.15/day has dropped from over 2 billion to under 600 million people). There will never beaffordable positional goods for everyone, because as soon as construction ended many of the people would only value the ones not near themselves.

As one of the more ardent transhumanists on The Motte, I suppose I have to crack my neck and get to addressing all of this:

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.

I think planetary colonization or terraforming is a fool's errand myself. The only reason I support Musk in his attempts is that they contingently reduce launch costs and make the following easier (and it's fucking cool)-

Far better to build space habitats, and run them off asteroid mining.

Even in the case of something like an asteroid impact or nuclear apocalypse, Earth would remain more inhabitable than Mars. For a more realistic x-risk like AGI, there's nowhere that's safe, short of being aboard a probe travelling at 99.99% the speed of light to intergalactic space, and we're not building any of those in time.

Of course, we'll eventually fill up Earth, even with baseline humans, so the idea of filling up the cosmos instead will be necessary in some form. There's a lot of starlight illuminating empty rooms, and better to use negentropy we can't store instead of letting it go to waste.

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

Cryonics is hardly a proven technology, but even a minuscule chance (1-5%?) of reviving after death beats the big fat zero default of letting your body thaw and rot.

(Before some idiot brings this up as an example of Pascal's Wager or Mugging, those deal with infinitesimal probabilities, 1%, while small, is very much not negligible)

I don't plan on doing it myself, but only because I expect AGI to either kill us or provide more robust means of life extension in the next decade. I'm not dropping dead of senescence by then, and I have more pressing needs.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

This is a profound failure of imagination. What makes 80 the most optimal lifespan to live?

Would society collapse if average life expectancy made it to a 100? 120? 150?

Humans have gone through far more tumultuous transitions, and eventually we'll ponder how people could ever have been so stupid as to not solve death and aging the moment they had a real shot at it.

Personally? I like living, and that's enough. And it's hard to do much of anything if you're not alive, and I'm far from exhausting all the possibilities.

Not that I'd go so far as to mandate immortality. As far as I'm concerned, life comes with exit rights, and if you tire of living, you have every rights to call it quits.

The reason the elderly often become unhappy is because they are unhealthy. They suffer from cognitive deficits, feel all kinds of aches and pains, and watch their peers inevitably slide into the grave. None of these apply to a 80 year old with the body and mind of someone a quarter their age.

Further, as a doctor, I am uniquely positioned to see how much, by revealed preferences, people are willing to spend to extend their lives by the few paltry years that modern medicine allows, and thus can see for myself that almost everyone puts a massive premium on lifespan. Unlike most other doctors, I'm lucid enough to not knot myself into false quandaries when gasp, our medicine and surgery actually lets people live longer and longer.

Medicine is transhumanism. All doctors rage against the dying of the light, and that's one of the few invincible pillars of nobility that makes me proud of the profession.

So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

To put it bluntly, I think "true transcendence through a more spiritual realm" is nonsense, or at least cope, and what's worse, it's outdated cope, when we finally have the tools to do better.

Telling a medieval peasant about cryogenic life extension or AGI does absolutely nothing for them, while drugging them with the opiate of the masses at least dulls the pain. But we're not medieval peasants, we're at the cusp of real apotheosis, and regardless of whether we live or die, I'm glad I was around for the ride.

And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

"What does it mean to be human? Is it down to the genes? There's so much genetic diversity, can the mere conversion of a few proto-oncogenes into oncogenes deprive one of one's human rights? It seems lazy to simply cut and throw them away, instead of exploring what it actually is to be human"

Says the insane parson trying to stop the neurosurgeon from resecting their brain tumour.

My God man, how can you call it lazy to solve or render obsolete such a massive problem, when to date all the bloviating and moralizing by philosophers has been incredibly more lazy, or at least profoundly useless, because we haven't gotten anything out of it?

I can actually see the appeal in pushing out the age, it's one of those things where the desire to get more may creep up once you get closer to the time. As long as you have health but then that would presumably go hand in hand with the life-extending capability. I might be part of a minority - for me, knowing I'm going to die one day gives me great solace! And I like the idea of life stages, childhood - youth - middle age - old age and all the changes in perspective that go with it. I'd rather the 2-3 really good seasons and finish up, than the meandering season after season for the sake of it. But perhaps that's not a fair analogy.

I agree, the spiritual transcendence is acting here as a total macguffin! I'm still working on this admittedly but it's in the scientific frame I'm thinking of ...

I'm not sure on your last point. I assume it's around why would you withhold treatment if it works. While I don't rule out cosmetic sex change as being effective for some people my contention is that there might be something else that works and that so much is downstream of culture. These ideas are so new and therefore contingent. I don't see lifestyle diversity/identity optimisation as the holy grail as I think it's operating at a fairly superficial layer. It feels to me like one of the dead-ends of modern liberalism, a symptom of ennui.

I might be part of a minority - for me, knowing I'm going to die one day gives me great solace!

I find that idea rather perverse, but like I said, your choice to die is entirely up to you in my eyes. I simply resent dying one nanosecond before I choose to.

Do you want to kill yourself right now? I doubt it and I doubt you will when you actually turn 80 either. Being healthy and wealthy has a rather pronounced effect on mental wellbeing.

And I like the idea of life stages, childhood - youth - middle age - old age

I have little doubt that we'll invent new and interesting categories when people live long enough for that to be useful. After all, a centenarian's club would have been an awfully empty place for most of human history.

I'm not sure on your last point. I assume it's around why would you withhold treatment if it works.

I meant it in the sense that it's a billion times more laudable to eliminate a problem than it is to spend an eternity sitting around debating it and never making any useful progress.

There's no firm consensus definition of "human", but that doesn't mean we complain when cancer cells aren't given human rights.

At any rate, a lot of our moral confusion about gender will be entirely obsolete when we can switch it at will, and I think it's crazy to frame that as a bad thing!

Well there's a lot of interesting things to do and see so I wouldn't rule out being persuaded for another chunk of 20 or so, and I admit there's a slippery slope there. But finitude has its own motivation - my knowledge of death encourages me to try and 'lay it on the line', notwithstanding my desires for comfort and ease.

As to assuaging moral confusion, isn't transhumanism just operating as some cosmic consequentialism? Don't worry about the petty ethical concerns of the day such as unnecessary surgeries, the utopia of the future will render them moot. Once we get bored by the ubiquity of sex change we will realise the futility of such an identity focus ...

It's also so open ended it raises questions around how meaning is possible.

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

I think there's a lot of contradiction in the transhumanist ideals, and that's normal, but someone really should address "We're gonna have so many people on Earth we have to create space colonies and settle other planets" with "We can solve the problem of cryonics and revive people from now to live in the future where life extension is also a mostly solved problem".

I expect AGI to either kill us or provide more robust means of life extension in the next decade.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

None of these apply to a 80 year old with the body and mind of someone a quarter their age.

Two different problems there: life extension past what we currently consider the 'normal' limits (e.g. making sure most people will live to be 100) and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then). Think of Swift's Struldbruggs; what do you think people would choose, given the fear of death, between "you will live another 20-30 years but keep getting older" or "you will stay in your 40 year old state of health up till you die, but you die at 70-80 as usual"? Some people will pick the extra time, some people will pick the healthier body.

But we're not medieval peasants, we're at the cusp of real apotheosis

That's an amount of hubris that makes me laugh. Come back when you're 60 and few of your confident predictions have come true. The one thing that happens is that as we get to know more, we realise how much more complicated the problems are (space colonies! solving aging!) than the early optimism of the day imagined (we're so smart now and know so much, surely in 10/20/50 years we will know everything!)

Says the insane parson trying to stop the neurosurgeon from resecting their brain tumour.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that? 😁

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

There's a reason I suggested a 1% chance of ever coming back, but surprise surprise, transhumanists, like their merely "humanist" kin, are capable of charity.

At a point in time where we can actually do this, it's not going to cost much for the living.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

I expect reality to set us straight, not fully-generalized-pessimism.

and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then).

That is not how aging works. The only way you're going to be able to pull that off is dragging your happy and healthy grandma behind a shed and introducing her to a baseball bat.

Age is not a coat of paint, it represents trillions of accumulated failures in complicated systems, which cause a super-exponential decline in capabilities (if it was merely exponential, some people would live centuries and more, instead of us being hard capped to 120 years).

You make people healthy (also known as reversing aging) and they will live longer.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that?

More of a comparison to abortion or what it means to be human, as far as I can tell.

To put it bluntly, I think "true transcendence through a more spiritual realm" is nonsense, or at least cope, and what's worse, it's outdated cope, when we finally have the tools to do better.

I'm sad you think this way. Whether it's an artifact of the way human minds have evolved or whatever the case may be, there is definitely something there. We can argue about whether there's an actual big old God sitting outside of time somewhere, but mystical experiences and relationships with the divine are as real as it gets. These experiences of something greater than ourselves are really what binds all human civilization together. It's what lifted us out of the murk and gave us consciousness, as far as I can tell. That's something worth worshipping.

There's a lot to get in there my dude, and I'm not sufficiently qualified on neuroscience (I slept through the lectures, not that they went that deep) to give a full explanation of how religious ideation arises from the brain.

I still know that sufferers of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy see visions and can even speak in tongues, and instead of worshipping them, we get them psychiatric help these days.

The limbic area is also distinctly associated with religiosity in general.

I honestly see nothing about the human condition that is well explained by religion being true, and a great deal that speaks for the other side.

What loving, omnipotent and omniscient God lets children with ichthyosis vulgaris exist as more than a fevered dream of horror in the imagination of overactive biologists? (I suggest you don't Google what that looks like).

If there's solace to be had in religion, I don't want or need it. My only standard is whether its true, and the believers haven't brought me around nor are they likely to until we make gods ourselves, not that we should workship them, quite the opposite if we have their source code.

My only standard is whether its true, and the believers haven't brought me around nor are they likely to until we make gods ourselves

No worries! I don't want to stop ya in any way of your transhumanist dreams to be clear. Heck, I may still even join you. The jury is out.

I just want to convince you and your fellow machine gods to spare the poor humans who want to stick to their physical bodies and worship some sort of God.

I just want to convince you and your fellow machine gods to spare the poor humans who want to stick to their physical bodies and worship some sort of God.

I'm not homicidal myself, as much as I pity the religious, I don't think the solution is euthanasia haha.

Can't vouch for the Machine Gods, you'll need to take that up with Altman!

Cryonics is hardly a proven technology, but even a minuscule chance (1-5%?) of reviving after death beats the big fat zero default of letting your body thaw and rot.

(Before some idiot brings this up as an example of Pascal's Wager or Mugging, those deal with infinitesimal probabilities, 1%, while small, is very much not negligible)

Estimating 1-5% revival chance for current cryonics seems awfully optimistic.

I would put it below 0.001% chance or lower.

Our understanding of the way information is stored in the brain is limited. I enjoyed this article from 2015, but even it is largely speculative, we have no idea if 'engrams' exist, we presume they do and presume to understand how they're stored.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival. We don't know for a fact whether the current most advanced forms of cryonics preserve any of this information, although it seems extremely unlikely that they do. But stranger things have happened, science advances extraordinarily rapidly, and who knows what superintelligent AI might make of the problem of a cryogenically frozen brain.

"Uploading" is even easier. There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival.

It seems possible. Claiming that current preservation methods will allow resurrection seems wild and extremely unlikely. Someone claiming that estimating resurrection chance at 5% for currently frozen brain seems extremely miscalibrated for me.

to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

I disagree. A model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus is you in every appreciable sense.

  1. even if they would be atom-by-atom identical then they would still not be me

  2. "you just need to train a model to be you" is insufficient to reach "model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus"

I certainly won't appreciate it, so it isn't.

In every appreciable sense. In other words, a perfect copy of me would seem exactly the same to everyone else but if I had them standing in front of me I would be very sure they aren’t me. And if they killed me I would be dead.

Of course, having a legacy copy of you walking around might be considered better than nothing.

There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree.

That is simultaneously pathetic and horrible. So build an automaton that says the things you have been recorded saying, does the things you have been recorded doing, and never mind if you die because we'll all pretend - or worse, believe - this doll is really you.

A civilisation of puppets all playing pre-recorded roles forever and ever, engendering nothing new, after the last real human died and is now a heap of bones. But don't worry, their puppet exists so it's really them, honestly!

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock?

It seems reductive to call the desire for a space exploration age utopian. It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory. The demographics of people who would sign up for a one-way Mars colonization trip are the same as the people who try to make it big gambling on stocks and crypto. Crypto is a sad excuse for a real frontier for many reasons, but it's the closest thing I can think of in the modern day.

People want more space to spread out and get away from the current social structure. A lot of the most disaffected or persecuted people in Europe were able to do this with the Americas, and right now we lack this kind of physical release valve. I think a lot of social problems would solve themselves if people who were unhappy with things could just go... somewhere else.

It's very possible that space travel looks nothing like that, and will only take highly skilled and educated individuals. Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.

Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

The space race generated/improved countless technologies that vastly improved quality of life back on Earth. A new wave of interest in space would almost certainly result in new material gains here. If asteroid mining is possible in the long term, it could solve a lot of resource problems and lead to an explosion in wealth gains like no other. If by utopia, you mean spiritual transcendence, then yeah this probably wouldn't help with that.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

My issue with transgenderism is the "point deer, make horse" of social pressure to affirm that someone who is clearly not a woman is a woman, and of pushing dangerous, irreversible medical interventions onto autistic and underage people. Philosophically, I'm not against the concept of changing your body and hormones to be the same as a woman's, were it possible to actually do so. I'm not willing to bet that medicine will ever figure this out 100%, but if it does, that's a good thing.

Sex change isn't your thing, but are you against other forms of bodily modification? Do you have no issues with your health or vanity that you'd be willing to medically fix/improve if it were cheap and easy enough?

I guess ultimately I might have a different definition of transhumanism than you. At its core, it seems like the concept of using technology to overcome failings of the body. We've been doing that since we first picked up a walking stick. If in the future, the cure for blindness is to install vat-grown eyes, I don't see that as much different than LASIK, or even from wearing glasses. In all examples, your genetics or life circumstances led to you having the bad hand of poor eyesight, and you're relying on an unnatural intervention to overcome that.

I admit it looks pretty silly when you look at Yud talking about Cryonics and living forever. I wouldn't recommending holding out for technology to fix everything as an excuse to ignore your physical fitness. I'm not holding my breath for space travel, extreme body modification, etc. But at the same time, if you were to tell a man with poor eyesight from 100 BC that in the future, we could fire lasers into his eye to reshape his cornea, he would probably dismiss that as magical thinking in the same way that you are with some of your examples. These things don't always pan out how we want them to. But sometimes they do.

I think you raise an important point about frontier spirit, which I consider one of the problems we are facing, that modern life in many ways is ill-fitted to our nature.

I think you might want to think a bit more carefully about what kind of people we send on missions though. I think modified humans that have been engineered for cooperative behaviour might be a safer bet than 'wild-west' types. I don't know if you are familiar with the mutiny on the bounty tale at all, though to their credit the colony survived even if everyone is now related to Christian Fletcher...

As to medical improvements, I'm for them- I could be persuaded of a reasonable amount in this domain. Cosmetic procedures I would endure if there's a good reason, an unsightly mole but not really anything at the next level. I'm in the norms of feature proportions as far as I can tell so haven't had the need. I seem to get uglier year on year but don't notice for large periods of time so it's no biggie. Full-body tattoos are good for Yakuza etc

My concern around the impulse for sex change in some people is part of it may be originating in cultural ideas. I contend it's better perhaps to change the cultural space rather than mainstream cosmetic surgery.

Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.

The problem is, that the technology needed for the high frontier is so high, by the time we get it operational to create those Mars domes there will be nothing for a guy who can drive a lorry to do there. We'll have robot diggers etc.

In the 17th-19th centuries, the disaffected guy with nothing more than his manual labour to offer could scratch out some kind of living on the frontier wielding a shovel or working on a ranch. For a Mars colony, what is a guy with a shovel to do? He can't strike out on his own for the gold diggings or claim a land grant for a farm of his own, since everyone will be dependent on technology to live from breathable air onwards. And that means living in organised settlements en masse, no solitary prospector wandering the hills. If the social problems arise out of "he can't stop getting into fights with other people, unless he lives on his own" then they'll be transplanted right along with the disaffected.

It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory.

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

But the modal young American man is too comfortable. He’s too comfortable because his ancestors won and he really did grow up in a fantastically prosperous society where all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

What the crypto gamblers really want to be is rich. But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it. So the ‘frontier’ argument is really just a delusional fantasy of LARPing as a gold prospector from a Hollywood movie who strikes it rich. That’s as realistic today as it was 200 years ago, which is to say not very.

I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:

all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.

My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.

Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.

But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it.

Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.

Ahh yes Computer Science the easy major that 50% of people drop out of after their first year.

Or programming so easy of a profession that the practitioners get paid just because those slimy software engineers conned us all.

Link your github or gtfo.

Becoming a FAANG dev or majoring in computer science at Stanford is hard. Going to a bootcamp and doing basic data science python stuff for a plain old corporation that pays $105k a year in the burbs of some Sun Belt City isnt. But I think you’re getting distracted, because my focus wasn’t just on tech but on ‘email jobs’.

Do you think millennial girlbosses in HR or ‘Product Marketing Managers’ are doing an ultra-challenging job intellectually? Because they all make decent money too.

Its been a decade since anyone could get a software job by knowing html,css and js. And do you really think Dunder Mifflin Paper company has Data Scientists working for them when their "database" is most likely an excel sheet? Your conception of working in tech is based off of reddit comments.

Anyways, I dont think professional email senders do much intellectual work, neither do bankers or any non STEM white collar workers for that matter. Its class warfare. But I dont really lose sleep over it because I trust demand and supply.

learn how to program (trivially easy)

For some. If you have the maths ability and the kind of mind that works for programming, you can do that. The likes of me? You could not beat it into me with sticks (literally).

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig,

There's nothing new or unknown about either of them, and lots of men do them.

go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

Frontiers have potential; the DRC is a basket case and is known to be. Trying to "do what it takes" there would be like trying to homestead during the Dust Bowl. Southeast Asia, of course, is absolutely packed with people.

He’s too comfortable because his ancestors won and he really did grow up in a fantastically prosperous society where all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life.

Very broadly drawn, there's less than 6 million professional programmers in the US, out of 158 million total employed. It's certainly not trivially easy to do so; if it were, more people would do it and drive the salary down. Furthermore, it doesn't help; while it is far more comfortable than fracking or working on an oil rig, like those jobs it provides money without status, or perhaps even negative status. There was a short time this was changing, though only for the top of the profession, but it did not last.

What the crypto gamblers really want to be is rich.

Not just rich, but rich in a flashy and impressive way. Get rich by making a good salary and investing the money in normal stuff, you're boring. Get rich by joining a tech startup and hitting the IPO jackpot, and unless you reach Sergey Brin levels of rich, you're just weird (Brin is weird but rich enough that it doesn't matter). Get rich by throwing your life savings into a meme stock or shitcoin and hitting it big, and you're exciting. Winning gamblers are just inherently higher status than winners who got their money more conservatively. Losing gamblers are, of course, losers, but even they might be higher status on the way down.

Yeah but by definition this isn’t really a solution. If all young men want to do is gamble with infinitesimally small odds of great wealth, they can play the lottery. A comfortable, happy life is within reach of most young American men. A 99.99th percentile life is, by definition, not. And it wasn’t in the ‘age of the frontier’ either.

So you understand your proposals don't work and you're just suggesting young men eat cake?

The lottery doesn't work for various obvious reasons either.

My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.

If it’s about gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich, you can do that.

If it’s about working hard to provide a comfortable life for your family, you can do that.

If it’s about living somewhere rural and remote, living off the land, homeschooling your kids, you can still do that in many parts of the US (and for relatively little money if you’re not picky).

If you want to live some kind of outlaw criminal fantasy, then again, you can do it - and just like it did for most outlaws in the Wild West, it’ll probably end badly.

So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.

So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.

What has been lost is the true belief in God that compelled people to have hope that such a drastic move could lead to a better life. Remember that the majority of the settlers were Christians who were so devout they were willing to cross an ocean and take incredible risks, leaving behind everything they've ever known to go to a new land. There's a reason those people were selected.

There's a reason those people were selected.

They had, like, five fucking older brothers and didn't stand a chance to inherit anything good. Or a king they never met lost a war and they got displaced. Or they were from a Godforsaken frozen mountain in Sweden and farming on the great plains is just a better deal. Yeah.

My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.

You know, though, that the substitutions you are suggesting meets some technical definition while missing the essence. Playing the lottery isn't the same as prospecting for gold, even if both are "gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich". Working as a corporate drone isn't the same as working as a cattle driver or even running a store.

I’m not trying to be facetious.

My point is that the difference between then and now is mainly a product of huge increases in total societal prosperity. 2/3 of your examples (working on a cattle ranch and running a store) are totally possible today, it’s just most people don’t want to do them because they’re hard work and poorly paid compared to a lot of other stuff you could do.

Most men didn’t seek their fortune in the West as some kind of grand adventure, they did it because they were desperate and poor, because life in the urban tenements of the East Coast was intolerable, because they held out hope for a small fraction of the quality of life that the average American has today.

You’re romanticizing what in many ways was the historical equivalent of Nigerien migrants crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy dinghies in the hope that they become soccer champions. A sad phenomenon that modern young Western men need not take part in because they have already won the birth lottery.

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The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

God bless America. Sometimes I forget how damn lucky I am. Thanks for reminding me.

all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy)

it is trivially easy for some (including me) but not to all, and no - it is not only about intelligence

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

None of these places are frontiers. They offer no respite from people telling you what to do and how to do it, and that's like 80% of the appeal.

The wilderness may have no people telling you what to do and how to do it, but it has Nature telling you so, and Nature can be far crueler and more demanding than any human tyrant. Although I suppose that depending on your personality and temperament it could still be more tolerable.

The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.

True, and fair enough.

The actual frontier never had that either, there was always government in the Wild West. Unless you’re talking about the outlaw fantasy (organized crime is still pretty big today, so that’s certainly doable), the inhabitants of the old west lived under a system of government that was substantial, backed by military force and involved the weight of legal, social and cultural expectation in almost every aspect of life; it was, if anything, a more conformist society than the present.

There's government that's going to bother to look for you and make sure you're doing everything exactly the way they want it, and there's government that won't. No one would have arrested you for finding a free plot of land and starting a farm (though you might end up getting screwed once "civilization" expands, and your land becomes interesting, I suppose.)

The United States are still pretty empty, and a skilled farmer can still get land at both trivial price and effort to practice his craft. It is also hard work that you do in places of solitude after a half-decade or so of learning your craft as an absolute nobody, which is why the people fantasising about frontiers aren't growing beets off in Ohio right now: things stop being romantic when you have to put in sweat and effort for them.

I was unaware that they brought back the homestead act.

Yes. That is why I said trivial, rather than free. Lots of farmers, both American and even foreign, still start new farms on US soil, and they pay very little money compared to what they end up making. It's just less of a cultural cornerstone ever since farmers became such a minority of people in the west.

I think it’s utopian in the sense that most people have wildly utopian and really do not understand the dangers of both exploration and colonization. They’re basing their ideas on TV and movies where space travel is barely more dangerous than a cruise ship and has better food. Where colonies are easy to build and maintain and don’t require any inputs from earth.

The real universe is not like this of course. If everything goes right, you’ll ride in a tiny cramped and probably cold ship to a tiny colony entirely supported from earth (with costs in the trillions or at least high billions per year) where you do basically manual labor and spend several hours a week on top of that maintaining the structure of the biosphere or farming. Basically, the gestalt image should not be Picard on the bridge sipping an earl grey tea, but the very early days of colonizing the new world. Many will die, and those who don’t are going to be doing a lot of very hard work.

true transcendence through a more spiritual realm

What about uploading?

As far as I'm concerned, that's the essence and goal of transhumanism. Everything else is a distraction. We move swiftly on to posthumanism, building bodies to our liking. You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain with transistors or whatever computing material we use by then. Once you're machine-legible, you can either stay in VR or print out a new body and install your brain, or you copy yourself massively, or you add on new capabilities digitally (ranging from Matrix-style accelerated learning to fundamentally increasing one's speed and depth of thought). Or some combination of these.

Now there are formidable technical and political/practical problems with this vision. Who knows how easy it is to augment one's own mind? Will more than 0.001% of the population survive to see this? Does AI eat us for breakfast before we even have a chance to kill each other?

But, if our species survives, there is no alternative to leaving fleshy humanity behind. There's nothing an organic human can do better than a posthuman, uploaded being drawing upon more energy, more mass, more resources. They would be able to think faster, act faster, reproduce faster, be more intelligent, more powerful, more resilient. There's no way our 20 watt brains are at the peak of what's physically possible, less so our bodies.

Imagine being a legacy human in an era of posthumans. You're constantly watched in ways you can't even understand, let alone counterattack. You have no sovereignty, no power, no ability to participate in a cultural life that's beyond the capacity of your senses and intellect. You might as well be a zoo animal. There is no escape except death. If you get on a starship to explore the universe, posthumans will already have gotten there first. You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies. It would be an extremely sad existence to my mind.

I chose the words 'machine-legible' precisely because I know that it epitomizes what some people here don't like. But there are irresistible competitive forces pushing us in this direction. I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, to to some extent, a search for immortality. This impulse is deep-seated. People are always going to try to transcend their biological limits and see what they can truly do. Technology isn't going to give us just Star Trek's glass spires and cool toys, it's not going to culminate with a civilization that primarily caters to jumped-up apes.

Take terraforming Mars. The whole idea assumes that humans need water, certain temperature ranges, oxygen, gravity, planets... Why accept such restraints? Why not flock to orbit the stars that provide all this free energy? Why should people live on Earth when they could live on the orbit of Mercury, or closer to the Sun? Isn't it more habitable there? Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world. And it's backed by trend lines in GDP, computing power and so on - every hockey-stick graph that shows us at unprecedented growth.

You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies.

Sure, but those minds are still dependent upon a physical substrate. The uploaded mind isn't floating around in the ether, it's stored in some fashion on a physical computer or in a robot body. And if the machine stops...

But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair.

The effect of this frank confession was admirable.

'Of course,' said a famous lecturer – he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour – 'of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine.' Thousands of miles away his audience applauded. The Machine still linked them. Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. Only the old and the sick remained ungrateful, for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men.

What about uploading?

Say an LLM trainer (hypothetical future robot-AI-thing) followed you around for 10 years, recording everything you did and said, and then recreated your personality, worldview and identity perfectly, such that you could present it with any problem or situation and it would react the way 'you' would.

Would you kill yourself, safe in the knowledge that you had achieved immortality? There's a viscerally unsatisfying nature to 'uploading' that can't be ignored.

There's a nice short story by Greg Egan that explores this, "Learning to Be Me". I won't spoil it, even though it's older than Russian Federation.

Sounds great, I’ll try to track it down.

I'm with the spiritualists on this one. It is making a copy and then destroying the original. Our original bodies contain an essence and a continuity of existence that is then broken. You can't Ship of Theseus your way out of this by copying neuron by neuron. The copy is not 'you'. 'You' would die in the process, or would coexist with the copy, showing clearly that you are different entities.

I'd be open to regenerative techniques such as gene therapy or even nanites to repair organic tissue indefinitely, but I wouldn't go for a cybernetic version of immortality.

To be honest I'd probably even avoid Star Trek style transporters.

Your continuity of existence is broken every night. Thousands of nerve cells die and you also lose consciousness for hours.

Unless you're a a dualists positing 'souls' that are crucial and somehow distinct from the unique pattern of information in every person's brains, you aren't making much sense.

I won't make an argument to 'souls', but I will place my stake on continuity of existence. There is some loss and gain of brain and other cells and loss of consciousness, but this is not a break in continuity of existence.

I understand this is not something I can logically convince others of. They will have to make their own decisions on what 'they' are and how 'they' can gain immortality.

The brain doesn't stop working entirely at night. I have reason to believe I wake up the same process as I was, which is completely lacking in the case of murder-teleporter, not to mention the LLM scenario.

People who blithely accept non-continuous cloning as acceptable substitute for themselves ought to experience talking to their own clone before being told that they'll be killed right now and it will live on. I think this will disabuse many of any further impulse to claim that's the same thing as going to sleep.

We have zero reason to believe anything beyond the very specific arrangements of matter determines everything about an individual, therefore a perfect copy with sufficient fidelity would be that person.

they'll be killed right now and it will live on.

Why do you think instincts have much to say about thought experiments or sufficiently advanced technology ? They don't. Instincts can't even cope with something as mundane as radiation, or orders of magnitude. We don't have instinctual facility with numbers, there's some evidence that people whose language lack the concept cannot even learn to count.

Meanwhile the survival instinct is ancient and really not that smart.

Nothing about the very specific arrangement of matter explains why there has to be an awareness behind the matter and the electrical processes of the brain. However, as long as it exists, it would be trivial to see if the perfect copy with sufficient fidelity shares that awareness with me. If it doesn't do so while I live, I'm not about to count on it doing so after I die, simple.

(You don't have to bother asking me how I know whether or not the awareness exists. It's self-evident to me and I'm not a solipsist so I don't believe yours isn't self-evident to you, either. I consider the denial of self that's common in rationalist circles to be stubborn attempts to does-not-compute reality into the bounds of their theories. Call dualists incoherent all you want, as long as you have the guts to admit you don't have the answers either.)

You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain

That's the point of this caveat. IMO it's still a huge gamble, but as @self_made_human discussed above, if there's even a chance it works it seems like a good gamble to make. I'm conflicted about the spiritual repercussions though.

I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status.

It's pretty funny that a mathematician with a 150 IQ couldn't see doing away with industry was implausible from just the game theory angle, however..

Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world.

Indeed. Let me quote imo the least appreciated contemporary British philosopher:

Conspicuously missing from the public space debate, therefore, is any frank admission that, “(let’s face it folks)—planets are misallocations of matter which don’t really work. No one wants to tell you that, but it’s true. You know that we deeply respect the green movement, but when we get out there onto the main highway of solar-system redevelopment, and certain very rigid, very extreme environmentalist attitudes—Gaian survivalism, terrestrial holism, planetary preservationism, that sort of thing—are blocking the way forward, well, let me be very clear about this, that means jobs not being created, businesses not being built, factories closing down in the asteroid belt, growth foregone. Keeping the earth together means dollars down the drain—a lot of dollars, your dollars. There are people, sincere people, good people, who strongly oppose our plans to deliberately disintegrate the earth. I understand that, really I do, you know—honestly—I used to feel that way myself, not so long ago. I, too, wanted to believe that it was possible to leave this world in one piece, just as it has been for four billion years now. I, too, thought the old ways were probably best, that this planet was the place we belonged, that we should—and could—still find some alternative to pulling it apart. I remember those dreams, really I do, and I still hold them close to my heart. But, people, they were just dreams, old and noble dreams, but dreams, and today I’m here to tell you that we have to wake up. Planets aren’t our friends. They’re speed-bumps on the road to the future, and we simply can’t afford them anymore. Let’s back them up digitally, with respect, yes, even with love, and then let’s get to work …” [Thunderous applause]

entire essay in pdf ^^

Thought-provoking stuff. I wish he'd be clearer and say 'New Space is wedged between their grand, extremely based and megalomaniacal visions of stellar-scale deconstruction and the tiny, incoherent things that are politically acceptable to announce'. If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying. Perhaps not even Nick himself: https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1334309844086480896#m

In any event, it's locked in. It couldn't matter less what the hoi-polloi want - the planets will be disassembled regardless either by us, by someone or something. Or if not, then only because it's not efficient and there are more economical uses of resources.

People seem extremely keen on the "nothing ever happens" philosophy - some form of stasis.

If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying.

I think he's pretty certain what he meant but I also think if you read him avidly rather than with apprehension, you're probably bonkers.

Given how things have worked out in the past, it could very well be that the project for deconstruction of planets will get off the ground at the same time someone figures out making your own pocket universes using a particle accelerator, ingenuity and an unbelievable amount of chutzpah.

Moving to Mars, space

This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.

Changing sex

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

Freezing our body, brain to come back later

This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.

When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.

There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

Changing from a sex to another per se may not be the sort of objective upgrade championed by transhumanism, but changing from "constrained by your biology at birth" to "able to modify your biology as you see fit" definitely is -- a central part of transhumanism, even.

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism. This is where I bemoan that so much of my information intake being hours upon hours of non-CTRL+Fable podcasts, but there was even some manifesto written in the 90's explicitly advocating for promoting transhumanism by way of transgenderism.

Also, I thought transhumanism is centrally about transcending the limits imposed on us by nature. By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.

This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism.

People say a lot of things. There are people who will assure you that transgender ideology is either the culmination or feminism or incompatible with it. Spend any time reading SJW or transgender communities talk about fiction and you'll find them headcanoning tons of random stuff as actually about transgenderism. But if you read either prominent historical transhumanists or modern prominent transhumanists like Nick Bostrom (co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, now named Humanity+) there is little or no interest in transgenderism, except incidentally insofar as transhumanist technology might make body modification in general much easier.

By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.

I think that's more an economic/libertarian principle (rational choice theory?) rather than the logic of utilitarianism, utilitarianism doesn't say anything about whether people make good choices. Whichever principle says that because people are close to the consequences of their own choices and are self-interested they make better decisions for themselves than distant decision-makers like the government. But yes, providing more choices is generally an upgrade in the sense that it allows people to choose the better option, at least if the choice is easily reversible and provides rapid and clear feedback. ("Becoming a meth addict" is a choice enabled by modern technology, but having that option available is generally not an upgrade. Similarly grocery stores are much better than government meals when it comes to things like choosing food you like, but still struggle at tasks like increasing long-term health.) But the upgrade provided by having sidegrade choices available is much smaller than the upgrade provided by having the choice to continue living, or by granting objective capabilities such as higher intelligence, so it is those that transhumanists focus on.

Yes, I didn't touch on intelligence, cognitive enhancements but that seems a logical consequence. I would argue that there's some connection between the mindset of your stricter definition and my broader outlook, though I accept it may not be the target of current thinking. They share some of the same features as a cognitive displacement, and have the same problem of finite transcenders. If it were to happen, then what? How to other perennial problems disappear when a threshold of technology makes something possible, how does this solve energy problems, global warming? Is it just luxury, lifestyle practices akin to luxury beliefs?

How to other perennial problems disappear when a threshold of technology makes something possible, how does this solve energy problems, global warming? Is it just luxury, lifestyle practices akin to luxury beliefs?

Global warming isn't a 'real' problem. It's a grift by climatologists, aiding a bigger grift by money that seeks to use the hammer of environmental laws to get even more money. There's no risk of people dying out or giant environmental catastrophes. Whatever changes may occur absolutely pale in comparison with e.g. ice ages and such. In fact, we're overdue an ice age, it'd be rather funny if we eventually found out we must do some warming to prevent a new one.

And yes, most problems would disappear if people were smarter. Nuclear power, for example, could get us 100x of our current energy production at zero carbon use. And if the median IQ was 150, running all those reactors wouldn't really be a problem.

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here.

Understatement of the millennium.

People will say “humanity needs to become an interplanetary civilization to avoid extinction”, even though Mars…

  • Has far less gravity
  • A thin, inhospitable atmosphere, with no plausible way to make it thicker
  • No magnetosphere
  • An unknown amount of geothermal energy, but presumably far less than Earth, and you'd have to drill way deeper to get at it
  • 44% less available solar energy than Earth, and that's the best case scenario, as what's atmosphere it as kicks up horrifying black-out dust storms for major portions of the year

The idea Mars would be some outpost of a catastrophe on Earth is farcical. We could fuck up the ecosystem good and proper, and at least Earth would still have gravity and a magnetic shield—we have absolutely no ability to create a sustainable biosphere on Mars.

While I don't think Mars is good for anything long term except for raw material for a Dyson Swarm, you can quite easily create an artificial magnetosphere:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576521005099

Or

https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c

And fusion, let alone fission, makes the lack of solar power more of a nuisance than anything else. We can't rely on it anyway, at least in the further parts of the Solar System.

Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?

Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.

If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.

No magnetosphere

Oh boy, you hit a pet peeve of mine.

There are plenty of nigh-insurmountable obstacles to terraforming Mars, but the lack of a magnetic field is really not one of them. Solar wind needed hundreds of millions of years to erode Mars' atmosphere to its current levels, you might as well say the Suez Canal was a waste of resources because plate tectonics will close the Straits of Gibraltar and dry up the Mediterranean 600 thousand years in the future.

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