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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 Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art.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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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 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.
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