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 Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art.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