What does everyone here think of Transhumanism?

[Doktor Loki]

H+ intrigues me, mostly because physical limitations suck.  We can only hold about 7 items in working memory at a time.  Can't really multitask.  Our productivity drops dramatically when we get tired, cold, or hungry.  Good enough for hunter-gatherers, not good enough for me.

Essentially, I just want to be able to read every book in a library simultaneously, and remember as much as I want to - stuff that computers can already do.

YES, but more than that.  Enhancment of the mind and body both.  All sorts of things could be done to our physical forms to make them more effecient, more enjoyable, more sensitive to input.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Wait, some of these transhumanists want to eliminate Payne from our lives? I... I don't know how I feel about that...

No! Payne must nevar be eliminated, at least not by laem transhumanist bliss-ninnies. Only loss of internets can defeat him.

[Manta Obscura]

I don't think eliminating "pain" is a core part of the transhumanist movement.

There's a cool series about some Posthumanists in Transmetropolitan #7.

spider calls them "post biological" humans.

Now this is pretty interesting. I'll have to read more of this.

Rereading my former post and the posts of others, it made me want to clarify that I'm not opposed to any of the ideas of transhumanists (trannies, as I like to call them  ). It's just that ideas like the elimination of suffering, the conversion of humanity into machines, etc., are functionally complicated to the point where it would be a waste of resources to pour a majority of our scientific expenditure into the research of the processes involved to accomplish those ideas.

Though we as a species have managed to have some advancements in genetic research, prosthetics, nanotechnology, and other transhumanist topics, I think we're still an incredibly long way away from being able to synthesize and push our advancements to a point where it would be feasible to alter our biology or psychology in any noticable way (except, of course, for the use of the aforementioned prosthetics, as well as psychologically altering pharmaceuticals).

My guess is that no one in our generation - or even, probably, in our grandchildren's generation - will be able to benefit from some of the radical claims of transhumanism like what is presented in Cram's post. Ergo, I think the majority of our R&D should be put towards the more immediate goals of social and ecological amelioration projects, where the consequences of inaction are more dire in an immediate sense.

[Cramulus]

If you showed ancient man what life is like in postmodern times (the Strange Times), I don't think he would even be able to process it. Sure, the basics are still the same - streets, buildings, police ; money, jobs, love, power. These things are more or less unchanged since 5000 BC. But it takes decades to get acclimated to how the world really works, and the devil's in the details. This is the age of the spiritual machine - we have plastic hearts, we carry ghosts of music with us in our pocket, we access a net of communication which lets us send banal text messages to someone on the other side of the globe. Even old fogeys like Thucydides would acknowledge that this is still humanity, no matter how weird it's gotten.

But there are people on the fringe, who I wonder - have they left humanity already?

I'm thinking of the Lizard Man, who has taken decades to change his body into something else. He's out of society now - he will never again be able to go to the bank or get a cheeseburger without his lizard-ness separating him from the rest of us.

Or Stephen Hawking. He's practically a robot, and his intelligence and status falls well outside the bell curve. He doesn't live like we do. He doesn't think like we do. How much of us is in him?

I think Thucydides (who I've arbitrarily picked to speak for ancient man) would recognize that these guys, no matter how different they are, are still humans. Like Spider Jerusalem said, as long as there's still a human mind, it's still a human, right?

In writing this post, I made four or five different google searches - looking up facts, scanning through pictures of the lizard man, creating links to other related topics... In many ways this post only partially came from my brain, and partially came from the web of information out there. I don't have to remember a fact, as long as I can figure out how to access it. The internet serves as my "off-board memory", in a sense. Are these my thoughts, my memories? Or are they just a resonance between my meat and the growing collective consciousness?

I mean, we're all cyborgs now, augmenting our minds and our lives with technology. And then there's the work on the genome that they're doing. You better believe that if I have the option of rasing genetically enhanced humans, I'd take it. Let's make them disease resistant, extend their lifespan, hone their intelligence... after all that tinkering with the very blueprints of life, will we still be human?

I think these are interesting questions. I don't think we'll ever reach a point where we collectively decide that we're not humans anymore, but if we do, we'll see this period of history as being well on the way. We'll look back and say, yeah, we were cyborgs then, and didn't recognize the changes that were taking place were kind of fundamental.

[Manta Obscura]

If you showed ancient man what life is like in postmodern times (the Strange Times), I don't think he would even be able to process it. Sure, the basics are still the same - streets, buildings, police ; money, jobs, love, power. These things are more or less unchanged since 5000 BC. But it takes decades to get acclimated to how the world really works, and the devil's in the details. This is the age of the spiritual machine - we have plastic hearts, we carry ghosts of music with us in our pocket, we access a net of communication which lets us send banal text messages to someone on the other side of the globe. Even old fogeys like Thucydides would acknowledge that this is still humanity, no matter how weird it's gotten.

But there are people on the fringe, who I wonder - have they left humanity already?

I'm thinking of the Lizard Man, who has taken decades to change his body into something else. He's out of society now - he will never again be able to go to the bank or get a cheeseburger without his lizard-ness separating him from the rest of us.

Or Stephen Hawking. He's practically a robot, and his intelligence and status falls well outside the bell curve. He doesn't live like we do. He doesn't think like we do. How much of us is in him?

I think Thucydides (who I've arbitrarily picked to speak for ancient man) would recognize that these guys, no matter how different they are, are still humans. Like Spider Jerusalem said, as long as there's still a human mind, it's still a human, right?

In writing this post, I made four or five different google searches - looking up facts, scanning through pictures of the lizard man, creating links to other related topics... In many ways this post only partially came from my brain, and partially came from the web of information out there. I don't have to remember a fact, as long as I can figure out how to access it. The internet serves as my "off-board memory", in a sense. Are these my thoughts, my memories? Or are they just a resonance between my meat and the growing collective consciousness?

I mean, we're all cyborgs now, augmenting our minds and our lives with technology. And then there's the work on the genome that they're doing. You better believe that if I have the option of rasing genetically enhanced humans, I'd take it. Let's make them disease resistant, extend their lifespan, hone their intelligence... after all that tinkering with the very blueprints of life, will we still be human?

I think these are interesting questions. I don't think we'll ever reach a point where we collectively decide that we're not humans anymore, but if we do, we'll see this period of history as being well on the way. We'll look back and say, yeah, we were cyborgs then, and didn't recognize the changes that were taking place were kind of fundamental.

This is a really insightful post, Cram, and I agree with almost all of it. The only part that I would like to contend with is the part which I have bolded.

I agree that the escalation of the scale and scope of technology has altered the way in which we live, but to me your statement seems to say that the technology that we use alters the way that we're alive. A subtle lexical difference, but it carries major undertones. My apologies if this is not what you were intending, but in the interests of seeing this hypothesis to its conclusion, I'll continue.

Yes, technology has altered the way in which we conduct our daily life practices, but to say that the change in daily life practices has changed us seems a little far-fetched to me. After all, there have been several such technological leaps among civilizations, and within and among those civilizations we do not consider the people to be any different in fundamental makeup. For example, before the advent of writing people had to memorize stories and tell them verbally. After writing came about, however, people no longer had to memorize whole epics (note: I know that the majority of people were still illiterate until very recently, but I am just speaking in terms of the potential of literacy here) and communicate solely by sound and kinesics. The invention of writing served in a similar way to computer information archiving, making it to where storytellers did not have to remember entire stories on their own.

In this example, we don't think of the literate societies as fundamentally different, as pen-and-paper (quill-and-papyrus?) golems or something (sorry, that's the best pre-technological analogy to cyborgs I can think of off the top of my head), but merely as a group of people who uses different techniques to accomplish the same challenges of the past. The physical, psychological and social measures of humanity (e.g. the need to eat, socialize, be warm, have some level of mental stimulation, etc) still applied between both sets, and it is only the means of satisfying those measures that were altered.

I don't mean to sound Carlylian here by reducing humanity to the satisfaction of needs, as if we were some sort of all-encompassing digestive system. I merely want to say that the basic human needs, drives and responses, both physically and psychologically, remain the same over time over a population, changing only slowly by evolutionary processes. In the meantime, the developments that change our way of life do not alter the fundamental way in which we interact with our world, because if those developments/tools were removed, people would still exist and be capable of the same life activities as they were previously able to undertake.

In regards to those who have "left humanity already," as you put it, I agree that they are still human, although they utilize different tools to fulfill their physical and social needs. Likewise, I agree that even with the most out-there developments of the transhumanist movements, there might never be a time in which we "collectively decide that we're not humans anymore." The changes that [most or many] transhumanists are attempting to enact are not changes to discard our basic needs and drives, but are instead changes to give ourselves the capabilities of fulfilling those things more effectively.

If, one day, the trannies are able to give us true hivemind, bodily regeneration, immortality, the cessation of suffering, nanotech life, or any other host of changes that would alter one of the fundamental underlying drives of the human condition, it would then be useful to declare humanity to have transcended its humanity. However, until one or more of the drives which connect us to our progenitors and their lineage is severed, I think it is probably more useful to think of the developments in terms of useful tools to alter the superficial processes of drive fulfillment, rather than as developments which make humanity into "cyborgs" or, as in my example, quill-and-papyrus golems.

[Telarus]

Good post Cram. The 'external memory' is exactly why Thoth was worshiped as a deity, in that according to that tradition's myth, he was the one who figure out how to encode information onto the environment instead of leaving it in the brain.

One of the more interesting 'Transhumanist' experiments I've run into recently was a woman who had a small magnet implanted in one of her fingers. She could do shit like feel the phone just _before_ it would ring, and feel some-one using a can opener in the next room. Basically she was hypersensitive to any technological thing that had magnetic coils (most small motors, etc) and anything that was carrying high-voltage. Let me dig up some links:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

Oh, and here's when something when wrong with the coating on one of the magnets:
http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20060401.html (Warning: Surgery Pics)

[Kai]

Good post Cram. The 'external memory' is exactly why Thoth was worshiped as a deity, in that according to that tradition's myth, he was the one who figure out how to encode information onto the environment instead of leaving it in the brain.

One of the more interesting 'Transhumanist' experiments I've run into recently was a woman who had a small magnet implanted in one of her fingers. She could do shit like feel the phone just _before_ it would ring, and feel some-one using a can opener in the next room. Basically she was hypersensitive to any technological thing that had magnetic coils (most small motors, etc) and anything that was carrying high-voltage. Let me dig up some links:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

Oh, and here's when something when wrong with the coating on one of the magnets:
http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20060401.html (Warning: Surgery Pics)

THAT is COOL. I'm all for adding sensory abilities.

[Rumckle]

I'm not sure the question should be whether we are still humans or not, but whether we are people. Human is more of a biological term, imo.

But I guess if the problem is that possibly without the chemical interactions, that some of the things that "make us human", desires and the such, may not be as evident. Whether you can still have some of the urges when you aren't controlled as such by chemistry and hormones, is the question, and whether these are important for being human.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

Oh, and here's when something when wrong with the coating on one of the magnets:
http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20060401.html (Warning: Surgery Pics)

Damn, I was about to post some of them,
but also this on the same subject:

http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20060115.html
(again surgery pics)

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Human or not human... isn't that an issue of definition rather than anything else?

Transhumans are human if we classify them as such. They're not human if they don't classify themselves as such... but in the end that kind of argument seems like navel gazing. Their DNA is human. If they have babies the babies will be human. They may have enhancements, or modifications... but they're enhancements and modifications to their Human body. If I add more memory, a second CPU and a snazzy case... my computer is now enhanced and modified... but is it not still a computer?

For something to be not human, I think it would have to reprodue 'not humans' and have 'not human' DNA.

I really like what Transhumanists are DOING, but I often get the feeling that trhey walk a fine line between using technology to enhance their experiences and falling into a transcendental paradigm.

[Cain]

Pain is important for physiological reasons. Suffering is psychological.


That said, didn't Cain leave a link to a transhumanist e-zine here a month ago or so?

Yes, I did.

And I still stand by my criticisms, and would like to add one more: Dick Cheney.

OK, I'll expand. Any of this wonderful and advanced technology is going to go to the rich and the powerful first, and the maniacal and dangerous who do not automatically fit on the first list as second.  Do you really want Robo-Dick Cheney?  How about immortal Dick Cheney online? 

The benefits of technology will be poorly distributed and I do not trust our transhumanist Eloi to not wipe out the Morlocks (ie; us) with advanced bioweapons simply so they can continue on with their dream society, that of one where they do not have to put up with the nasty effects of other peoples presence (which is in many respects the ideological premise behind technology fetishism).  Obviously, that is a problem right now, but we can at least expect that the very worst sort of bioweapons would not be used by humans on other humans because of basic genetic similarity. If you can engineer immunity, or transcend biology however, you are in a very dangerous area.

Not to mention that when the benefits do get passed down to us, assuming we survive to that stage, they will no doubt be tightly controlled, and there may well be backdoor hatches for this sort of technology to be implanted in unwilling or unsuspecting persons.  The dream of fascists everywhere, is that....and technocratic fascism is a very real possibility with this sort of technology.

We've just about got to grips with nukes and that was a closely run thing several times.  This has the potential to be far more powerful.

[Rumckle]

Unfortunately, poor distribution is a problem with the vast majority of emerging technology. While bioengineering does have a lot of potential ethical challenges, there are many other emerging technologies that could be just as bad. There is inherently always going to be a trade off with such technologies, and, usually, the more impact a technology would have on ones life, the more open to abuse it is. And I'm fairly sure that such progress will happen eventually, despite the criticisms that may arise.

[Vene]

Pain is important for physiological reasons. Suffering is psychological.


That said, didn't Cain leave a link to a transhumanist e-zine here a month ago or so?

Yes, I did.

And I still stand by my criticisms, and would like to add one more: Dick Cheney.

OK, I'll expand. Any of this wonderful and advanced technology is going to go to the rich and the powerful first, and the maniacal and dangerous who do not automatically fit on the first list as second.  Do you really want Robo-Dick Cheney?  How about immortal Dick Cheney online? 

The benefits of technology will be poorly distributed and I do not trust our transhumanist Eloi to not wipe out the Morlocks (ie; us) with advanced bioweapons simply so they can continue on with their dream society, that of one where they do not have to put up with the nasty effects of other peoples presence (which is in many respects the ideological premise behind technology fetishism).  Obviously, that is a problem right now, but we can at least expect that the very worst sort of bioweapons would not be used by humans on other humans because of basic genetic similarity. If you can engineer immunity, or transcend biology however, you are in a very dangerous area.

Not to mention that when the benefits do get passed down to us, assuming we survive to that stage, they will no doubt be tightly controlled, and there may well be backdoor hatches for this sort of technology to be implanted in unwilling or unsuspecting persons.  The dream of fascists everywhere, is that....and technocratic fascism is a very real possibility with this sort of technology.

We've just about got to grips with nukes and that was a closely run thing several times.  This has the potential to be far more powerful.

This seems slightly relevant (even though I'm sure we've all seen it).

[Cain]

It will, of course.

The question is though, who will have control over the resources and will there be any checks or balances to its use?  In theory, an educated population and forward thinking government could place certain restrictions on usage which would minimize social impact (which I suspect will likely happen in Western Europe, if anywhere, and even then possibly only in Scandanavia, where claims of national security and military utility are not going to sell especially well).  But in practice, most populations are scientifically illiterate and governments lack popular mandate from the public to either control or minimize the potential impacts of research.

I have no problem with technology disrupting the status quo.  However, I do have problems with technologies which can be used to fundamentally control humanity to a degree that most dictators could never dream of.  Equally, I have problems with technologies with the potential for mass death, especially when that technology seems to be passing more and more into private hands and away from any sort of public control.  Back in the day, at least we have the Soviets holding our population hostage (and vice-versa).  They made us honest, and we appreciated the risk enough to cover our WMDs in a blanket of secure measures to stop the nightmare scenario playing out.  But how do you threaten a corporation?  Or an individual?  Mututally assured destruction is a lunatic proposal when you increase the range of actors beyond certain points, because a proliferation of dyads just increases the chances of someone doing something stupid.

Do I have a solution?  Not really.  But its not going to stop me from pointing out the very real problem of technological advances outstripping social ones.

[Cainad (dec.)]

"What starts out as a far-fetched science experiment/body modification becomes a fad among the fabulously wealthy. Further research and development lowers the cost and increases availability, making it popular among the merely very wealthy, but the middle and lower classes remain unable to receive the benefits of this technology. Suddenly, the world sports a handful of intellectual and physical superhumans who are also at the top of the political and economic ladder."

Sounds like the beginning of a helluva sci-fi novel.

[Cain]

Or you get the plot from Fringe.  Superempowered black hats, wielding incredibly dangerous new weapons (of course, the focus in the show is on "fringe science" but other authors have theorized about nanobots, rogue AI, genetically and cybernetically enhanced soldiers etc etc)