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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Does anyone working in prosthetics or biotech or iphone apps or whatever call it "transhumanism" tho cause I feel like that is the exclusive domain of dorkos who think they're gonna be foglets I think the thing that separates transhumanists is they want to use technology to make people better than they currently are somehow. We can't really do that right now so they're mostly just people saying "When we get there I'm totally gunna be all over that poo poo. gently caress you guy I know'll be against it I know you're there." Pavlov fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 06:59
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Pavlov posted:I think the thing that separates transhumanists is they want to use technology to make people better than they currently are somehow. We can't really do that right now so they're mostly just people saying "When we get there I'm totally gunna be all over that poo poo. gently caress you guy I know'll be against it I know you're there." I think the thing that separates transhumanists is that while much of the rest of humanity is actively involved in doing just that and has been for millennia they're writing a bunch of spank fiction about Skynet whose basic shared mythos hinges on no practical experience with using technology to make people better, beyond using technology other people made to generate more blog posts than an unaugmented human could. I don't know your lab assistant buddy but unless we're going for some kind of 'everyone's secretly a communist deep down because they'd all prefer having some society to the alternative' semantic game it's pretty safe to say 'it'd be nice if there was a cure for my sickness' is not a meaningfully transhuman concept. The immediate plausibility and importance of uploading your cryonically-frozen brain Lawnmower Man style into an undying robot is though!
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Mar 1, 2015 08:19
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Well, that's the thing. Is it transhumanism to say "it'd be better if everyone who dies of old age should instead lived one additional day"? Not really. One year? Maybe. One millennium? Probably. There's a fuzzy line between regular old humanism and transhumanism.
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Mar 1, 2015 08:25
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I think if you can only make transhumanism credible by generalizing its specific ideology and predictions into the vague inchoate aspirations shared by much of mankind since we was duckin lions on the savannah that suggests less that pretty much everyone has always been a transhumanist and more that transhumanists share only the vaguest and most meaningless of thoughts in common with the world of the sane. Wanting to live a thousand years (or wanting everyone to live a thousand years) isn't part of the transhumanist ethos, wanting to live a thousand years by downloading the human mind (average livespan: seventy some years) to digital media (average MTBF: around four years), without any useful idea of how you'd do that beyond shoving a cable up your nose is.
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Mar 1, 2015 08:36
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im going to shove a cable up your rear end and spin it round and round and round
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Mar 1, 2015 10:27
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The thing that separates transhumanists from normal humanists isn't that they want to improve the life or body of the average human, it's that they want to turn the average human into a god and have no idea how to do so.
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Mar 1, 2015 13:27
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Also most of them say the average human but they really mean 'me and my friends first, the rest of you later/never.'
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Mar 1, 2015 16:36
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It's right there in the name; there's no need to beat around the bush. They want to mechanically transcend human biology. They don't even want to be brains in jars, but digital brains in digital jars.
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Mar 1, 2015 17:26
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Lots of poo poo is gonna happen before that tho. I mean it's not like one day youre scratching your bum with stick and BAM! Brain in a jar
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Mar 1, 2015 17:51
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Transhumanism, as mentioned, is a very broad continuum, and the 'rapture of the nerds' stuff is at the far end. We already use a great deal of technology to go beyond our physical limitations, and advancements in artificial limbs, organ replacement, and so on are implicitly transhumanist even if they aren't as attention-grabbing and wacky as the folks on the Internet who rhapsodise about rolling across Venus on their thousand metal penis-legs.
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Mar 1, 2015 18:01
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if i shove a metal pole up my butt am I a transhumanist
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Mar 1, 2015 18:11
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Hey, I skipped over thousands of posts, anything interesting come up about the Yud? Also, anybody know of a good Yud-bomb to throw at someone mentioning these idiots in anything other than a disparaging way when it comes to AI/non-AI?
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Mar 1, 2015 18:20
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sugar free jazz posted:if i shove a metal pole up my butt am I a transhumanist Only if you sincerely believe that shunting that pole up your rear end will help you transcend the limits of human potential to some degree. How empowering is your butt-pole?
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Mar 1, 2015 18:32
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i can use it to stimulate my prostate so it's pretty great, being a transhumanist is great
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Mar 1, 2015 18:48
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Wanting to live a thousand years (or wanting everyone to live a thousand years) isn't part of the transhumanist ethos, wanting to live a thousand years by downloading the human mind (average livespan: seventy some years) to digital media (average MTBF: around four years), without any useful idea of how you'd do that beyond shoving a cable up your nose is. The point of my post was that this isn't always true, but I'll be more explicit: some people who call themselves transhumanists want to use methods other than digital uploads or cryonics or whatever. There's a few relatively well known transhumanists who prefer using drugs to enhance their daily lives. Nootropics and stimulants, at the moment, but they'll be first in line when the next experimental blood-pressure pill turns out to have an off-label use in weight loss and mood-alteration. And again, there's a continuum: a guy who takes a pill to control his schizophrenia, probably not a transhumanist. A guy who take a pill to increase his focus / intelligence (like some dude abusing adderall), probably not a transhumanist, although some people actually do think this counts. A guy who takes a pill to raise his IQ twenty points, definitely a transhumanist. Even brain uploads are on a continuum. The standard transhumanist explanation is the Ship of Theseus, only with neurons instead of planks.
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Mar 1, 2015 18:53
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sugar free jazz posted:i can use it to stimulate my prostate so it's pretty great, being a transhumanist is great The funny thing is, creating an implant that lets you stimulate your prostate on demand would probably be transhumanist. It's as simple as believing that modification of the human body using technology is beneficial, and definitions of 'modification of the human body', 'technology', and 'beneficial' do of course vary wildly. Some folks want mechanical hearts that won't give up on them, some folks want to give their brains additional memory cards, and some folks want on-demand masturbation tools. it's like those weirdos who bifurcate their penises, only more sciency and occasionally even more gross. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 19:07
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Darth Walrus posted:Transhumanism, as mentioned, is a very broad continuum, and the 'rapture of the nerds' stuff is at the far end. We already use a great deal of technology to go beyond our physical limitations, and advancements in artificial limbs, organ replacement, and so on are implicitly transhumanist even if they aren't as attention-grabbing and wacky as the folks on the Internet who rhapsodise about rolling across Venus on their thousand metal penis-legs. Most of us live in an environment unaugmented humans literally cannot survive in, are clothes transhumanist now. SolTerrasa posted:The point of my post was that this isn't always true, but I'll be more explicit: some people who call themselves transhumanists want to use methods other than digital uploads or cryonics or whatever. There's a few relatively well known transhumanists who prefer using drugs to enhance their daily lives. Nootropics and stimulants, at the moment, but they'll be first in line when the next experimental blood-pressure pill turns out to have an off-label use in weight loss and mood-alteration. I'll accept this continuum bc the guys on the 'reasonable' end are still really fuckin dumb and attributing made-up magic properties to useful poo poo with known qualities and limitations, the transhumanist credo
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Mar 1, 2015 21:36
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SolTerrasa posted:A guy who takes a pill to raise his IQ twenty points, definitely a transhumanist. They're also an idiot who thinks Limitless was a documentary
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Mar 1, 2015 21:52
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Most of us live in an environment unaugmented humans literally cannot survive in, are clothes transhumanist now. Serious answer, I think anything that society doesn't accept as "part of basic human capabilities" might be transhumanism. I think that if anyone ever invents decent, empirically verified nootropics or brain uploads or whatever, inside a century those things will be considered "normal" and not transhumanism at all (assuming transhumanism is going to continue to exist as an ideology, which I'm not confident of). So, clothes are not transhumanism. Cell phones? Probably not, but it depends. Someone from a hundred years ago would say yes. Google Glass? Aside from making you look like an rear end in a top hat, still probably not, though A Fire Upon The Deep might say yes. The problem is that the loudest people who say "I am a transhumanist" are the ones who haven't thought about this at all, and really all they're saying is that they want to be 9-dicked cyborg dragons and/or foglets. Everyone laughs at those people, even other transhumanists.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:14
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The problem with treating transhumanism as just beyond humanism is that this leaves out some of the conceptual ways transhumanists of the technological variety view analog and digital information. Something like increased standards of living and pills do not necessitate that. Some views of nanotechnology and ubiquitous community do not do those things and are more of a creep of use than anything else. These uses also do not make assumptions about physics in the way those who make claims about analog and digital information do.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:24
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SolTerrasa posted:Serious answer, I think anything that society doesn't accept as "part of basic human capabilities" might be transhumanism. I think that if anyone ever invents decent, empirically verified nootropics or brain uploads or whatever, inside a century those things will be considered "normal" and not transhumanism at all (assuming transhumanism is going to continue to exist as an ideology, which I'm not confident of). So basically the cult of computer worshippers gets to claim retroactive ownership over all of human innovation and everyone who has ever created a useful tool, and use this to lend credence to their predictions that once they pile up enough transistors they will have invented God, because they believe in 'progress' well that sounds reasonable and not asinine
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Mar 1, 2015 22:28
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I don't really get the hubbub about brain uploading anyway. I would love to have an invincible and erotic cyborg body but why should I mulch my brain to (quite likely) just create a computer program that thinks it's me, while I myself am dead as a dodo? It's one of those weird axiomatic ideas.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:29
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Transhumanism is a marketing term for technophiles, that is why it has no precise meaning.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:31
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Nessus posted:I don't really get the hubbub about brain uploading anyway. I would love to have an invincible and erotic cyborg body but why should I mulch my brain to (quite likely) just create a computer program that thinks it's me, while I myself am dead as a dodo? It's one of those weird axiomatic ideas. Some of the most powerful computers we've got are (supposedly) owned by the Pentagon, used to run incredibly detailed simulations of nuclear detonations since they're running out of Pacific paradise islands to ruin. The transhumanist philosophy of mind is basically that given a few more petaflops, those simulations could blow up a city.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:33
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There's nothing wrong with technophiles though. I love technology. Thanks to technology I've seen more tits today than any of my ancestors saw their entire life.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:34
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Some of the most powerful computers we've got are (supposedly) owned by the Pentagon, used to run incredibly detailed simulations of nuclear detonations since they're running out of Pacific paradise islands to ruin. The transhumanist philosophy of mind is basically that given a few more petaflops, those simulations could blow up a city.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:36
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Nessus posted:Eh I don't think that's directly related to what I'm looking at here. What I'm looking at is this axiom that turning myself into computer software - as opposed to getting a cool cyborg body, in part or in whole, or gradually integrating fancy future electronics into my brain over the course of a few years - is some kind of awesome and perhaps even inevitable idea. It seems like it's like, 'this is the closest to the religious ecstasy we can get, so let's go with that.' Bodies can't live forever and faced with the prospect of their own mortality internet atheists suddenly find they've rediscovered the soul, and it will run on MAME
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Mar 1, 2015 22:46
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Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely a technophile but I wouldn't say I'm a computer worshipper. I spent half this thread talking about why the computer worshippers are hilarious. But you can't say that transhumanists are wrong about everything just because most of them are idiots. "hilarious dumbasses say X, therefore the exact opposite of X" is dumb logic. Watch Yudkowsky take 1500 words to say the same thing: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelligence/ Anyway, it's possible to be a technophile (or at least as much of one as I am) and still not believe that piling a bunch of transistors together will make space-god. Of course it won't, not any more than a really big abacus is God. E: A Wizard of Goatse posted:Bodies can't live forever and faced with the prospect of their own mortality internet atheists suddenly find they've rediscovered the soul, and it will run on MAME Exactly this, except that for every three terrified antideathist whatevers, there's one person who shoved a tiny magnet in his hand or put her credit card on an NFC chip in her hand or something. SolTerrasa fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 22:57
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How about instead of giving "transhumanists" credit for things people who've never even heard of transhumanism did and saying all the ones we see are just the wierd fringers of this vast silent majority you just link to one self-described member of the transhumanist movement who's not a complete fucken retard broski How about that
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Mar 1, 2015 22:59
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:How about instead of giving "transhumanists" credit for things people who've never even heard of transhumanism did and saying all the ones we see are just the wierd fringers of this vast silent majority you just link to one self-described member of the transhumanist movement who's not a complete fucken retard broski That's reasonable, I'll see what I can find.
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Mar 1, 2015 23:02
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:How about instead of giving "transhumanists" credit for things people who've never even heard of transhumanism did and saying all the ones we see are just the wierd fringers of this vast silent majority you just link to one self-described member of the transhumanist movement who's not a complete fucken retard broski I don't think transhumanists are trying to take credit for stuff we've already done. I think they want to capitalize on things we've yet to do.
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Mar 1, 2015 23:03
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What about my ball sack stretchers do those make me a transhumanist. I want to transcend the natural limits of human ability and create a pavilion out of my scrote to shelter myself from rain
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Mar 1, 2015 23:03
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The difference between transhumanists and humanists is any pragmatic concern for how to achieve your goals at all.
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Mar 1, 2015 23:05
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He might be a secret crazy person, but I met Amal Graafstra at Toorcamp 2014, and he seems pretty sane, if a little over excited about the prospects of what he's been working on. Still, he actually *does* something, which I respect. In that way, he's very different from the cyberdick dragon folks. Here's his TEDx talk, I saw a version of it at Toorcamp. http://youtu.be/7DxVWhFLI6E
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Mar 1, 2015 23:09
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SolTerrasa posted:He might be a secret crazy person, but I met Amal Graafstra at Toorcamp 2014, and he seems pretty sane, if a little over excited about the prospects of what he's been working on. Still, he actually *does* something, which I respect. In that way, he's very different from the cyberdick dragon folks. About ToorCamp, the American hacker camp, first “launched” at the Titan-1 Missile Silo in Washington State in 2009. The second ToorCamp happened in 2012 on the beautiful Washington Coast. This year we’re continuing the tradition and are looking for groups to participate. Show off your crazy projects you’ve been working on, bring some ideas you want to hack on with the other technology experts that will be showing up, organize a campsite with all of your friends and show how awesome your group is, or just see what all the other groups are up to. It’s up to you! Either way, we’d like to show that the US can throw down as much as the European hacker camps (CCC Camp, HAR, etc) so this is your invitation to come! Want a roof? We have a limited number of cabins available for ToorCamp that we can provide to sponsors, campsites, and attendees. If you are interested in a cabin, please send us an email with a brief explanation of your plans for the cabin so we can place you in the one that’s most suitable to your needs. Cabins start at $3000 and come with 6 admission tickets. Check-in is Noon on Wednesday, July 9th and check-out is Noon on Sunday, July 13th.
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Mar 1, 2015 23:21
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Sham bam bamina! posted:They don't even want to be brains in jars, but digital brains in digital jars. Fun fact: We've actually done this and seen it work, for real, but I don't see the Yudkowsky crowd contributing to OpenWorm.
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Mar 2, 2015 01:55
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Most of us live in an environment unaugmented humans literally cannot survive in, are clothes transhumanist now. Lots of people consider things like tool use (including clothing) and significant advance planning to be something that distinguishes humans from "lower" animals, so in a way you could say they're transanimalist.
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Mar 2, 2015 01:59
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Nessus posted:I don't really get the hubbub about brain uploading anyway. I would love to have an invincible and erotic cyborg body but why should I mulch my brain to (quite likely) just create a computer program that thinks it's me, while I myself am dead as a dodo? It's one of those weird axiomatic ideas. Most brain uploaders I know of are in the "Ship of Theseus" camp, where they hope to keep augmenting their mind until the biological part is vestigial while maintaining continuity of consciousness.
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Mar 2, 2015 02:06
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I thought the defining point of transhumanism was outright jumping into a new body. Or so lovely sf tells me.
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Mar 2, 2015 02:12
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king salmon posted:so i guess he couldn''t think of an ending to his fanfic on his own... obviously he could, he just wanted to make sure The Audience was paying attention all along!
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Mar 2, 2015 04:08
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