Imagine a world without hate, violence, wars, weapons, a world where everybody is kind, and loves each other. Without starvation, poverty, or pollution. A world where all the people are happy. And then imagine us attacking that world. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
That’s an engineered species. An evolved species can’t be like that.
Fear the masters that created them.
Tags Now:
#the iron hand - the State
#the invisible fist - Capitalism
#the red hammer - Communism
#thx xhxhxhx - you know who you are @xhxhxhx
#chronofelony - time travel
#mitigated future - futurism
#art+#oc - hand-made, free-range, gluten-free, organic, locally-sourced PNGs
#shtpost - quality, 100% serious post, always repost this
#politics - elaborate joke post, never repost this
#trump cw - self-filter tag for anti-memeist bigots who are prejudiced against our first Meme-American President due to the orange color of his skin
#discourse preview 2019 - retrocausal posts from the New Mexico Timeline
#nationalism - posts banned under the 2089 Human Dignity Act of the Earth Sphere Federation, filtering these is recommended for normies and anyone who isn’t a NatSep
#augmented reality break - (alternate (reality) break) tag intersection, but with coffee so it’s better and therefore augmented (like me)
Future Tags (Vegas Timeline):
#this week on woke or broke - exciting new youtube show in which contestants try to guess what is social justice orthodoxy and what was cooked up by the producers. failing contestants are fired from their jobs
#miti draws dallas - performance art piece in which thousands of teleoperated drones are released in a swarm over Dallas, Texas, and pictures of frightened and heavily-armed Texans are posted to Tumblr in five minute intervals
#super love love demon battle - SLLDB fandom drama. eventually boils over into discussion of the SLLDB fandom murders
#HobbesWasRight - series of articles laying out the philosophical groundwork for Googlezon Dynamics’ Leviathan Project and its benefits for the security of the state and the populace
#dogs - dog photos and canine cybernetic augmentations. also ferrets, to go with the ferret mistagging fad
#national technocracy - hypothetical point within the N-dimensional ideospace lattice originally theorized by RAND Geospatial Dynamics Working Group in the 1950s, generally summarized as “that thing that comes after prediction markets”, many researchers dispute whether it can actually exist. abandoned by Silicon Valley CEOs in favor of a system based on Facebook likes.
#dogfree - actual dog photos, just dog photos
Future Tags (Montana Timeline):
No tags for this timeline, possibly unstable. Radsuit suggested.
What, too good to die forever like every other person on Earth?
What, you think not-dying is some sort of hubristic demand?
“Not wanting to die” is a pretty vanilla position, dude. We even argue over the morality of policy in terms of how people it saves/kills! It’s pretty common!
Humanity just came up with a bunch of reasons why going feeble and insane was a good idea because they lacked the means to avoid it, not because going feeble and insane and then not-existing is actually a good thing.
There’s no point in getting yourself hyped up over vaporware. However, once the technology becomes closer to being within reach, that changes.
Death is part of the human condition, a part of reality that every religion, philosophy, and moral system invented by a culture tries to address. Of course it is hubristic to think you can bypass it. To completely bypass death is to change the nature of what it means to be alive.
The nuance between debates around “how can we make life fulfilling?”, “how can we stall death and avoidable illness?”, and “how can we prevent people from dying needlessly in dangerous situations that we are inflicting upon them?” is not the same at all as “how do we live forever?”
Every religion or tribal culture in the world has addressed the hubris about seeking immortality. Every culture has its own failure to achieve immortality myth. How is “wanting immortality is hubristic” a hot take?
Go write a bunch of symphonies if you want to live forever.
So, is heaven hubristic, then? Reincarnation? Both are extremely old takes, both are far more commonly accepted than Transhumanism.
Or are the Christians and Buddhists and so on also Transhumanists? Are they indulging in hubris?
We’ve already redefined things radically, multiple times, to even get to the point where “writing symphonies” is even possible.
It doesn’t have to be, strictly, forever. But arbitrarily going feeble and insane, and then involuntarily not existing, it’s not actually this deep, holistic or whatever thing.
And I think it’s incredibly hubristic to say that it’s up to you how much time someone should have with their parents still in their lives, and so on. Because once the capability for the technology exists, that is a decision that’s being made, not just dodging out of the decision and all responsibility thereof.
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Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.
I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.
I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals. You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.
If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.
My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.
…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.
What about sleep?
It’s the same physical hardware, and I think that makes a difference.
Does that apply to your hypothetical digital copies as well, do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying, or is it just the flesh-to-silicon transition that has this problem?
do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying,
I would think so, but I am less likely to believe that consciousness is purely classical these days.
What, too good to die forever like every other person on Earth?
What, you think not-dying is some sort of hubristic demand?
“Not wanting to die” is a pretty vanilla position, dude. We even argue over the morality of policy in terms of how people it saves/kills! It’s pretty common!
Humanity just came up with a bunch of reasons why going feeble and insane was a good idea because they lacked the means to avoid it, not because going feeble and insane and then not-existing is actually a good thing.
There’s no point in getting yourself hyped up over vaporware. However, once the technology becomes closer to being within reach, that changes.
Death is part of the human condition, a part of reality that every religion, philosophy, and moral system invented by a culture tries to address. Of course it is hubristic to think you can bypass it. To completely bypass death is to change the nature of what it means to be alive.
The nuance between debates around “how can we make life fulfilling?”, “how can we stall death and avoidable illness?”, and “how can we prevent people from dying needlessly in dangerous situations that we are inflicting upon them?” is not the same at all as “how do we live forever?”
Every religion or tribal culture in the world has addressed the hubris about seeking immortality. Every culture has its own failure to achieve immortality myth. How is “wanting immortality is hubristic” a hot take?
Go write a bunch of symphonies if you want to live forever.
So, is heaven hubristic, then? Reincarnation? Both are extremely old takes, both are far more commonly accepted than Transhumanism.
Or are the Christians and Buddhists and so on also Transhumanists? Are they indulging in hubris?
We’ve already redefined things radically, multiple times, to even get to the point where “writing symphonies” is even possible.
It doesn’t have to be, strictly, forever. But arbitrarily going feeble and insane, and then involuntarily not existing, it’s not actually this deep, holistic or whatever thing.
And I think it’s incredibly hubristic to say that it’s up to you how much time someone should have with their parents still in their lives, and so on. Because once the capability for the technology exists, that is a decision that’s being made, not just dodging out of the decision and all responsibility thereof.
Heaven is just an ideal to regulate behavior make your actions valuable to the people around you, to make the fear of death less unbearable, and to do good on Earth while you are here. Do you really need to be reminded of the Tower of Babel parable? It has *always* been hubristic to believe that one could reach heaven or that heaven could be recreated on Earth.
You know as well as I do that it’s not real. Pretending it is real is part of the ritual. Only biblical literalists and atheists actually believe it is a real place.
You guys are the only one trying to make immortality a reality, not just an ideal.
I’m not so sure they interpret it the same way that you do.
And I’m sorry, but not wanting to die is not hubris. We’ve just expanded the definition a little farther than you’re comfortable with, because we can see that, for the first time, it’s truly coming into reach, at least for aging.
You know perfectly well that if it were the other way around, introducing aging and death therefrom would be an unthinkably evil curse, not a blessing of connection to temporality.
Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.
I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.
I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals. You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.
If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.
My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.
…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.
“but how will I ever be able to get laid if modern culture frowns upon me getting coworkers drunk and making out with them against their mumbled protestations?? it’s not like my wife is gonna sleep with me lol”
I have not actually worked out how modern culture proposes people are meant to get laid.
I mean, people obviously seem to be doing it, but there appears to be no acceptable strategy.
You ignore the recommendations, and prove how manly you are by taking on the risk anyway, getting shut down viciously if you’re too low-status.
The problem is that any permissible channel will be FLOODED due to the mismatch between the demand for sex from women and demand for sex from men, at least at the noisiest age pools.
Secondly, straight women (generally, on average) do not want to initiate beyond the barest hints, ones that are plausibly deniable if she turns out not to be wanted by that particular guy, leaving her sense of being desirable intact.
What is going to change this is early Transhumanism, as it’s going to alter the sex ratio and potentially result in an increase in bisexuality.
I mean, in practice I used a dating website, which implicitly includes the idea that everyone there for dating is there for dating, and specifies their orientation, so if you don’t have “short/long-term dating” and so on your profile, no fuck for you,
but I don’t necessarily match the patterns of other people, so this may not be actionable advice.
Anyhow, to add on to this, revealing you find someone hot when you’re attempting to extract resources or in a high-stakes …relationship negotiation? …hurts your bargaining position.
At least, you can still get away with pretending that you have to be won over (and showered in all the resources that “winning over”) requires, so long as there are more incoming proposals than outgoing ones, such that the norm is they have to approach you if they find you hot.
As the sex ratio changes, this becomes less and less feasible.
Since I expect a decent-sized chunk of people (3-5%) to “exit” from being male (as we know it) once the technology improves, that throws the bargaining out of whack, as does bisexuality, which means you’re competing with more people for a higher virtual gender ratio… or something. Naturally, once being a sex is more voluntary, what being that sex means changes as well.
“but how will I ever be able to get laid if modern culture frowns upon me getting coworkers drunk and making out with them against their mumbled protestations?? it’s not like my wife is gonna sleep with me lol”
I have not actually worked out how modern culture proposes people are meant to get laid.
I mean, people obviously seem to be doing it, but there appears to be no acceptable strategy.
You ignore the recommendations, and prove how manly you are by taking on the risk anyway, getting shut down viciously if you’re too low-status.
The problem is that any permissible channel will be FLOODED due to the mismatch between the demand for sex from women and demand for sex from men, at least at the noisiest age pools.
Secondly, straight women (generally, on average) do not want to initiate beyond the barest hints, ones that are plausibly deniable if she turns out not to be wanted by that particular guy, leaving her sense of being desirable intact.
What is going to change this is early Transhumanism, as it’s going to alter the sex ratio and potentially result in an increase in bisexuality.
I mean, in practice I used a dating website, which implicitly includes the idea that everyone there for dating is there for dating, and specifies their orientation, so if you don’t have “short/long-term dating” and so on your profile, no fuck for you,
but I don’t necessarily match the patterns of other people, so this may not be actionable advice.
Following final victory of the Good Feminist People in the Great Gamer War, the old archetype of Man has been abolished.
Seeking to end sexual oppression, and empowered by novel tissue engineering techniques, the possession of a penis is limited to only those who can prove they are sufficiently Woke, enforced by a powerful licensing agency.
In practice, those with power in the corrupt government are those who can ensure their license remains in effect, no matter what crimes they commit. These same patterns of abuse are used to justify the licensing regime, while leaving social and financial power unexamined.
David Florence’s license has just been revoked.
Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.
I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.
I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals. You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.
If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.
My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.
…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.
Now I’m very much in the Stop Picking On Death camp and we’ve had it out on that subject before, but, as you say, setting that aside: something that people who aspire to immortality tech need to grapple with, I think, is that any technology that pushes the boundaries of human survivability is going to change our concept of what “death” is. This has already happened to a limited extent: concepts of what death is and when it occurs have been pushed back by medical advances, while those same advances have also pushed back our concept of what life is, in cases like brain death. Insofar as radical life-extending/life-expanding technology is possible, our present notions of life, death and identity will have completely broken down long before those technologies are perfected, simply because they’ll be obsolete. In a sense this is comforting and in a sense it’s not, since this also means the end of our present notions of what a person is and what it means to say that a thing exists, because those notions are not designed for the kind of pressures that immortality tech would place upon them. You can already see hints of this in the extreme, unbridgeable disagreements over partial-continuity thought experiments.
It seems to me that insofar as there’s a generalized intuition of death, it’s that death is when something changes irreversibly in such a way that you can no longer recognize it as having the same “identity”. This isn’t just a function of the degree of change, though, it also has something to do with smoothness – when you get into situations where the end result is still clearly a living person rather than a pile of topsoil, people’s intuition about “is this death” seems to be almost entirely based on whether they sense an abrupt discontinuity in something they consider central to identity.
Obviously, you get radically different results depending on how you define change, identity, smoothness, and so on, which is why once you start talking about hypothetical futuretech, concepts of death diverge into unrecognizeability. It’s also why the question of whether you’re dead or not depends on who you ask. It’s a fortuitous coincidence that the normal way of dying where your body stops working and disintegrates and isn’t replaced by anything with a close resemblance happens to satisfy nearly everyone’s death formula. In a real sense I think it’s fair to say that, just like selfhood, death is a social construct, and you need to account for that element of it when envisioning a “world without death”.
@discoursedrome here preparing for the discourse takes of 2507
