@kissingerandpals: #what is wrong with transhumanists #hasn’t technology ruined our lives enough?
No God in Heaven, no Devil in Hell. The only paradises can be the ones we make for ourselves, and one man’s paradise is another man’s torment.
My paradise, the body I want, doesn’t come standard, so the only thing to do is build the society capable of producing it.
Come to me with real magic and I might reconsider.
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.
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.
I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary.
It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.
I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se… I mean, kind of. It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.
What does race discourse look like when you can change your race? Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?
What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?
What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?
Et cetera.
I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.
(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)
Transhumanism just sounds really gay but also inevitable so I guess we’re all going to be gay cyborgs one day
I believe it will involve a lot of literal, rather than metaphorical, homosexuality.
The first generation to gain the ability to change to a new sex easily and cheaply and completely passing (on a physical level) will also start experimenting with new sex configurations, probably. For the generation after that, it will be normalized, and manipulation of hormones at key points in development may used to guide sexual orientation towards bisexual or pansexual.
So yeah, gay cyborgs.
Anonymous asked:
While many futurists anticipated broad advances across the technological economy, in fields ranging from computing to materials science, few foresaw the radical advancements in theology that advanced quantum theory would bring.
- The Quantum Fields of God, Ned Halibut, Kansas Revival Timeline, 2308 (retrieved from Church of Mars archives 2609 with permission of Father Gregory)
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.
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.
@discoursedrome: in the grim darkness of the far future, the furry vs. scaly war knows no end
That’s the spirit!
Our time is already more fetishistic than the past. It wouldn’t be surprising for the future to be more fetishistic than the present, especially given a reduction in morphological restraints under either Transhumanism or heavy Virtual Reality.
Future-shocking readers that way, however, will actually shock them now, even though androids, ray guns, and starships operating on impossible physics don’t shock them at all.
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.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
