Transhumanism

[Strato]

All pundits of hipness have to know about transhumanism now.

Homo Deus is about this.

The latest National Geographic cover story is The Next Human: Taking Evolution Into Our Own Hands showing a line of figures - in the rear: hominim, then Ice Age man, modern man, culminating in Transhuman, a sexless bionic 'individual' interfaced with the Supercomputer/Superalgorithm, plugged into the Internet-of-All-Things. All will be revealed, though you won't have any privates, if you were an elite entitled to get the biotech remake anyway.

For some nutters this is really what Jesus was prophesying, saying his disciples would be doing greater works than these and what the resurrection body really means, as according to the Miami pastor, chair of the board of the Christian Transhumanism Association, Christopher Benek in this Guardian story today, God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism, Meghan O'Gieblyn.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-transhumanism

I don't think the Guardian editorship has first-hand knowledge of the global atheist discourse, to their discredit. Just like our ABC. But we like to keep things quiet. We don't want it like Bourke Street here, not like Christian Forums. com. Do we?

Googling National Geographic Transhumanism,, on the first page the Superalgorithm calls up this individual, Truefreethinker's site, some kind of gnostic Christian, heretic. A busy lad, begging for donations for his services to humanity. Yet again some true genius craving followers with really seductive memes.

True free thinker hates atheists. These are your pseudo-true-free-thinkers.

Another committed conspiracist saint on page 1, alerting us to all the perils perpetrated by the powers that be including transhumanism is this prophet crying in the wilderness, questioningourreality.

https://questioningourreality.blogsp...aphic.html?m=0

Google search - Transhumanism page 1, a nice night's entertainment.

https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ss...manism&spf=592

[Strato]

No algorithmic transhuman could ever play like Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Stevie was a Christian. Faith and preaching it in his music got him off the booze.

A busy artist. Reading takes time out of your life. And then you have to get your hands on the right literature.

[stylofone]

I know a teenage transhumanist, who admits having a pathological fear of death which brings on panic attacks. She can't swallow religion, but finds transhumanism credible because it's all sciencey. So she can still take comfort in life after death.

I just want to get it down to basics. If you believe in uploading, there are many problems: knowing what it is you are uploading (i.e. brain science isn't advanced enough, we don't even know adequately what a brain is); creating an interface to be able to do the uploading; making a computer powerful enough to run the simulated brain. There are known unknowns in these propositions, we need to make new discoveries and inventions. To put a date on any of this is like Archimedes putting a date on relativity. But people believe it because faith. It reminds me of the UFO cults, people find religion old and unbelievable, but UFOs are shiny and metallic so they believe them. The Heaven's Gate suicude cult was like this.

I also think these transhumanist types don't think enough about biology and genes. Are our genes (which make us want to have sex with each other but not with our computers and cars) going to let us do it? There'll be a strong genetic urge to curb a lot of this. The life extension side of it will have to address the resources issue, and the reduction in diversity that comes about from longer life expectancy. Dying can have a genetic advantage.

But as a science fiction fan, I like the ideas. Iain M Banks dug right into it in his "Culture" novels, fantastic stuff.

[The Irreverent Mr Black]

I'm just fresh from my first Windows 10 setup.

In transhumanist hell, you're uploaded with Cortana (the new Clippy) bugging you every ten seconds, reporting your every thought and transaction, and pushing products at you.

[stylofone]

I'm just fresh from my first Windows 10 setup.

In transhumanist hell, you're uploaded with Cortana (the new Clippy) bugging you every ten seconds, reporting your every thought and transaction, and pushing products at you.

I killed Cortana so long ago on this Windows 10 piece of shit, I forget what the murder weapon was. But I refuse to accept responsibility for her being in hell.

[Darwinsbulldog]

Just what we need- religious Borg!

[The Irreverent Mr Black]

I'm just fresh from my first Windows 10 setup.

In transhumanist hell, you're uploaded with Cortana (the new Clippy) bugging you every ten seconds, reporting your every thought and transaction, and pushing products at you.

I killed Cortana so long ago on this Windows 10 piece of shit, I forget what the murder weapon was. But I refuse to accept responsibility for her being in hell.

This is sort-of my second Win10 setup. Lappie-that-rhymes-with-racer self-bricked (possibly a BIOS fault, but who knows) after setup, which included a Regedit session to exorcise Cortana.

User and I decided to leave the nagging harpy in place until after the Cremator's Update has installed.

(End O/T)

[Strato]

As a future cybernetic indigene you are now determined by Cortana and her ilk (subject to the Darwinism of memes), made by their intelligent designers, under their sway, always for commercial ends, justified for 'informatics' sake'. Welcome to the future.

So much for impartially and critically apprehending and understanding absolutely everything once you are hooked up to the Internet-of-all-Things. Does this guarantee of eternal life also guarantee total freedom, individualism - personality, creativity, foibles, general uniqueness, eccentricities?

I suppose this now becomes one of the many necessary conversations for we moderns. I suppose Yuval Noah Harari is seeking to provoke such a discourse with his latest tour de force, Homo Deus, though he doesn't say so there. I will be reading his next production/offering.

I'd rather be me how I am, mortal, enduring the human condition.

Yet biotech is ever finding cures to horrible congenital conditions. This is all good, isn't it? Where does it end? This obviously is not all they're working on. Such research is driven by money. Silicon Valley entrepeneurs Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are Transhumanism fundamentalists with big money to drive the Quest.

Naturally the super wealthy desire to live forever and so perpetuate their successfulness, success. This admits of a Darwinian explanation. They are constituted that way, just like Jessica Rabbit was drawn that way. Just like Kim Il-Sung, purportedly. And who really runs the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea dictatorship? And where is Christopher Hitchens when you need him? Sorry.

The Greeks referred to themselves as mortals. Why be this nostalgic, romantic? Getting old, I guess. That's cool. I certainly love many aspects of the past, especially the music but I don't live in the past.

How do we really live on?

[The Irreverent Mr Black]

I propose a project in which the consciousness of a certain senior Aussie cleric is to be scanned and stored.

When it becomes feasible, a large number of instances of that consciousness are then to be simultaneously run through simulated tortures and horrors of diverse kinds.

A tentative title for the enterprise is "Pell's Hells".

[stylofone]

I propose a project in which the consciousness of a certain senior Aussie cleric is to be scanned and stored.

When it becomes feasible, a large number of instances of that consciousness are then to be simultaneously run through simulated tortures and horrors of diverse kinds.

A tentative title for the enterprise is "Pell's Hells".

Science Fiction references, sorry if my geeking out veers off topic...

"Surface Detail" by Iain M Banks, about high-tech societies which have made the religious concept of hell a reality, by creating it in VR, and condemning people to eternal suffering. But the ethical civilisations of the galaxy find the concept appalling, and trying to stop the practice. The villain is the businessman who provides the computers that run the hell sims, he stands to lose bigly if they are banned. The supporters of the manufactured hells are of course the ones that have a religious tradition.

One of Banks's other concepts is granting human rights to simulations. Universities are creating sims for research and then just switching them off when they've finished. But the sims have the same complexity as the real thing, so a court ruling states that they have to be maintained because switching them off is tantamount to genocide.

There's another passage where he discusses the relative merits of the physical and the purely virtual, where he comes to the conclusion that "matter matters".

The other one I saw recently was the episode of Black Mirror "San Junipero", about the terminally ill pensioners visiting a kind of eternal John Hughes film. But for mental health reasons your time there is limited, you can only be there full time after you die.

All this reminds me of the phenomenon whereby, when someone comes up with a science fiction concept, pretty soon some silly person will think that it's real. Orson Wells' "War of the Worlds" broadcast is an early example. Moon landing hoax theories boomed after "Capricorn One". Tales of real alien abductions boomed after "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".