Originally posted by DigiMark007
I take back the invite Sabah. Keep your nigh-incoherent rants to your own thread in the religion forum.
Ok, I'll stay there. But I should remind you that what takes men decades or centuries to accomplish, can be accomplished in a fraction by a General artificial intelligence given sufficient computational resources. This is the factor that takes things from being millenia away to mere decades. We will hit the limits of the possible in terms of molecular machine design before this century is over.
Originally posted by Mindship
Transhumanism (and its follow-up, post-humanism) is one of my favorite topics. In brief, I'd like to paraphrase Carl Sagan by saying that, the tech modifications to the human mind and body we currently imagine will be nothing like what we will really be able to do one day.On the bright side, we will discover/invent things completely out of left field in contrast to today's paradigm. On the dark side, there will be repercussions, side-effects, whatever--both individual and societal--which will serve as vital reality checks for what is ultimately possible.
Mate you should read most comics written by Warren Ellis its his favourite concept to explore. He's a massive transhumanist. !
IMO i think transhumanism is the only true meanong of life. With it we should be able to obatin all the benefits that Religion will supposedly provide us, but we will do so objectively.
Originally posted by Mindship
My feeling: transhuman augmentation will likely first come to those who can afford it, increasing the separation between the Haves and the Have Nots.
I don't think this will happen as by the time we have the trechnology to merge humans with technology on a mental level, capatalism will have basixcally been removed, due to nanotechnologies affordable to all. Hopefully by this stage are traditional redundant from of democracy will have been replaced by Comte / Platonic Philosopher Kings form of alturistic leadership. Hopefully !
Originally posted by Cartesian DoubtThanks. Likewise, you might wanna check out www.orionsarm.com (scifi--not much on actual stories but worth exploring in terms of background, heavy into AI, nanotech, etc), and also Ray Kurtzeil (not sure on spelling) has an interesting site.
Mate you should read most comics written by Warren Ellis its his favourite concept to explore. He's a massive transhumanist. !
Originally posted by Cartesian DoubtHopefully something better than what we have now will come along (I'm sure it will, some day). In the interim, never underestimate greed and lust for power.
I don't think this will happen as by the time we have the trechnology to merge humans with technology on a mental level, capatalism will have basixcally been removed, due to nanotechnologies affordable to all. Hopefully by this stage are traditional redundant from of democracy will have been replaced by Comte / Platonic Philosopher Kings form of alturistic leadership. Hopefully !
Originally posted by Cartesian Doubt
I don't think this will happen as by the time we have the trechnology to merge humans with technology on a mental level, capatalism will have basixcally been removed, due to nanotechnologies affordable to all. Hopefully by this stage are traditional redundant from of democracy will have been replaced by Comte / Platonic Philosopher Kings form of alturistic leadership. Hopefully !
You think much to highly of human beings.
Lulz at altruistic philosopher kings. A noble goal, no doubt, but not terribly realistic.
But thanks for the link MS. That Orion site is...bizarre, but cool.
Originally posted by Cartesian Doubt
IMO i think transhumanism is the only true meanong of life. With it we should be able to obatin all the benefits that Religion will supposedly provide us, but we will do so objectively.
Meaning is created by each individual. But as a collective goal, I'll agree that see it as worthwhile a goal as anything, and moreso than most. True longevity as a species, and also the potential for levels of cognition unknown to us, as well as a quality of life currently unimaginable, are the promises of transhumanism.
Personally, my pragmatism leads me to be a bit pessimistic toward the movement. I see the singularity as impossible, where tech becomes exponentially better at increasing rates, and I don't believe the incremental change toward such goals will be fast enough, and that humans will be gone before such goals are reached. I hope I'm wrong, certainly, and think we should work toward it regardless. But most "end" theories of transhumanism require a lot of luck and/or progress that we have little reason to believe will happen as quickly as is anticipated.
Originally posted by DigiMark007
That Orion site is...bizarre, but cool.
Originally posted by Mindship
It's rich in intriguing ideas, and has a noble objective (eg, no humanoid aliens or navel ships in space), but it strikes me as being somewhat enamored with itself, like it figures its ideas and mission statement alone will carry it on in the absence of solid, genuine storytelling.
It's awesome if you want to write a story, though. Most of my plot ideas come from there or from RPG sourcebooks.
Speaking of which, there is an RPG setting based around transhumanism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_Space
Among other things propaganda and politics have been replaced by high level study of memetics.
The most recent addition has the following to say about the potential application of memetics at high levels of technology or within a transhumanist society. I feel it should be noted that GURPS (the creators) are known for putting a good deal of research into everything that is put out.
The science of memetics is another kind of technology, with its own capabilities and limitations. It makes propaganda and related techniques (rhetoric, advertising, popular arts, etc.) much more powerful and precise, to the point where even a lone amateur can have quite large-scale effects – but it can’t reach into individual human brains and reprogram them to order. (Some nanodrugs might accomplish that, but even with those, specific words and images can only be planted if the victim’s environment can be precisely controlled.)
Memetics isn’t telepathy; it’s mass psychology with some powerful scientific tools and a mechanistic view of its subjects. It also provides a handy vocabulary for describing social movements and conditions to players. For example, a “meme war” is a competitive propaganda campaign, in which both sides analyze and break down the ideas being spread by each other, prepare balancing ideas, and then try to spread them through a population which is familiar with memetics and may be all too aware of what’s going on.
But memetics doesn’t have to be actively manipulative. Changing and propagating memes is hard work, and not terribly reliable; it is far easier to observe the “natural” memes in a population, and work to exploit those. Edgehunters and analysts might look rather dull as PCs, but that depends where they have to work, and what their goals might be; they can find themselves out on the fringes of society, acting as talent scouts as much as advertisers. They can also spot toxic memes before they spread, and prepare countermeasures.
A campaign could involve a police unit, its official memeticist consultants, and a couple of sympathetic freelance edgehunters or social activists, locked in battle with psychopathic meme-hackers who create suicide cults and nihilist radical movements for kicks.
Personally I think a smart writer could make a fascinating story with those guidelines.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
It's awesome if you want to write a story, though. Most of my plot ideas come from there or from RPG sourcebooks.I feel it should be noted that GURPS (the creators) are known for putting a good deal of research into everything that is put out.
Personally I think a smart writer could make a fascinating story with those guidelines.
Maybe you should submit something... 😖hifty:
Here's the other site I mentioned...
Originally posted by Mindship
Agreed. Their ideas are very well researched, and the site is definitely a welcomed break from what passes for most scifi these days. But the site does need skilled storytellers. I think that would help it most in gaining notoriety.Maybe you should submit something... 😖hifty:
Is there a way to do that without the huge contest they're running?
so, I'm going to play devil's advocate on a subject that I know better than to even speculate on. Let me further premise this at, I'm not a transhumanist, nor overly interested in it. I find a lot of it to be based on very cursory explanations of biology and systems within the human body, though of course, my expertise is neuroscience, so I can't say much really about my skepticisms of stem cells or genetic engineering as saviors to all of humanity's problems, aside from "I am skeptical".
Here is my contention. The main problem with, imho, with transhumanism is two-fold. 1) It supposes design, or rather, conventional reverse engineering, is possible from something that has evolved; 2) Certain issues, especially regarding the brain, appear to be dealt with at philosophical levels. As an addendum to 2), brain stuff is difficult to accurately or even conveniently discuss at anything other than a philosophical level, so it is hardly a personal criticism, though certainly a utilitarian one.
1) So, less like Christian design, more like Ford or GM design. We seem to think that by taking apart the human body and putting it back together with new parts, we can make it work better. I mean, why wouldn't bigger stronger legs make us better? Why wouldn't eye lasers be the bomb? Evolution!
Look, I'm not saying things are impossible. I'm the last person who will say what the future holds, but to think that we could open the human body like you would open the hood of a car and just "mess" with things, upgrade, make things more lean, energy efficient, is ridiculous. We are designed from much less complex things only to work properly in certain environments under certain conditions. I understand the idea behind the philosophy is to escape these human constraints, but that is where I think the "design" mindset is in error. I'll go into this further, but I don't want too huge of a post.
2) Since this is what I know, I will use the brain as an example. It is highly related to what I just said, but more tangible.
God, ummmm, this article: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n1/abs/nn2024.html
which has a summation:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n1/abs/nn0108-5.html
unfortunately neither are available without a subscription to nature. If you REALLY want a copy of one, PM me and keep on me to scan one for you...
ok, so imagine a black computer screen. Now imagine that there are 25 squares, either small, medium, or large, and also either white, red or blue. (This is not what they did in the experiment, I'm trying to really make things simple).
So, no imagine a set of 3 things that can be activated to different levels. This set is X -> Y -> Z.
X is the very basic visual system which determines what each of those boxes is and what colour/size they are. It contains a wealth of information about the world around us, more information than we could ever consciously be aware of. X is comprised of many items, based on how many items you are seeing. Depending on how "active" any particular item at X is, it is more likely to go through Y to Z.
Y is the "bouncer" to the memory system. The bouncer knows what your task is (like, find the large blue square), and because of this, it is able to check the items in vision to see if they are close to it and need attention. More activation of Y leads to less activation in the attention area Z. This is taken to indicate that the Y region is responsible for kicking out irrelevant information. So, the medium blue square gets in, because it is close to the one you are looking for, but the small red one doesn't.
Z is the memory/attention system. It is more active depending on how many items it currently holds. The more active, the more items it holds, the less able it is to select the proper one. So, if you have 3 items in Z, you can compare them very quickly to the one you are looking for, and they will likely all be very close to the target. If you have 16 it will be much longer to compare, and the items are probably less similar.
here we have 3 individual mental capacities that are completely interrelated. One might expand the capacity of X to filter irrelevant information, however, this might prevent task switching (imagine you are doing the task, however you see fire. Y would allow that to Z because it is so important, and fire would be a very active X. Because your Y has such strong stimuli filtering abilities, you are focused on that). Or, if the capacity of things in X was increased, you would be unable to filter them. Z capacity might be good to increase, except it only would increase its capacity for irrelevant items, as the current system is already optimized for filtering.
blah, I hope thats not too long/makes sense. I wanted to try and give a concrete example of what I am talking about. In this "attentional bouncer" system, sure, each process could be optimized to work with each other based on particular stimuli contexts, but change the stimuli you are looking for and the system is no longer optimized.
Lol, like I said, I'm just floating this out there. I'd be delighted if tomorrow someone figured out how to do it, I'm just saying, because we evolved and were not designed, improving is going to be very difficult. The creationists do make one good argument that might explain this a little more. When talking about the tail bone or whale fingers (things that were never selected against through species transitions, I can't remember the term...) scientists usually call them "useless" (or some variation) which they are, theoretically speaking, though they do still have some purpose. There are a bunch of muscles that do attach to our tail bone, and are important for our movement, which is what the creationist would say. Clearly then, removing the "useless human tail bone" might cause more damage than it is worth.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
It's awesome if you want to write a story, though. Most of my plot ideas come from there or from RPG sourcebooks.Speaking of which, there is an RPG setting based around transhumanism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_SpaceAmong other things propaganda and politics have been replaced by high level study of memetics.
The most recent addition has the following to say about the potential application of memetics at high levels of technology or within a transhumanist society. I feel it should be noted that GURPS (the creators) are known for putting a good deal of research into everything that is put out.
The science of memetics is another kind of technology, with its own capabilities and limitations. It makes propaganda and related techniques (rhetoric, advertising, popular arts, etc.) much more powerful and precise, to the point where even a lone amateur can have quite large-scale effects – but it can’t reach into individual human brains and reprogram them to order. (Some nanodrugs might accomplish that, but even with those, specific words and images can only be planted if the victim’s environment can be precisely controlled.)
Memetics isn’t telepathy; it’s mass psychology with some powerful scientific tools and a mechanistic view of its subjects. It also provides a handy vocabulary for describing social movements and conditions to players. For example, a “meme war” is a competitive propaganda campaign, in which both sides analyze and break down the ideas being spread by each other, prepare balancing ideas, and then try to spread them through a population which is familiar with memetics and may be all too aware of what’s going on.
But memetics doesn’t have to be actively manipulative. Changing and propagating memes is hard work, and not terribly reliable; it is far easier to observe the “natural” memes in a population, and work to exploit those. Edgehunters and analysts might look rather dull as PCs, but that depends where they have to work, and what their goals might be; they can find themselves out on the fringes of society, acting as talent scouts as much as advertisers. They can also spot toxic memes before they spread, and prepare countermeasures.
A campaign could involve a police unit, its official memeticist consultants, and a couple of sympathetic freelance edgehunters or social activists, locked in battle with psychopathic meme-hackers who create suicide cults and nihilist radical movements for kicks.
Personally I think a smart writer could make a fascinating story with those guidelines.
IMO anything invented by Richard Dawkins needs to go the way of the Dinosaurs !
Originally posted by DigiMark007
Lulz at altruistic philosopher kings. A noble goal, no doubt, but not terribly realistic.But thanks for the link MS. That Orion site is...bizarre, but cool.
Meaning is created by each individual.
I believe that's that to be an Existential perspectives, and i all honesty it i think treads to closely to Nihilism.
Originally posted by Cartesian Doubt
IMO anything invented by Richard Dawkins needs to go the way of the Dinosaurs !
and the specific claim you make against the idea that culture is passed through horizontal and vertical imitation is?
Originally posted by Cartesian Doubt
Its hardly any more farcical than most religious ideologies ?
if religious ideology is the standard you wish to compare ideologies on...
Originally posted by inimalist
so, I'm going to play devil's advocate on a subject that I know better than to even speculate on. Let me further premise this at, I'm not a transhumanist, nor overly interested in it. I find a lot of it to be based on very cursory explanations of biology and systems within the human body, though of course, my expertise is neuroscience, so I can't say much really about my skepticisms of stem cells or genetic engineering as saviors to all of humanity's problems, aside from "I am skeptical".Here is my contention. The main problem with, imho, with transhumanism is two-fold. 1) It supposes design, or rather, conventional reverse engineering, is possible from something that has evolved; 2) Certain issues, especially regarding the brain, appear to be dealt with at philosophical levels. As an addendum to 2), brain stuff is difficult to accurately or even conveniently discuss at anything other than a philosophical level, so it is hardly a personal criticism, though certainly a utilitarian one.
1) So, less like Christian design, more like Ford or GM design. We seem to think that by taking apart the human body and putting it back together with new parts, we can make it work better. I mean, why wouldn't bigger stronger legs make us better? Why wouldn't eye lasers be the bomb? Evolution!
Look, I'm not saying things are impossible. I'm the last person who will say what the future holds, but to think that we could open the human body like you would open the hood of a car and just "mess" with things, upgrade, make things more lean, energy efficient, is ridiculous.
Ok why is it ridiculous ? You haven't really justified your conclusion that 'redesigning' the body is ridiculous. You've mentioned that we aren't comparable to the hood of a car, but when you get down to the nitty gritty we are quite simillar. Organisms (especially humans) are a lot more complex than cars, but we are still made out of the same building blocks. If reconstruction and redesign can be done on other physical objects, what logical impossibility is stopping us from doing it on organisms ?
Further, such reconstruction occurs all the time in hospitals and in the labs, where various less complex organisms have been reconstructed. The mouse with an ear on its back comes to mind. True our bodies are going to require far more advanced redesigning equipment, but there is nothing that is logically preventing the reconstruction from happening.
Originally posted by inimalist
We are designed from much less complex things only to work properly in certain environments under certain conditions. I understand the idea behind the philosophy is to escape these human constraints, but that is where I think the "design" mindset is in error. I'll go into this further, but I don't want too huge of a post.2) Since this is what I know, I will use the brain as an example. It is highly related to what I just said, but more tangible.
God, ummmm, this article: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n1/abs/nn2024.html
which has a summation:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n1/abs/nn0108-5.htmlunfortunately neither are available without a subscription to nature. If you REALLY want a copy of one, PM me and keep on me to scan one for you...
ok, so imagine a black computer screen. Now imagine that there are 25 squares, either small, medium, or large, and also either white, red or blue. (This is not what they did in the experiment, I'm trying to really make things simple).
So, no imagine a set of 3 things that can be activated to different levels. This set is X -> Y -> Z.
X is the very basic visual system which determines what each of those boxes is and what colour/size they are. It contains a wealth of information about the world around us, more information than we could ever consciously be aware of. X is comprised of many items, based on how many items you are seeing. Depending on how "active" any particular item at X is, it is more likely to go through Y to Z.
Y is the "bouncer" to the memory system. The bouncer knows what your task is (like, find the large blue square), and because of this, it is able to check the items in vision to see if they are close to it and need attention. More activation of Y leads to [b]less
activation in the attention area Z. This is taken to indicate that the Y region is responsible for kicking out irrelevant information. So, the medium blue square gets in, because it is close to the one you are looking for, but the small red one doesn't.Z is the memory/attention system. It is more active depending on how many items it currently holds. The more active, the more items it holds, the less able it is to select the proper one. So, if you have 3 items in Z, you can compare them very quickly to the one you are looking for, and they will likely all be very close to the target. If you have 16 it will be much longer to compare, and the items are probably less similar.
here we have 3 individual mental capacities that are completely interrelated. One might expand the capacity of X to filter irrelevant information, however, this might prevent task switching (imagine you are doing the task, however you see fire. Y would allow that to Z because it is so important, and fire would be a very active X. Because your Y has such strong stimuli filtering abilities, you are focused on that). Or, if the capacity of things in X was increased, you would be unable to filter them. Z capacity might be good to increase, except it only would increase its capacity for irrelevant items, as the current system is already optimized for filtering.
blah, I hope thats not too long/makes sense. I wanted to try and give a concrete example of what I am talking about. In this "attentional bouncer" system, sure, each process could be optimized to work with each other based on particular stimuli contexts, but change the stimuli you are looking for and the system is no longer optimized.[/B]
Correct me if this isn't your second argument.
1.) Memory systems have a series of interconnected variables, that depend on each other.
2.) As the variables are dependent on each other they exist in a vulnerable state of 'equllibrium'. Therefore manipulating or redesigning one of the variables will be detrimental to the whole system.
3.) Therefore any redesigning of the variables will be counter productive ?
Its quite a good argument except there is inductive evidence that counters it.
1.) Your conclusion would mean that the memory process would never be able to improve. But as we have seen, brain capacity's vary through out humanity and nature. This would suggest that your 'unalterable' systems can be altered effectively, as seen in evolution.
2.) Your second premise only refers to one of your variable examples being improved. What if they where all proportionally improved simultaneously ?
3.) Your argument doesn't account for an entirely new system of memory being used.
I might be wrong about what your original perspective is, so apologise.
Originally posted by inimalist
Lol, like I said, I'm just floating this out there. I'd be delighted if tomorrow someone figured out how to do it, I'm just saying, because we evolved and were not designed, improving is going to be very difficult. The creationists do make one good argument that might explain this a little more. When talking about the tail bone or whale fingers (things that were never selected against through species transitions, I can't remember the term...) scientists usually call them "useless" (or some variation) which they are, theoretically speaking, though they do still have some purpose. There are a bunch of muscles that do attach to our tail bone, and are important for our movement, which is what the creationist would say. Clearly then, removing the "useless human tail bone" might cause more damage than it is worth.