Today I felt it would be worthwhile to discuss how our culture will necessarily have to change to adapt to transhumanism. While this subject is vitally important to understanding how a major part of our civilization will need to evelove, serious discussion of proto-transhumanist topics such as transgenderism and related has been outlawed or punished with Dire Consequences ™. This really sucks. The primary drivers behind this so-called movement seem to be:
- The depopulation agenda involving chemical castrations and surgical sterilizations.
- the use of transgenderism as a tool of cultural oppression. Among other things, it puts people outside of the cult on the ropes and forces them to defend what should be basic givens of civilized life such as segregated bathrooms.
- Cultural vandalism, instead of maknig life beatiful and awesome, the real asshats of the world want to make it repulsive and broken.
Before anything can get better, we require the right to call a faggot a faggot and a dyke a dyke. A direct benefit of allowing proper criticism in this way we can have an open and critical discussion of what the requirements of a “successful” gender transition actually is. Only by having this discussion can technology actually advance.
But, turn the page, things are different. At a fundemental level, knowing how a technology will work is equivalent to having that technology. So given the assumption that we will be able to do more things, easier in the future. The constraints of logic, math, and physics will remain. There are also metaphysical unkowns. While I consider myself to be a monist and have a low opinion of dualists, the possibility of some form of dualism is not strongly excluded yet. A number of the thinkers I respect do believe in a form of dualism. (if it is not excluded, then we require a technology to work with minds on the other plane whatever that actually is…)
What I’m getting at is that within broad but well delineated margins you will probably be able to get to be whatever your deviant little heart desires. Today it is a lie to say there are more (or less) than two genders. In the future gender (or even individuality) will be either a preserved or discarded concept. Either way it will be a choice. For exactly the same reason I oppose the current cult of transgenderism. I also oppose future conservative movements to try to enforce conventions about gender and the discreteness of the individual when those charactoristics truly do become variables. There is a fuzzy boundry between the two states but problems don’t truly arise until you try to force things to be one way or another.
It is somewhat appealing to imagine having your own astaroid-base or just using VR. But living with other people requires a culture that regulates behavior and, by extension, physical expression to what is generally acceptable. I expect quite a few people would wish to live outside those limits and use VR or live in enclaves that have diferent mores. That is not to say that the culture that will evolve in response to transhumanism will necessarily be healthy. Indeed, the current culture is profoundly unhealthy. Whether you attribute that to CIA media manipulation or what, the fact remains that the majority of the population has allowed the culture to decay to the point where it does not even support the family with dire impacts on the birth rate and many other unspoken consequences. (Ref: The Culture War)
Because this is an F^3 post, lets stay with the future orientation. One of the greatest fears about the robot apocalypse is not the value alignment problem or whatever you want to call “friendliness” these days but rather that the AI systems will be too well engineered and perform exactly as intended. This is a problem because of the way humans work. Humans are at their best when they are in pain, or under stress. Their minds become sharper, brainwave frequencies go up, they become more observant, ingenious, creative, dilligent, and courageous. When humans (or basically any animal) gets blissed out, all of those things are lost, the proverbial computer goes into a halt state and that’s that… That is the true danger of AI. Nature has everything rigged just about right where we are on a “hedonic treadmill” we are always reasonably well motivated to move forward. If we weren’t making any progress we would stop and just suicide or something. If we “got there” then we would basically fall apart. That’s the direction we are going in. The liberals seem to be there already, they are certainly doing things that are objectively insane and are jeapordizing everything.
Logically we want a “healthy” civilization based on logic and reason that provides citizens with a reasonable amount of elbow room for ‘play’ but still advances forward and continues to develop, learn, and accomplish things.
I’m not quite sure where this leaves us, it’s just a very important thing to think about after the Great Reset collapses in on itself and is replaced by “The Storm”.