I’m having a bad brain week but I’m going to try to to post anyway. =P Got a lot on my mind and generally not taking very good care of myself.
Mood music: “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide 'cept for Me and my Monkey” – The Beatles, a song about going naked.
One of the most disturbing responses I got from my previous post was along the lines of “wow I hadn’t thought about that!” =\
Let me let you in on a little secret… It’s easy for me to think about things you haven’t thought about because the only thing I need to do is think about anything that’s not brain scanning and having to do with transhumanism and wallah! A new thought! Seriously, take any given zombie and either Keith Henson or Randal Koene and you will find that all they can talk about are brains… Put a curtain around it and you can’t tell the difference between scanning them and just eating them… Really, the business model is indistinguishable! You die, and the zombie/uploader gets your brain.
I saw an article that I’ve since misplaced a few days ago about how the aliens have almost certainly already all uploaded… Bleh! it could have been written any time in the past thirty years there was so little original in it. =|
So yeah, it’s ridiculously easy for me to come up with new ideas to post about and still not leave my own comfort zone, for no other reason than the rut my own mind is stuck in is not the same one yours.
You see, in order to maintain our sanity, each and every one of us wears a set of mental blinders that protects us from what Sartre called the existential angst that comes from nothing other than the unfiltered perception of being a human. To get to where I’m going in this post, throw in a Red Pill™ too.
People viciously protect their blinders. I have gotten banned from a substantial number of Second Life sims for no other reason than I was trying to be reflective on what was actually happening.
So how would you explain/sell transhumanism to your monkey (mind)?
First you need to look at the world from the point of view of your monkey. Well, I can only speak for mine so you’ll have to extrapolate.
To my monkey mind, the most salient features of the human condition are these:
- You are hardwired to want boobs.
- You can’t have boobs. You can’t look at boobs. You will never have an opportunity to touch boobs. You will have to face this fact pretty much every day.
Actually, there’s a serious societal problem involving a number of various factors, political agendas, biological drives, and far far too much for me to get into here. In a nutshell, 80% of the women are unwilling to settle for anything less than the top 20% of men so therefore 3/4ths of those will end up as “crazy cat ladies”. On the other hand, the massive push for women in employment and STEM fields leaves means that men are often left out of the workforce, and thus unable to reach the status of “eligible bachelor”.
For more information, I refer you to the great philosopher, Turd Flinging Monkey:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MorgueToeTag
But the important take away is that our society, when it functions, serves our biological nature and needs, and is thus a function of our biology. The extent to which we change our biology, we will necessarily change the nature of the society that we require to serve it.
Transhumanism offers a variety of plausible and semi-plausible prospective technologies that could potentially get us past the circus freak surrounded by SJWs level of transgenderism to something that could actually be appealing. It is against my philosophy to confront people with personal details that they might find uncomfortable so let’s take a step back and remove all personal preferences and lets gloss over the real sex differences and treat the sex difference as expensive and meaningful as flipping a random bit in a computer. We see that just considering the sociological issues, one would have a strong preference to being female:
Take a look at this amazing video from Karen Straughan, who likes destroying feminists with logic:
I highly recommend her other videos too.
The line of thought my monkey brain uses to reject uploading should not be even slightly mysterious.
Okay, so there’s every possibility that there will be a significant exodus from the male gender once it is possible to do so, at least until our society becomes much less pathological regarding gender. As a thought experiment lets consider the “#killallmen” scenario, which has apparently been a thing over on Twitter, not that I know much of anything about hashtags or twitter. The issue then becomes what kind of beings are we talking about. Are we talking about women women or more androgynous beings who could pass for women under all but the closest scrutiny, or something more like cyborgs. What I’m getting at is that our humanoid society requires a significant number of people, maybe 30-40 percent who are fully capable of performing the male social role and 30-40% of those need to have the physical capabilities of the male to perform necessary manual labor that is not readily amenable to automation. Some of you might be warming up a can of bullshit to spew at me regarding equal rights and some shit like that. =\ I’m talking serious here. This is a real issue and no amount of SJW-ing will change the brutal reality of how our species works.
In the spirit of getting serious about reality, the issues I was talking about in the previous paragraph will probably be relevant for, at most, a week and a half. At that time we will be in Trouble. Moravec, the unabomber, and anyone with more than half a brain realize the dangers of runaway optimization processes. The skinny of it is that radically alien and dystopian futures can come about from 10^12 tiny little mundane decisions that Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time ™. Furthermore, at the point of the singularity, the decision processes going into each of those choices will not even be driven by human motivations such as boobs. Moravec, more than twenty years ago, painted a picture of a future where the best we humans could hope for is to be a figment in some superintelligence’s imagination. =\
A counter-proposal would be to just upload into Second Life. No. it’s just not a sustainable form of existence. It will collapse and in short order. Having been banned from all the >H groups I have no reason to hope for any good whatsoever from that outcome…
But seriously, what is an optimization process? An optimization process can only exist in essentialist philosophy. It can only exist when something has a an essence that can be perfected. Furthermore, a theory of the future that demands an entire civilization follow what one deems to be an optimal solution ignores examples such as:
Which is like poetry in glass, steel, copper and tungsten. One of those amps weighs about 40 pounds, consumes over 40 watts of power continuously to produce barely 8 watts of audio, by the numbers has a fairly narrow bandwidth, has relatively high impedance output and very low “damping factor”. By any logical standard it’s an awful amp… They sell for $6,500…
I have seen far far too many people use the singularity as a cop-out to avoid actually thinking about the problems of choosing and obtaining a positive outcome.
We are in a position where we need ultratechnologies to get whatever it is you would call teh awesomez. But those same technologies will redefine our civilization into something so alien that whether we can even exist in that future is in question. Moravec seemed to think positively of being a figment of the imagination of a post-human being.
[been working on this sporadically, for days, forgot the big point I wanted to make… Yeah that’s right…]
Another point that most people miss, and this one is big, is that they talk longingly about “transcending the human condition” as if that was somehow an unequivocal good thing. =( These people are scheduled to get run over by a bus for being terminally blind. I’m not talking about mortality, but just the general parameters of the human condition are part of what defines our identity. Our minds are more or less well evolved to operate within the space defined by our human nature. Without those limits, you will be faced with a much much worse problem, having to define an existence for yourself without those constraints. Basically, if you get your wish to transcend your human limitations, your experience will be a constant state of existential angst ten times worse than any you can voluntarily experience.
I know I’m not communicating very well. =\ That’s what I get for trying to write about ideas at the fringe of my comprehension.
My point is, what evolution will bring us might be unknown, but does it matter? We will go there anyway. And there will be, probably, no stages, I imagine fluid motion and changes happening as they are meant to, not in leaps… This minute I am me, next minute I am something else? Like watching stroboscoped scene? No. At all times, I guess and hope, there would be awareness of what I am and what changes.