So,
transhumanism. H+. Those crazy internet nerds who want to be robots. After our
recent conversation on neodymium implants, I realized we've never really had a thread on this before.
Transhumanism is an ideological movement which advocates the use of technology to improve the capabilities of human beings, and the integration of human beings with technology. That may sound out there, but you're the one using a computer to talk to me when you otherwise would never have known me at all. If you accept that technology should be used to enhance your abilities as a human being, then you are in a way already a transhumanist. This is primarily a predictive movement for the moment, though as I'll detail below we are reaching the point where this is ceasing to be the case.
The aforementioned neodymium implants consist of a coated neodymium magnet implanted in the finger. Being a powerful but small magnet, this allows the implanted individual to feel magnetic fields. This has proven useful from being able to determine if a wire is live or dead by moving your finger near it, to doing otherwise impossible magic tricks.
Here's a decent article/mini-documentary on the subject. Being that no doctor will perform this kind of ramshackle elective surgery, and by now are probably wondering why people have started asking them to put magnets inside their fingers for no clear reason, the only alternative is through the body modding community. And the primary problem with that is that they aren't allowed to use anesthetic.
The reason that this is important is because it represents an early realization of transhumanist ideas that can be reached by normal people. This sort of thing is transhumanism verbatim. Your senses are being enhanced in a way that you otherwise would not experience (
there is evidence to suggest a vestigial magnetoception in humans, but that's not the point). It also points out the need for a recognition of
morphological freedom if transhumanism is ever going to be a reality. Bootleg surgery might be alright for now, but there are obvious limits.
Moving on, another matter of interest is radical life extension.
Pew did an interesting piece on this lately, as well as the responses of
the general public and
leaders of major religions. I personally find it very interesting how many people say they'd reject being able to live to at least 120.
Finally, I'll end this opening post with one of the most amazing leaps in the research of a brain-machine interface that I have ever encountered. The magnum opus of Professor of Cybernetics
Kevin Warwick,
Project Cyborg. I think it is one of the better cases for mad science out there, since shoving electrodes into your nervous system to see what happens is crazy, and following it up when it works by using the same technology to connect to your wife's nervous system is also crazy, which does nothing to change the fact that this experiment was radically successful.
Here's the paper in full (I don't know if you all will be able to access this due to me being on a university network, but it says it is free). Here's a TED talk by him if you find all this interesting.Finally, this is what this thread is
not about:
Singularitarianism: This is the big one, and what I want to get out of the way immediately. Transhumanism and singularitarianism are often conflated, but they are neither the same thing nor are they necessarily linked. One can (as I do) accept transhumanism without accepting singularitarianism, and one can accept singularitarianism without accepting transhumanism (the "AI gods to rule over us" position). This is perhaps the single most controversial part of the futurist ethos that transhumanism is a part of, and I want to make it clear now that I don't want this thread to devolve into a circlejerk between singularitarians and non-singularitarians. This is not to say that I am forbidding the discussion of singularitarianism wholesale, but we should only discuss it in the context of its relationship to transhumanism, be it the technological or societal version of the singularity.
Artificial Intelligence: Not far from singularitarianism in topic, AI development is a separate field from transhumanism.
General Scientific Advancement: We already have a science thread. As above, this is about transhumanism specifically, and discussed scientific advancements should be related to transhumanism in some way.
The end of capitalism and/or the rise of automation: Same as before. While these things may well coincide with transhumanism in timeframe, they are not transhumanism.
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Topic: Transhumanism Discussion Thread (Read 53537 times)