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[Eagleon]

Who are you even responding to here?

Several people. Nenjin, in particular I think. His mention of geology compared to the human brain's capacity to persist through time. Taken as a unit, the brain is not a closed system - it's entirely possible to decrease its entropy. To fix it as it ages. Practically, you can't ignore what's outside of the brain, so eventually it will die because we'll run out of energy, or resources, or whatever to fix it more. But there is literally no physical law stopping us from letting every human on Earth now live until the sun dies, if we had the right tools.

From observing what's happening in medical, materials, and computer technology today, I believe (I don't insist) that those tools are within our grasp, within my lifetime. Again, I could be wrong, but otherwise I probably wouldn't be as interested. Hypocritical maybe, but nonetheless...

If the inevitability of personal death is the problem, no transhumanism can possibly be the solution, regardless of what other positive things it could do.

I agree. Does that make me not transhumanist? o.o I seriously don't know anymore.

People can embrace changes and advancement, even changes in ways of thinking, it's just not a quick process.  And If I have a particular beef with transhumanism, it's the haughtiness, and being berated for holding a more cautious assumption of what and when things change.  I don't advocate staticism, I just don't expect the future to plop in my lap any day now.  Angrily wishing it were so doesn't get it there any faster, and if anything, turns a lot of people off to the idea whatever changes are being pitched in such a manner.

Bothers me too. It's desperation at its core. Maybe it's fantasy, but you can't really blame people if you're going to understand the weaknesses we face. Past clinical immortality (whenever that will happen), there will still be people afraid of death, regardless of how close or far away it seems - if it's the heat-death of the universe, people will avoid thinking about it until the last possible second, and that in itself shows our true terror of it. I've faced a lot of death in my life, so maybe that's why it's such an issue with me too, but I don't think that just because they're not being constructive with their opinion, crazy panicked aging transhumanists automatically invalidate their own beliefs.

[DJ]

There will always be entropy. By the logic that we shouldn't push the limits of it because we can't push it all the way, we should all just kill ourselves. Now. It's pointless because you'll die eventually anyway, right? And, ignoring whether or not increased education leads to positive social change (which is honestly debatable), we should abandon making ourselves smarter because there are problems in the world it can't solve.

What, you want me to tell you the meaning of life? I'm sorry, I don't know what it is. But simply existing forever doesn't seem very meaningful to me.

[nenjin]

But there is literally no physical law stopping us from letting every human on Earth now live until the sun dies, if we had the right tools.

Yeah, there are. The very limitations you say "the right tools would fix" are the very limitations of reality itself. We could make rocks exist forever if we coated them in some magical substance that prevented wind erosion, abrading, and all the hundreds of other micro processes that contribute to decay. I know, maybe if we made a field that just stopped proton and radiological decay altogether.

And humans could exist forever if hooked up to perpetual motion machines and were pumped full of intelligent nanobots that massage our neurons, build up the myelin sheaths around them to improve memory and thought function, and snap and reorder neuron pathways according to some master plan for peak human performance.

Just like I could be magically happy if I built a machine that makes everything I wanted true.

And then we remember what reality is, from the basis of scarcity, to competition, to logistics, to those pesky fundamentals some treat as minor obstacles....and we're back to where we are. A forum discussion about things no one is qualified to achieve. What if the nature of reality is that life, as we understand it, has to decay to function at all? That without decay, there is no motion, and therefore there is no life?

The assumption on the part of humanity is that our potential is limitless, that we can do anything if we have enough time. We know not our true limits because we haven't searched for them yet, and take that to mean there are no limits until we find them. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, blah blah blah.

I'm not interested in what's not even theoretically possible yet. For all the talk about how lives are wasted in pursuits of this or that, intellectual masturbation about things that aren't even within the scope of our possibilities now is just as much of a crime against humanity as play Pong until you keel over in your chair. You could even argue the brain activity you get from thinking about the topic is a sort of 'monkey pressing the button' as we pride ourselves on how deep we can think about reality.

Or simply put, life is one form of masturbation or another.

[Criptfeind]

he's a rapacious powerbroker out for himself first and alone, save for any little prodigies he gets to craft in his own image.

Wasn't there a move where Gorden Gecko did this? But then screwed him over and then everyone went to jail? I think I saw it in last years accounting class.

[Vactor]

stuff

I agree, it reminds me of when I was debating some larouche pac guys out in ohio, there are a variety of hard and fast limitations on the universe and how it can be manipulated, no amount of imagineering will be able to work its way through that.  (even if the limitations that we know can be broken there will be others we haven't butted against yet)  I have pretty strong doubts about the human mind's infinite potential as well.  Could butterflies, given enough time, the right tools and a desire ever design themselves human-like brains?  I know that if they managed to they wouldn't be butterflies at all anymore.

[sonerohi]

Sometimes we should just be content with the fact that we invented toilet paper. Amen for no ass hands.

[smigenboger]

Does this boil down to the ideas of "Rich is relative to everyone else, and everyone cannot live above the rest?"

If you do create a miracle program that can make you rich, you're probably bleeding the rest of us out of that much money.

Let's say I created a site called Best-N-Fashion*, where people people send their best home-made clothing to be ranked the best. After 8 months of programming and licensing work, it takes off and is worth $750,000 in fashion ideas, datamining, and traffic. Is that 8 months of work worth 75,000 hours of me unloading boxes off a truck? If so, creating a program is 58 times more rewarding than hard manual labor.

*I called it first

[nenjin]

Is there anything whatsoever in anything I wrote that suggested that what I was saying did not apply to myself?

More it was your tone I took exception to. I'm all for a good dose of self-flagellation. You were dealing it out to humanity as a whole though, and in the context of this discussion, it does seem a little hypocritical. Just picking apart your rhetoric, really.

What to do about irreversible entropy, whether it's "accept the inevitable" or "here's how we can get around it", will be definitively answered long before we actually have to worry about it.

More specifically, long after you or I have any reason to care. Again, I'm interested in what I'm going to see or help lay the ground work for in my own life time. The farther ahead you start projecting your wishes....the more it becomes a masturbatory exercise. In 200 years we've figured out all this stuff. Who is to say we've not already bumped up against what's possible? And not possible in "look, I got a quark to do this in a jar" but possibly in it can actually apply to the human race as a whole. Like, on the level of what agriculture did for the species. And who is to say the "solution" you crave might be a nightmare no one would actually want? That's already been addressed by people up thread.

Isn't that what the definition of technology is? For a long time people wanted to fly, and couldn't. That was inconvenient. So we invented airplanes. People got sick of waiting for mail. So we got the telegraph (-> telephone -> automatic switchboards -> Internet). The whole reason we make tools is because reality is inconvenient. We didn't like unsharpened rocks, so we sharpened them.

No. Technology doesn't treat reality as an inconvenient obstacle. When the bomb went off, Oppenheimer went straight to religion as his first reaction. That's, I think, the real approach technology has to take with manipulating reality. Not "oh man, god will be pissed if we do x" but "what are we fucking with? What are we unleashing? Do we have the right? Is it sensible?"

That's respect for the natural laws, even as we push the boundaries. What you talk about is so laced with contempt, it's like you've got a grudge against the fact you were born as a thing with rules you've got to play by. You act as though death is a problem that has to be solved, completely ignoring the fact that maybe, just maybe, all things are meant to die, because that's one of those rules that makes it so we even have a reality to begin with.

In the end, a lot of the transhumanism rhetoric comes off as having a god complex and wanting the rest of humanity to join in it. What a terrible reality that would be, I think, to have billions of demi-gods running around the universe, each convinced they've got the power and the ability to do whatever they want. I think the only that makes the human race as a whole sufferable is the fact we've got an expiration date. Cynical, I know, but I don't think the expiration date is the reason we act as a species in a way we don't like. Our own logic dictates that since we know we're mortal, we should act really intelligently, make good choices, support the species as a whole. But we don't. You think freedom from the rules is going to make us act better? What species have you been hanging out with?

[Vactor]

It just seems to me that we have an abysmal track record of fiddling with the human brain, most of our attempts at small corrections come with a significant price in side effects and long term issues.  You talk about eliminating all the irrational things humans do, like playing video games, If I can't be rewarding my instincts by posing myself problems and solving them because i no longer have those instincts, then I have a hard time seeing how my existence would be in any way rewarding.  The betterment of mankind, and work towards longevity is a response to these same hardwired desires, if you remove them and give yourself a completely rational mind you would be left only with the knowledge of just how irrational your existence is. 

[Eagleon]

Eugenitor: Chill. Seriously. You're the kind of people I don't like to argue with, and we're on the same side on this. No one is going to listen if you insult them.

Nenjin:

Yeah, there are. The very limitations you say "the right tools would fix" are the very limitations of reality itself. We could make rocks exist forever if we coated them in some magical substance that prevented wind erosion, abrading, and all the hundreds of other micro processes that contribute to decay. I know, maybe if we made a field that just stopped proton and radiological decay altogether.

Taken as a unit, the brain is not a closed system - it's entirely possible to decrease its entropy. To fix it as it ages. Practically, you can't ignore what's outside of the brain, so eventually it will die because we'll run out of energy, or resources, or whatever to fix it more.

And humans could exist forever if hooked up to perpetual motion machines and were pumped full of intelligent nanobots that massage our neurons, build up the myelin sheaths around them to improve memory and thought function, and snap and reorder neuron pathways according to some master plan for peak human performance.

From observing what's happening in medical, materials, and computer technology today, I believe (I don't insist) that those tools are within our grasp, within my lifetime. Again, I could be wrong, but otherwise I probably wouldn't be as interested. Hypocritical maybe, but nonetheless...

I'm sorry, but I didn't feel like repeating myself You don't need to do things perfectly to extend human lifespan twenty or thirty years. In the meantime, more progress will be made, and that figure can be extended outward. That's what I mean when I say that it might be within my lifetime - not that we'll know everything we need to push our lifespans out to <arbitrary point before scarcity intervenes> instantly in twenty years time. The only way that could happen is through a singularity or some ridiculous breakthrough, which is a whole 'nother bag.

[Aqizzar]

The idea that biological human improvement even needs a movement is silly. Is there a movement for faster graphics cards? A political campaign for tougher steels? Does anybody ever hold up a sign saying "More efficient airflow on airplane wings NOW"?

Can you imagine walking into a room full of people who use computers every day, suggesting that maybe computers could be better if we had people spending time and money to make them faster and add new features, and have their reaction be "BURN THE HERETIC" instead of "No shit, Sherlock"?

See, there's that condensation again.  I'm not disagreeing with you, to the extent that I'm disagreeing at all, because I'm afraid of change or something.  It's that I don't believe your plan for how the brain works and how to change it.  Do I know how the brain works?  No, I don't have a fucking clue.  But even though I'm certainly not arrogant enough to think that just because I don't know something that no one else does or can, if it were really that straightforward, I would think the theory at least would have more volume and traction.

But you're inching closer to the heart of the argument and opposition.  Let's suppose for a second that all that's correct - we can have smarter, more rational people (not our own generation or any foreseeable one, but in the conceivable future), thanks to the engineering that goes into their brains.  But first you have to make that actually happen, and make the process of getting there popular enough to truly prove the point to people at large.  And here's the funny thing about humans - many of them get violently mad and offended when we so much as hypothetically consider applying the same industrial-scale modification to humans, and especially human brains, that we do to computers and crops and horses and everything else.

Many, I'd say most, people fear the meditated alteration of what they think is "human" on the same scale they fear death, for the same reasons.  Is it irrational ego-worship to forestall the genetic advancement of the human brain because it reminds people of their own flaws and mortality?  Of course it is, but being irrational doesn't keep it from existing.  How do you proceed?  This is why I call "transhumanism" a movement and describe it as such, because to achieve your goals, your task is to convince a significant chunk of humanity, especially the entrenched segments of human culture that make laws and stuff, that we should think about and approach the fundamental essence of humanity, our brains and genes, with the same clinical experimentation that we apply to tools and plants.  How do you intend to jump that hurdle?

[smigenboger]

I keep forgetting to post between active debates instead of in the middle of them.

[Vactor]

This occurred to me, I disagree very little with Eagleon, but strongly with Eugenitor.

Eagleon's mindset is more oriented towards the idea that the betterment of man will take it down a path of transhumanism, while Eugenitor's is more towards the concept that transhumanism is the how mankind will be bettered.

I don't think it is something that is received well if it is forced.

It will in all likelihood be a continuation of medical history, where we are able to further push back the biological death of a body, but as we do so we continually expose new ways for the body to fail.  There could be a plateau where once we get to a certain point it will become easier to extend life farther, or it could continue like it is, and we will continue to get diminishing returns on amount a life can be exteneded, with exponential cost increases.

[Dasleah]

No thanks, I'm steering clear of any ideological debate where an active participant calls himself the "Eugenitor".

[Vactor]

No thanks, I'm steering clear of any ideological debate where an active participant calls himself the "Eugenitor".

it would be great irony if Eugenitor is disallowed reproduction in a future totalitarian state.