transhumanism

ilzolende asked: hate meme: anti-transhumanist pro-mortality bioethicists

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

the-nth-angel:

chroniclesofrettek:

ozymandias271:

It never fails to amaze me how bioethicists manage to be wrong about everything, like, I would expect that there would be a point where I would agree with bioethicists out of sheer reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence AND YET every time I see a viewpoint attributed to a bioethicist it is inevitably fucking stupid

bioethicists: wrong on death, wrong on suicide, wrong on augmentation, wrong on cures, wrong on ice cream cones, wrong for America

Yeah … the ice cream cone thing surprised me when I heard about it.

Wait, what. I thought Ozy was just throwing out a random joke to further take the piss out of bioethicists. I just googled and… wow. I’m irl laughing really hard. This is The Onion-grade material right here, except it actually happened.

I KNOW, RIGHT? I Googled it and got halfway through an incredulous response with a lot of ellipses in sheer astonishment that a human being said that while being serious and is still taken seriously when using that argument about non-ice cream subject matter.

Unrelatedly, I walked down the street eating ice cream today. It was great.

Transhumanists: Because they think ice cream is morally OK.

Tags:

#transhumanism #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #oh my god #I assumed it was a random joke too

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tastefullyoffensive:

 

comparativelysuperlative:

I used to bike past a cemetery every day, and whenever I did I’d get this song going through my head.

Along with the Ood chanting “the circle must be broken.”

…somehow, my brain never juxtaposed those two things. Well, it will from now on, I expect.

Even before reading this, though, I always thought it was a bit odd how a song celebrating the circle of life argued against the “boredom” pro-mortality reasoning: “there is more to see than can ever be seen/more to do than can ever be done”.

(It is only just now occurring to me they might have meant more to see than can be seen within one lifetime, rather than within eternity. Probably because the part of me that read Ringworld at a very young age heard that line and immediately thought of the main character of said book, who swore to live forever because “how else could he see all there was to see?”)

(After writing that quote, I checked it using the Amazon “search inside this book” feature. Despite not having read the book in over a decade, probably at least half my life, I got the quote exactly right. Could be luck, but possibly Ringworld was more of a formative experience than I realised.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #transhumanism

Anonymous asked: Do transhumanists think they can end all [nonconsentual] death, or just old age death? Because not having [nonconsentual] old age death sounds good but also makes me even more terrified of driving/war/murder/accidents/etc because there’s so much more to lose.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

chroniclesofrettek:

theunitofcaring:

One possibility is having Horcruxes (well. backup copies of your brain stored somewhere). Which would effectively end death by most causes less dramatic than supernova. Another is eventually making people (who wish to be) substantially more durable. But aging might be a more tractable problem than either of those, so it’s possible we’ll have a length of time during which you can’t die of old age but you can still be killed. That’d be scary, i agree, but the worst outcome is ‘you die’, which is the outcome anyway if we don’t cure aging, so it’s still worth going for. 

Identity gets weird once backups are possible. These questions get a lot more complicated than they sound right now. 

It does, but I’m guessing most people would take the identity issues over risking inarguable death.

(Also I approve of there being copies of me even if I knew for sure that all of them are definitely not me. That part probably doesn’t apply to everyone else.)

Yeah, I don’t quite get why when mind-uploading comes up, the question people always ask is “would an AI version of yourself really be you?”. I mean, that’d be nice to know, but it seems to me that the much more important question is “is dying and being survived by an AI version of yourself better than dying and not being survived by an AI version of yourself?”.

I’m inclined towards “AI!me is not me, but she’s better than nothing”, but it’s one of my more open-to-persuasion stances.

(I’m not entirely sure why I find the idea of an AI version of me (who is not me) living on after my death to be comforting, but not the idea of a genetic descendant living on, since at first glance those would seem to have similar reasoning behind them. It’s probably to do with whether your descendant inherits your memories.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #transhumanism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

would-you-like-a-jelly-baby:

amaranththallium:

curiosity-discoverer-of-worlds:

survivor-trek:

imagine data caring for you when you’re unable to care for yourself

imagine data being the constant in your life for seventy, eighty years

imagine data staying by your side because he is accustomed to your sensory input and he would miss you if you were gone

imagine data knowing that one day he will miss you and choosing to become accustomed to you anyway

imagine data.

Imagine Data knowing that one day he will miss you…

…unless he does something about it

Imagine Data developing new advances in technology

Imagine Data revolutinizing bio-engenering, genetics, prothesis and everything that can prolongue human life.

Imagine Data giving back to you the ability to care for yourself

Imagine Data being a constant in your life for seventy hundred or eighty hundred years.

Imagine Data knowing that one day humanity conquered the stars, that one day humanity created himself, proving that it could create life.

Imagine Data knowing that one day humanity (post-humanity, trans-humanity, alien-humanity) will conquer Death.

scientiststhesis michaelblume yxoque wrapscallion ozymandias271

@sharkyminimalist

It occurred to me, while I was thinking about this post, that Star Trek already has mind-uploading capabilities.

It is canon that the Borg keep copies of every mind they assimilate, which survive beyond the deaths of the drones they were copied from.

It is canon that under certain conditions, minds can be precipitated out of the hive-mind solution, even if you don’t have their original brain handy.

And, on second thought, the Trill also do exactly this, though under circumstances that are likely to have a lot more limitations.

(Huh, there are actually two Star Trek episodes focusing on how people there can live indefinitely, but only if they spend almost all the time as part of a hive mind, with no reasons given for why the technology couldn’t be used in a completely non-assimilating manner.)

The Feds have already used adapted stolen Borg technology to save lives. Think how many more they could save if they went a bit further.

Tags:

#Star Trek #transhumanism #I have never *called* myself a transhumanist #but I have noticed I tend to react to transhumanist writings with ‘I like the way you think’

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