Poster:	natowelch
Date:	2009-06-15 14:50
Subject:	Meta
Security:	Public

Why does it matter whether a thing "makes us human" or not? What are the salient consequences to the proffered answers to the "debates" over whether any given modifications or other interventions make us human, not human, "inhuman", more humane, or "less" human?

Try to think about what answers to this question would be given by those you disagree with in regards to whether - or how much - certain "debated" changes would change an entitie's status as a human.

Why does it matter who we call human?

Poster:	ultrapeach
Date:	2009-05-22 17:05
Subject:
Security:	Public

I hope it's appropriate to ask this:

I was wondering is anyone is interested in speculative reproductive technologies specifically, and what impact these could have on sex and gender. For example, the existence of synthetic wombs would completely remove sex from procreation, finally pushing sex in the direction... finally legitimising once and for all sex for pleasure's sake (with any gender). Synthetic wombs would also free women from a painful fact of their biology - childbirth.

Basically, I'm writing an essay on this and was wondering if anyone has some good sources dealing with this? Discussion is fine too, of course!

Thanks.

Poster:	xuenay
Date:	2009-04-05 17:09
Subject:	The Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism
Security:	Public

Cross-posted to xuenay.

A colleague's posting on the Finnish Transhumanist Association's mailing list made me think about a phenomenon I've observed both in myself and several others, but never thought about so explicitly. I call it the Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism.

The excitement phase is when you first stumble across concepts such as transhumanism, radical life extension, and superintelligent AI. This is when you subscribe to transhumanist mailing lists, join your local WTA/H+ chapter, and start trying to spread the word to everybody you know. You'll probably spend hundreds of hours reading different kinds of transhumanist materials. This phase typically lasts for several years.

In the disillusionment phase, you start to realize that while you still agree with the fundamental transhumanist philosophy, most of what you are doing is rather pointless. You can have all the discussions you want, but by themselves, those discussions aren't going to bring all those amazing technologies here. You learn to ignore the "but an upload of you is just a copy" debate when it shows up the twentieth time, with the same names rehearsing the same arguments and thought experiments for the fifteenth time. Having gotten over your initial future shock, you may start to wonder why having a specific name like transhumanism is necessary in the first place - people have been taking advantage of new technologies for several thousands of years. After all, you don't have a specific "cellphonist" label for people using cell phones, either. You'll slowly start losing interest in activities that are specifically termed as transhumanist.

In the reorientation cycle you have two alternatives. Some people renounce transhumanism entirely, finding the label pointless and mostly a magnet for people with a tendency towards future hype and techno-optimism. Others (like me) simply realize that bringing forth the movement's goals requires a very different kind of effort than debating other transhumanists on closed mailing lists. An effort like engaging with the large audience in a more effective manner, or getting an education in a technology-related field and becoming involved in the actual research yourself. In either case, you're likely to unsubscribe the mailing lists or at least start paying them much less attention than before. If you still identify as a transhumanist, your interest in the online communities wanes because you're too busy actually working for the cause. (Alternatively, you've realized how much work this would be and have stopped even trying.)

This shouldn't be taken to mean that I'm saying the online h+ community is unnecessary, and that people ought to just skip to the last phase. The first step of the cycle is a very useful ingredient for giving one a strong motivation to keep working for the cause in one's later life, even when they're no longer following the lists.

One might think that this cycle isn't really specific to transhumanism, and that a more general form of it ought to apply to all communities. While I have no doubt that it probably does apply to other communities as well, I find that the transhumanist cause is somewhat rare in that it is so technology-dependant. Hobby communities are built around a certain interest, and for those you don't need much more than the community - having gathered a bunch of RPG or BDSM enthusiasts, you can then go enjoy the activity in question together with them. For purely political movements, you can make progress with a mainly online presence, debating the pros and cons of your cause and recruiting more people under its banner. But while transhumanism is certainly a political cause as well, the vast majority of people aren't really going to care about the social implications of a technology before they can be convinced that the technology in question is actually going to become real soon. And even if everybody did agree that radical life extension, say, is a good thing, that wouldn't really matter for as long as you didn't have life extension available. You'd need to actually get involved with things that actually brought life extension forward, instead of just twiddling your thumbs in the general transhumanist community. This makes the transhumanist community very different from most other kinds of communities.

Poster:	dracova
Date:	2008-11-12 10:38
Subject:	Deathist sentiment
Security:	Public

There's an ongoing discussion on Reddit which has reeled in a lot of comments. Take a look. It is essentially the age-old conflict between those who want to cure aging and those who think aging is good, our lifespans are enough, we must all die to make room for our children, etc.
What really surprised me is how many are in that second category. Not something I'd expect from Reddit. Kind of tantamount to seeing a huge evolution vs. creationism thread, isn't it?

Poster:	natowelch
Date:	2008-11-02 01:23
Subject:	Libertopian Doublethink on the Singularity
Security:	Public

With a touch of wit, Dr. James Hughes summarizes market fundamentalist backlash against Marshall Brain's heretical idea that democratic government can actually help as technologies continue to disrupt labor-based economies.

Yo, fellow meatbag, isn’t this the conference about the idea that greater than human intelligence will be such a profound rupture with all human history that we can’t predict the outcome? So that Singularity idea applies to everything except the magical capability of the market to find ways for human beings to compete in labor markets with super-capable robots, which you think is easily extrapolable from the migration of human peasants into human industrial jobs and then into shuffling meaningless numbers through computers with human fingers? What exactly are the jobs you imagine humans doing better than robots and AI in the Singularity future?

Poster:	natowelch
Date:	2008-10-27 21:46
Subject:	Brain Breaks Through
Security:	Public

[via Sentient Developments and the IEET ]

Marshall Brain, the author of Robotic Nation, gets a spot at the Singularity Summit this past weekend to explain the structural unemployment problems we're likely to face as machines become more productive, and why the best response might be a guaranteed income.

Now that's what I call forced retirement.

Poster:	itsgrimupnorth
Date:	2008-09-19 10:56
Subject:
Security:	Public

( New community for meeting radical bloggers and thinkers! )

Poster:	clawbug
Date:	2008-09-10 18:53
Subject:	What can be done?
Security:	Public

Just curious about what people in this community do actively for the transhumanist cause? Perhaps we could have a debate on the efficiency of various initiatives?

Me, I don't do much apart from spreading the word, reading articles, participating in debates and running Rosetta@home to help with disease and aging research.

I suppose our priorities have to do with which parts of the transhumanist spirit we're the most interested in, be it immortalism, singularity, body modification, space colonization et cetera.

But do you have any practical suggestions? Could we make a list of ten things that are doable for the common people (people who aren't employed as specialists in emerging technologies)?

Poster:	dracova
Date:	2008-08-26 22:05
Subject:	Something I'd like to share
Security:	Public

A while back, bookhling and I entered this contest.

Some of you may surely be interested in seeing our entry, which we submitted last night.

Poster:	willowperson
Date:	2008-07-30 11:04
Subject:	H+ discussion group in Seattle
Security:	Public

Aug 8th 7p First Hill Bar and Grill here in Seattle (901 Madison).

Facebook invite (including some reading materials) can be found here. Whitechapel discussion here.

Topic will be information intake, filtering, healthy information diets.

Poster:	kurosau
Date:	2008-06-09 18:06
Subject:	What's It Going To Look Like?
Security:	Public

Greetings, everyone. This is my first post, nice to meet you and all that. Let's talk about something!

Most of what I've read about transhumanism or posthumanism seems to fall in lines with the same sort of predictions that Vernor Vinge makes with the technological singularity. Our society is going to change, utterly.

And I'm relatively okay with that.

I like the idea of us becoming something else. What I'm curious about is whether or not we can see what we might become. My example is built on the idea of the Outside Context Problem, as described by Iain M. Banks in the Culture series.

Namely, it's a problem so big that you can't predict it. It changes you, fundamentally, for having interacted with it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't adapt to it. For the Aztecs, Cortes and his ships might have been an Outside Context Problem. However, that doesn't change the fact that the people adapted, even if their culture did get torn apart in the process.

So, I'm of the mind that we might be able to see where we're going. And I want to start speculating. After all, isn't that what futurists (and writers) do?

I think that our transhumanist future is going to first manifest itself as stunning increases in intelligence afforded by man-machine interfaces. We're going to start removing parts of our brain (or maybe just increase the size of our cranium...or hell, store the 'ware in another part of our body) to increase our recall and basic processing capabilities. And after that, once we've harnessed that technique to increase our ability to conceive of ideas, I think we'll become the new intelligences that will break through the singularity. I don't think computers are going to get there first, but that's just my thought, rather than any kind of educated guess.

What do you say?

Poster:	natowelch
Date:	2008-05-01 12:33
Subject:	Trouble with Names
Security:	Public

"The problem with the [transhumanist] label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human."

--Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and major funder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Poster:	scratchdaddy
Date:	2008-04-30 11:56
Subject:	Protecting the Vessel
Security:	Public

Does anyone where any kind of protection when they're out and about?

This might sound weird, but since I've adopted longevity as a goal I've become a bit paranoid about being injured in an accident.

It's not likely that I'll be seriously injured while just walking around outside, but if I live to be 500 the chances become significant. 500 years is a long time, and the chance of an accident happening in that time span is about 5 times as high as during a regular lifespan.

Provided that I survived this accident, I don't trust medicine fix me up like I was before. I don't want to take pain killers forever if my arm should become dislocated or I break my hip.

I've been thinking about this a fair amount while I have my rollerblading gear on. I feel so much safer and I wish that I had something similar that I could wear around without looking ridiculous.

Does anyone have similar feelings/thoughts or am I the only one?

Poster:	tangledzen
Date:	2008-04-30 11:41
Subject:	Nootropic regimin
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

Hey there, I'm currently experimenting with nootropics and have started a regimin this week. If anyone is interested in following my progress or chatting about smart drugs or transhumanism in general, please feel free to drop by my journal, all open minds welcome :)

Poster:	scratchdaddy
Date:	2008-04-03 12:15
Subject:	This just in - Paul Newman still has blue eyes.
Security:	Public

Did anyone catch the Barbara Walter's special "Live to be 150"?

I'm glad that she had this special. Hopefully more people will take life extension seriously. The more people that do, the more likely it is to happen. The technologies involved require political will as well as funding.

Having said that, I wasn't particularly impressed with the special itself. It was an hour long, but the last 30 minutes might as well not have been there. Topics in the second half of the program included such things as some old people like to water ski; there's a model who has white hair; Paul Newman drives a racecar and still has dreamy blue eyes.

Total crap.

The first 30 minutes included topics such as resveratrol, caloric restriction, stem cells, cloning, cryonics, and growing organs in a laboratory. All of them were covered pretty superficially. If I wasn't already familiar with the topics, I probably wouldn't have gotten anything out of it.

I wish that Barbara Walters would get a new producer. Someone who would say "Enough of this pandering to the senior market crap. If you're going to do a program about science then stick to the science."

Poster:	dracova
Date:	2008-03-21 11:44
Subject:	Immortality
Security:	Public

I'm an atheist.

As such, I don't believe in any sort of afterlife or spirituality. In fact, I find these beliefs childish, naive and harmful - they obstruct the truth, thereby retarding progress, and their adherents force them on everyone else in an effort to increase their own well-being. Everything I know points to that the universe is a machine; a fantastically complex one, but a machine nonetheless. Thus, I've answered two questions for myself: life is an abstract concept (meaning, "artificial life" and "artificial intellect" are no different from the real thing), and death is impossible to experience (as the brain ceases function, it cannot register any stimuli and thoughts just slow down infinitely).
My existence is not pointless however, and I refuse to die. Our knowledge of the universe is far from being even remotely complete, and for that reason utter nihilism makes about as much sense as hope for an absurd "Holy Kingdom" where you frolic for all eternity. I want to live - survival instincts and hedonism aside, I want to live out of sheer curiosity.

Now that I've explained myself, I'll share some thoughts on life extension. I consider saving my own life from death - from aging - to be of paramount importance. In fact, as it stands, it's infinitely more important to me than everything else put together. This means that I need a working solution of some kind within the next sixty years (and that's an optimistic number). From what I'm seeing, this isn't going to happen - though it doesn't have to be this way. And here's why.

First of all, there's the idea of a "Technological Singularity". What's expected of it is just madness; the same kind of madness that surrounds the Christian rapture. I don't doubt that artificial intellect that matches or surpasses human intellect is just decades away; however, expecting it to blossom into some kind demigod and usher in a utopia sounds just like the sales pitch of a religion. An AI going to be just as clueless as we are, regardless of how quickly it thinks. Perhaps it could truly turn into some kind of exponentially growing demigod if we gave it an autonomous body of some sort, like giving self-replicating machines a collective consciousness. But that notion is too silly to even consider: any healthy intellect would just kill us all - as evident from nature; and one burdened by some kind of Asimov's Laws is bound to be a sad, dependent cretin.
And then there's the emphasis on gene therapy. Everyone seems to think that gene therapy is going to reverse aging. Indeed, it'll make individual cells more robust, and it has the potential to make future generations far superior. Gene therapy can also potentially cure cancer. DNA research is a good thing that's certain to give us good things in turn. But it's not going to reverse aging. Implanting new DNA in an old person using something like a viral vector won't magically turn them young. Wrinkles won't disappear, and bodies will continue to deform. DNA is an algorithm by which the body builds itself; it's also the mechanism by which cells in an adult body are replaced. But it does nothing for the body's maintenance. Once the organs are fully developed, their structure isn't going to change. That's the reason we have wrinkles in the first place; they are the result of skin growing more and more chaotically with each cell generation.

I did say that it doesn't have to be hopeless, so I'm going to offer ideas for life extension which I consider to be workable in the near future.

The soonest, and the most likely reason for death in adults is mechanical failure of the circulatory system. Trying to fix it is a futile endeavor, because it's in essence a pulsating chunk of meat connected to a whole lot of meat tubes - and we don't have a whole lot of experience with meat repair; we have never treated meat like machinery. If anything, the trade of a surgeon is closer to the trade of a tailor. And, well, damaged cloth isn't fixed thread by thread - it's replaced, or patched. Best of all is the replacement of an entire body; a "head transplant", if you will. But that type of procedure is still impossible, since we can't yet reattach nerves. A whole body is bound to be ridiculously expensive anyway. So I think organ replacement is more realistic. Organs which teeter on failure can be surgically replaced. These replacements can be grown inside genetically modified animals, or cloned human beings.
No, I do not find dismantling mutant pigs and cloned human babies to extract the goodies within to be an inherently abominable practice.

Another solution I suggest is biomechatronics. It is less realistic than (and further off from) organ replacement in that it requires the development of utterly novel devices, but is still quite possible nevertheless, and is certain to perform a lot better in some ways. The only problems are developing the parts, and figuring out how to integrate them into the body so it does not reject them.

Am I wrong? It's a possibility. I'm quite nervous about posting all this for that reason. Hope this wackiness solicits some good replies, at least. Please comment.

Poster:	scratchdaddy
Date:	2008-03-10 04:19
Subject:	Immortality Group in Vancouver BC
Security:	Public

Greetings from Canada's West coast.

Finally there is a group here where people actually meet and discuss what can be done to further their own goals in regards to Immortality and Transhumanism in general.

It's a new group and some bugs are being ironed out, but if you're in the Vancouver area you might want to check it out.

Vancouver Immortalist Association

Poster:	overgrownpath
Date:	2008-02-08 11:46
Subject:	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2007 - DNA-driven world
Security:	Public

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4893602463025557866 

Poster:	willowperson
Date:	2008-01-31 15:57
Subject:	Seattle Group?
Security:	Public

Hello all.

I've just landed in Seattle (although I drove), and am looking for a Transhumanist discussion group. While I started and ran one in Bloomington, Indiana (and am happy to do the same here), I was wondering if something already existed here. Any ideas or interest?

Thank you!

Poster:	x_windansea_x
Date:	2007-12-27 23:21
Subject:	Can you think outside of morality, emotion, and your ego?
Security:	Public

I want to talk to you! [Surely this kind of a mental connection is within the scope of this community.]

I am looking for just such people. I want to build a team of those who can analyze something (whatever comes up before us) rationally, without emotion, without morality, without their own egos and self-interest involved, without anything else that may pollute an objective analysis. I want to find people who can take something with me - something of interest to one of us - and see its essence and cause-and-effect and why and so on, without imposing other filters like those I've mentioned.

Imagine the power of such a club! Even 10, 20 people who will put their minds together and truly get to the essence of things. Imagine bringing your own issues to the table and having such a clear input! I believe in the benefit of this kind a group.

Please comment with anything relevant.

Thank you.