Do you want to be Transhuman?

I was actually hoping to prevent a potentially disrespectful and unproductive course of discussion by talking about it. May not have put it the best because I'd been in a state of heightened anxiety and irritability for the past couple of days, sorry.

But isn't that already proven?

Anyway, if we're talking about the future of human evolution, my hope is that we'll "domesticate" ourselves, like we did dogs. (More than we've been domesticated already, I mean. Interesting side note, dogs may have domesticated US. That is, "us", not the United States. :V) So then, we could end up more playful and curious, more affectionate, etc.

edited 24th Sep '14 4:52:10 PM by CassidyTheDevil

What do you guys think of articles like this http://newobserveronline.com/human-genetic-engineering-its-a-reality-and-eugenics-has-been-confirmed/ that assert that genetic engineering is the new eugenics? I've seen this sort of thing in Orphan Black too

edited 25th Sep '14 6:03:48 PM by Xopher001

Going by what I can see on the sides that site is very right-leaning and really racist.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

So yeah I suppose they fit the eugenics crowd just fine then.

Oh really when?

Well, we kind of do need to be getting into gene therapy. Things like congenital defects, debilitating allergies, susceptibility to hereditary diseases etc. are all on the rise. I mean, that's going to happen when society advances to the point that people who have them don't die early. And fixing stuff like that kind of is eugenics.

Then again, there's as big a gulf between that and "designer babies" as there is between that and Dawkins's blithe "abort it and try again" gaffe.

edited 25th Sep '14 8:31:24 PM by Pykrete

"Designer baby" technology may be way off for humans (for obvious reasons), but for animals we're pretty much there already. The freakish monstrosities science has created through breeding and genetic modification are truly beautiful works of art. (like this, for example◊).

Just imagine, because the rate of our Frankenstein creations' evolution is exponentially faster than the wild things (and the rate is rapidly accelerating as our science advances), and we can select whatever fitness function we want, and we can even directly tweak the genes or add in transgenic or synthetic ones, in the evolutionary blink of an eye we could see a modern day Cambrian explosion of new weird and wonderful forms.

The genetic manipulation of humans is eugenics by definition. There is no reason to pussy foot around the term.

hashtagsarestupid

Some people say that transhumanism is the current version of eugenics. I'd say the big difference is that 1) transhumanism does not/ should not define what "improving the human condition" means (by my take, sex change falls under the umbrella of transhumanism because it is using science and medical knowledge to alter the human body according to the person's desire) and 2) non-genetic modification versions means that people can alter at any tine in their lives as opposed to be defined by birth and cannot be changed as in eugenics.

Suffice to say though designer babies is getting way too close to eugenics by my taste (because babies cannot consent to their destiny at birth). However, if we can modify genetic makeup after adulthood, that's a different story. Whether we can do that (altering the genetic material of every cell in the body is no mean feat) is entirely another matter.

edited 26th Sep '14 8:54:15 AM by IraTheSquire

It doesn't seem useful to care about whether transhumanism or designer babies are "eugenics" by definition as that isn't really the central question. The care of eugenics in the past was bad because it involved harming/killing a lot of people. Is the transhumanism case of eugenics bad is the central question.

As for babies not being able to consent to being modified at birth.... Well I didn't consent to my birth genetics either so there...

When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.

I'm not sure if this argument holds. After all, I did not exactly consent to my genetic code being what it is, or to my parents being who they are; I was just, well, born, and that was all (not that I have complaints about being born, of course).

Now, harmful changes should of course be forbidden; but if there existed the technology to give children better health, intelligence and so on, and if parents wanted such for their children, I would have no objections (well, as long as no embryos were harmed by the process, but let's please avoid an abortion debate here — no one's going to get convinced, we're all going to get frustrated).

I kind of understand the concerns about the breeding of "genetically superior people" and the nazi-esque implications of it; but after all, can I not be said to be "genetically superior" to a person with Down Syndrome, in the sense that differences between my genetic code and theirs makes my abilities generally better than theirs?

Of course, the key point here is that this does not mean that I am a better, or more worthy, person than someone with Down Syndrome; I've been simply more fortunate than them, nothing more.

If we somehow could make our successors such that their abilities would compare to mine as mine compare to those of a person with a severe case of Down Syndrome, I do not think that it would be fair of me to forbid this development only to remain somewhere near the "top of the heap" (this is particularly silly because I'm not there anyway, there are already people who are vastly more intelligent than me). I should rather encourage that development, and trust that these people would put their abilities to the service to the one humankind to which them and I and the person with Down Syndrome all equally belong.

edited 26th Sep '14 11:36:48 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

@Carc: I agree, but I also think by the same logic, we should bring elephants, great apes, and (especially) cetaceans into our moral community. Oh, and pigs, corvids and parrots too. And cats and dogs, of course (though they're mostly already accepted as there with us now).

And from those obvious cases as a "animal persons" (IMO), maybe we should go on to consider graduated responsibilities down to even the minimally sentient creatures.

I agree, I think that high-intelligence animals such as great apes or cetaceans should be granted at least some limited form of personhood.

I would go further and say that if we ever get the ability, we would have a duty to "uplift" them to full sapience, David Brin style. Although perhaps I'm talking science fiction now...

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

What happens to sea world then?

The same thing that happened to human zoos, I guess.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

'Yeah, but in the rush to see if you could, you never asked yourselves if you SHOULD.'

My answer? No. No brains in robot bodies, no uploading into computers, and no splicing. [[strikethrough]]Despite what my fetishes would tell me to do.[[/strikethrough]]

edited 26th Sep '14 10:46:06 PM by maxwellelvis

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Jurassic Park if anything was about the dangers of secrecy and sloppiness, not about those of science and technology.

I mean, suppose that you find a way to resurrect dinosaurs (by combining miraculously-preserved dinosaur DNA with frog eggs, which makes no sense — frogs are not particularly genetically close to dinosaurs, it would have been far better to pick an ostrich or something like that — but whatever). Do you:

1. Publish your findings in an academic journal, get your share of Nobel Prizes and accolades, and then proceed to openly develop your park, informing other people of what you are doing and of which security measures you are adopting?

2. Create your park in near-absolute secrecy, in a tropical island, with understaffed security and laughably terrible security protocols?

The problem was not that their science went too far; the problem was that their security did not pass the "would a five-years old find issues with it?" test.

edited 26th Sep '14 11:02:54 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

You're missing the point. Would YOU want to trade a fleeting life, but one full of sensation, for an eternal one in a metal shell, or as pure information?

Me, I'd pick mortality any time. I was born human, that's how I'll die.

edited 26th Sep '14 11:07:50 PM by maxwellelvis

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Not to mention our current legal hoops needed to get any medical from an idea to the market is extremely tight (average 10 years - while the patent only lasts 20 years). There are very good reasons why you rarely hear about hip implants failing or problems with cochlear implants (the other reason is that recalling implants are extremely expensive and companies avoid it happening like a plague - and it is very hard not to when something goes wrong and so they avoid anything going wrong like a plague).

Seriously, I would be more worried about drugs than any implants because the former isn't quite as expensive to recall and big pharma companies have lots more loopholes.

Actually, yes. Because I see myself as in an organic shell anyway.

Funny thing, transhumanists don't intend to impose how they want to treat their own bodies on other people.

edited 26th Sep '14 11:11:22 PM by IraTheSquire

Doesn't the body as well as the soul make you who you are? What I mean by that is, you were born into a body, and it shaped much of your soul, your personality, your thoughts, your outlook on life. Someone born in China would have a different perspective than, say, a Brazilian man born in France or something. A man born blind would have a different idea of life altogether, I wouldn't know, I'm not blind, but I think about that sometimes. Is it not unreasonable to assume that the body can influence the soul just as much as the other way?

edited 26th Sep '14 11:41:29 PM by maxwellelvis

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Yep, I feel that'd be bringing more beauty into the world. David Brin-style being key here.

More than just giving them enhanced "autistic" kinds of intelligence though, I think "wisdom" and "empathy" would be more important. (Mostly thinking of chimps here.... >.>) That'd be good for humans too.

Wait, what are we talking about? I thought that you were commenting to my post about uplifting animals to sapience — I said nothing about cyborgs or uploading in there.

However, to answer your question: well, I'm kind of skeptical that something like that will be developed in my lifetime, it seems to me that transhumanists vastly overestimate the speed of scientific development; but assuming that I'm wrong about that (which I may well be), my answer would be... it depends.

I see no reason, in principle, why a life "in a metal shell" (I doubt it'd really be metal, by the way, I don't see how that would make sense from a structural perspective; but eh) or as "pure information" (BTW, I'd argue that I am already "pure information", only on a different support) should necessarily be bereft of sensation or less fulfilling than my current one; but depending on various implementation details, it might well be. Difficult to say now.

I'd wait until I have all the details before deciding whether to be a part of that or not.

I wouldn't, I'm no fan of death. However, neither of us will ever get to choose: even assuming that techno-optimist predictions will come true soon (and as I said, I doubt it), that would simply give us the opportunity to extend our lives for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Nothing more. Eventually, we'd all die, probably in some unpredictable freak accident (or, at any rate, with the universe's heat death).

Still, if I could extend my life and doing so would have no consequences I find unpleasant (an extreme example: if some hypothetical medicine could make me functionally immortal at the price of making me about as intelligent as a lizard, I would not want it at all), I'd go for it — this universe is cool, I'd like to stay here for a while yet.

I entirely agree with this. I will too. But if before dying I can lead a longer, more fulfilling life by modifying the body I was born with, I see no reason not to do that.

edited 27th Sep '14 12:01:12 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well maybe the entire basis for your mind, body, subjective experiences, life itself, and the whole wider universe is fundamentally Turing equivalent computations.

Minor nitpick: none of us is actually Turing equivalent. That would require infinite working memory, which we do not presumably have.

From a computational perspective, all of us are lowly Finite State Machines (if ones with a ridiculously huge number of states). No arbitrary recursively enumerable language recognition for us! :-(

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Just read Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (which was why that was on my mind), and in the end of that novel the heroes end up unfolding a curled up dimension into an infinite-length one called the "lazy 8", and that makes everything alive and conscious and gives everything telepathy, omnividence, and endless memory.

Well, sure, if we postulate alternate physics then anything goes :-)

On that topic, I really liked Greg Egan's cellular automata-based approach in Permutation City, which would also imply infinite potential memory. But then we are going beyond even the most daring of technological speculation, and well into the realm of pure fiction.

edited 27th Sep '14 12:36:10 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.