Do you want to be Transhuman?

That would be no different to just carry a router around.

Your body has nothing to offer that a mobile hotspot can't accomplish. The major carriers all sell them.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Is it actually illegal to tattoo a baby? I guess that would fall under child endangerment or whatever. But to run with this metaphor; would it still be illegal if you could remove the tattoo at a later date without significant cost or damage? If changing tattoos was as easy as changing your hair I could see the law shrugging it off.

EDIT: fixed quoteblock.

edited 8th Oct '14 5:28:28 AM by thatguythere47

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

@That: Yeah, that's true.

Tattoos aren't really the best example anyway, they have limited social acceptability.

A better one would be male circumcision. It's purely cosmetic and basically irreversible (as of now anyway), but it also doesn't seem to do significant harm and it's got thousands of years of religious tradition behind it, and in the States at least it has widespread cultural acceptance (to the point where a lot of people consider not' being circumcised gross).

So Carc, do you think genetically altering your baby to have blue skin would also be acceptable if there was a religious tradition behind it, similar to religious exemptions for restricted drug use?

And since you mentioned ease of reversibility being another potential moral factor, what if tampering with your genes and radical cosmetic surgery were as easy as putting on a new pair of clothes? Would that make any difference as to whether cosmetic gene alterations on babies are acceptable?

Yeah, if there were a reliable, simple way of reversing it, I would have no real issue with it — I may or may not think that it's a good idea, depending on circumstances, but I would not consider it something about which laws should be made.

Likewise, if there was a community (religious or not, that does not really matter here) in which the practice of giving newborns strange skin colours would be common and encouraged, I likewise would have less problems with it — as I said, my problem is with parents treating their children's bodies as things, changing them without consent out of a desire for novelty or bizarreness.

I will admit, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the practice of circumcision: except in the case of medical necessity, I would not have it done on a children of mine, and I do wish that the religious communities that practice it did so later, allowing their children to make that choice for themselves. Still, the fact that there is a community in which this practice is already accepted and even expected make the situation radically different from the "blue skin" case, I think.

EDIT: The "limited social acceptability" of tattoos was actually one of the points of the analogy, I thought. A blue-skinned baby, in a society in which blue skin is not common already, would probably find that people relate to them quite differently from how they'd relate to them otherwise; and while they might or might not grow to appreciate that, I don't believe that parents should make that call for them.

edited 8th Oct '14 10:42:20 AM by Carciofus

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

I'd give very little value to how socially acceptable the procedure is. There are communities where female circumcision is acceptable/expected. For me the important factors would be reversibility and the health risks/pain caused by the procedure or the alteration itself. If it were up to me I'd disallow all permanent and/or painful purely cosmetic modifications until the person getting it can actually consent to it.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Social acceptability is not a sufficient condition for the permissibility of a cosmetic bodily modification: there are other requirements, like it not having negative physical effects, that FGM fails miserably.

However, I would say that it is a necessary condition. IF a modification has no purpose other than aesthetics, and IF it is not easily reversible, and IF it is not already commonplace or expected in your community THEN you have no business inflicting it on your non-consenting child.

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

I don't think anyone doubts that transhumanism can offer real, tangible benefits. If (to take an extreme example), we can turn people into Superman — faster than a speeding bullet, etc — then why not?

Other than incidentals (prohibitive cost, social issues, etc) that can eventually be overcome, the only real downside seems to be some version of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. If you're doing extensive modifications to yourself, are you losing some ineffable quality of "humanity" or "naturalness"? Even if you are, are those things of real value? Should we be worried about losing them?

Personally, I don't think we should. What counts as "natural" or "human" in terms of bodily functions is such an arbitrary distinction as to be basically meaningless. For most of humanity's history as a species, it was "natural" to spend every waking moment in exhausting, backbreaking labor and then die of old age at 30. A hundred years ago it was "natural" for 20% of people to die before the age of five. "Natural" is meaningless in terms of whether something is good or bad, and "humanity" has far more to do with mental and social functions than physical ones.

Of course, that doesn't mean that transhumanism is necessarily going to be all sunshine and roses. The "incidentals" I dismissed above are bound to be huge problems in reality, even if they might be worked out eventually. The specifics of any given instance of transhumanism are massively important. But the general concept? I find that difficult to criticize.

edited 8th Oct '14 6:54:05 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Any possible consequences are all theoretical speculation at this point, but so is transhumanism in the sort of scale that would lead to those consequences, whatever they may be.

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

My knowledge might be outdated by a few years, but while portable routers (As in not plugged into a line or whatever) exist, the service is expensive and the data transfer is slow by modern standards(Especially when you're using reliable transmission.)

Also they need electricity. And they're a bit bulky, so you'd have to remove your appendix or something to make room. And there's really no point to sticking one inside yourself.

That said, glorious cyborg renaissance.

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

Okay no one died at the age of 30. Average life expectancy was brought down by the infant mortality rate. If you made it past the things that killed you earlier in life, you wouldn't die much younger than you would today.

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

Also, for most of our species' history, we were hunter-gatherers and, going by studies of extant hunter-gatherer societies today, it was probably more like 20 hours per week devoted to survival needs - food, shelter etc.

Agriculture and "civilisation" upped the length of the working week only "recently" when taken as a part of the length of human history - agriculture and industry were/are more labour-intensive.

That aside, I don't think there is any undefinable "humanity" that would be eroded/taken away by replacing most of the more failure-prone parts of the body with implants/prostheses.

edited 8th Oct '14 9:16:55 PM by Wolf1066

On one hand, transhumanism could certainly be used for the benefit of the species. Faster, stronger, disease-free, who wouldn't want that? On the other hand, the potential for abuse of the technology is astronomical. On the newly-implanted CyberGrip 3000, if we let that sort of thinking stop us we'd never have made any progress at all.

edited 9th Oct '14 2:30:26 AM by Elfive

The ideal with implants would be if they could run off sources of energy naturally inside your body. After all, you wouldn't want to have to recharge your artificial heart, even if the internal battery lasts a few years. People are already working on that, I think.

edited 9th Oct '14 2:56:10 AM by CassidyTheDevil