Human Enhancement

Agreed with the fighting death statement there. Not even machines can last forever.

If I were to become a robot it should be because I want to be a robot, not because of some illusion that robots are immortal.

Ace, just saying that if someone was having breasts done, especially if it's a completly new piece such as sexual reassignment or removing cancer, that allows for the opportunity to insert some sort of beneficial modification since the breasts are essentially larger storage containers.

Don't think too much into it.

It was mainly a quip on how it was said breast enhancement was cosmetic only. Well, with the right technology and based on human needs, it doesn't have to be.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:01:38 PM by Gabrael

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

If fighting death is the end goal of science, I think that's missing the point. I always figured the goals of science were to figure out how the world works. And hopefully increase quality of life. Which "fighting death" can distract from, because you can become obsessed with that and forget about the quality bit. (I'd rather be happy and eventually die than live forever. The idea of living forever doesn't tell me anything about how happy I'd be in the long run.)

@Gab: Okay. I dunno, turning our boobs into storage containers sounds a hair off spy movie parodies where the bots have guns hidden in their boobs.

Hey, as someone who as a child received eye surgery that would be considered almost primitive and barbaric in current medicine, LASIK seemed like some sort of sci-fi dream when I was growing up. How many people went "LASIK? Fuck that, I'm not letting a guy put my eye under the knife!"

Now it's a common and quite widely offered service. Things evolve. What is expensive now will miniaturize later.

^

There are many facets to science. There is understanding the world around us, and then there is "application", essentially manipulating, exploiting, and inventing around the limitations of the world around us. Knowledge is one thing, but applying that knowledge is arguably just as big a part of science as the discovery.

We learn about the world around us so we can better manipulate and change it to suit our needs. That is science. The more we learn about the boundaries and rules, the more we can exploit them. Subverting nature isn't anything new, we've been doing that since the first time we dammed a river.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:10:27 PM by Barkey

To be fair, the idea of letting someone point a laser at your eye to improve your eyesight is somewhat counterintuitive. I can't blame people for not wanting to let someone do that.

Medical science, not science in general, which tends to be about, you know, fighting diseases, extending lifespans, and getting rid of ways to die, all of which lead to, in the long run, an effective end of death by eliminating all ways to die.

I can't either. I'm absolutely terrified of sharp things near my one good eye. I'm very hesitant to ever stop using contacts and get eye surgery.

^

To piggyback on what you're saying, yeah, medical science is improving quality of life by curing and treating ailments. But ailments are what kill you, they are how you die a "natural" death. So curing, eliminating, and successfully treating ailments also has the side-affect of enhancing our lifespan numbers wise.

As for me, I don't want to live forever. I want to live until I decide I don't want to anymore. That'd be pretty slick. When I'm so bored with what's going on in the world that I'd rather see what's beyond the veil.

Just stick me in a Dreadnaught and point me towards the enemy.. BARKEY SERVES, AGAIN.

Half joking.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:13:33 PM by Barkey

X5 True, and I'm saying the same thing but because of another reason: immortality is impossible. Even machines eventually will stop working.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:11:56 PM by IraTheSquire

For now it's impossible, but, with enough advancements in medical science, it could eventually happen. Machines can be fixed, parts get replaced. If all else fails, we could always upload our brains, and give them new bodies, when the ones the have begin to fall apart.

Entropy is one of the greatest forces behind creation! Even stars fade out.

But yeah, medicine is still far more about quality of life, for me. Treating a disease is about eliminating pointless suffering, and preventing injury. Thinking "I can cure death eventually" still misses the point. Thinking "how can I prevent this disease from spreading and harming more people" is what doctors and other medical scientsts should be thinking.

Also, I think we're at least a hundred years from any sort of brain uploading. So... yeah.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:17:38 PM by AceofSpades

Brain uploading has the problem of "is that really me or is that a copy and I actually have ceased to exist".

Regarding vision: I'm not sure if this was mentioned already, but an obvious upgrade that doesn't involve seeing in new wavelengths is the ability to turn one's attention equally to any point in one's field of view. As it is, your attention is always on where your eye points, and you can't distinguish fine details or read text outside a very narrow region. The ability to read anywhere without turning one's eyes would be a handy upgrade.

@Ace of Spades: I don't think many transhumanists claim that transhumanism will immediately solve every problem, or that the path to that point (and beyond) will not be rough and difficult. The point is that, with technological upgrades, we will be more prepared to tackle those other problems, and to recognize new problems that we may not even be aware of now. It may be that seeing in other wavelengths is useless, or that conquering death will lead to cultural stagnation and a lack of creativity. But if that's what transhumans discover, they will still be better prepared to decide what to do about it than we are right now. Their understanding of the transhuman condition will be deeper and more accurate than ours. I don't think we should stop where we are in order to avoid transhuman problems, any more than bacteria should have stopped where they were in order to avoid having human problems.

Incidentally (and this is partly in response to Kayeka, but I've noticed it many other times over the years), why do people always seem to assume that transhumanism would give huge increases in physical ability and in certain intellectual areas like planning, calculation and memory, but provide absolutely no improvement to moral understanding (or even make it worse)? On the contrary, as far as I'm concerned, one of the main reasons for improving our intellectual ability is to make us capable of more objective, moral reasoning. That is, to improve not just our capacity for doing things, but our capacity for deciding what ought to be done. I would naturally expect an overall increase in intelligence to bring with it improved moral understanding, and that it would take great care to avoid making us nicer along with making us smarter, if that's even possible at all in the long run. Most people wouldn't claim that humans are by any means morally perfect. We know perfectly well that we're selfish, greedy, hateful and power-hungry. So why does everyone assume that it's impossible to improve on that with technology, even if we can improve on everything else?

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True that. But I think we run into similar though not entirely philisophical issues when talking about folks with amnesia.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:21:10 PM by AceofSpades

Well, I don't know about that, but my point is that since the only way to immortality we can come up with has that problem (which btw is unprovable either way) it becomes sort of problematic to try to pursue it.

And that's my point. Adding to that is that we shouldn't avoid transhumanism just because it reveals our current problems, because that would mean that our current problems will stay as problems because there's nothing to trigger a change to fix it. And that attitude is the one that leads to social stagnation.

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:32:47 PM by IraTheSquire

I think the issue is with how human do you remain? And I'm not exactly a qualified philosopher, so I can't really comment on what qualifies as "human" when you get out of the realm of what we're already familiar with.

I will say this: Intelligence, Knowledge, and Wisdom are not inherently the same thing. Transhumanism doesn't seem to deal with that point much. As far as morality goes I really don't think transhumanism has anything to offer us in that field. It can't teach us "be kind to others" when that's something we're already trying to teach ourselves.

Practical applications such as food distribution are another thing entirely. It's moral to do it, which I don't need transhumanism to teach me at all. What I want out of transhumanism is "how does this actually help me accomplish the goal of distributing food to all?"

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:36:25 PM by AceofSpades

I vaguely remember reading an article about a drug that is supposedly able to increase a person's empathy and compassion to others.

And you'll be surprised by how many people will just not show kindness to other people because they're not "heart bleeding levvies".

edited 2nd Jan '13 11:39:37 PM by IraTheSquire

@Ace: And by ending diseases, and other ways to die, they are ending death, even if that's not how they're seeing it. If we end all ways to die, then death will be effectively ended.

So? If we end death in, say, a hundred years, we'll still have ended death. If we live that long, awesome, but, if not, then at least some won't have to suffer from death like we will.

@Ira: Which is why I'd prefer not having to resort to brain uploading. However, even if it is, would it really matter? I mean, one would still be surviving in some form or another.

Also, I feel like this immortality talk is getting off-topic. There are two other threads on this issue, but I feel neither of those quite deal with the actual topic we're discussing, namely should we or should we not seek immortality, so I made another thread.

Transhumanism, as a concept, isn't really about morality at its core. It's about transcending what is "natural". I'd take my own license to say that it's almost about forcing evolution by our own hands.

One thing is clear, whatever is coming, is coming. It can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. Sitting around being scared of the future is stupid.

Personally, I don't care how human or not human other people decide they want to be. It's none of my business. I'm already out of my comfort zone with what is considered the "normal" human condition these days, and I always have been. I could give a shit what other people want or don't want when it comes to human enhancement, I do know, however, that I've got a shopping list of changes I'd like to have.

edited 3rd Jan '13 12:01:11 AM by Barkey

@Ira: I sort of know what you're talking about? I want to say it was in relation to medicating those that presented with sociopathic tendencies, though. For empathy in general, I think that's something taken care of more by a change in cultural values, which is already happening without the transhumanism.

@deathpigeon: You can eliminate diseases, but not the slow break down of the body.

Shouldn't we try to eliminate that?

I'd like to see us start with optic nerve surgery. It's the biggest hole in our medical capability that we can't replace an eye. If it gets achieved with the goal of upgrading the eye rather than allowing the blind to see then that's still acceptable to me.

I don't think that's the issue at all. What is so special about being human? I mean, obviously it's special right now because it comes with a lot of things that we haven't found in any other organisms or anywhere else. But the whole point of transhumanism is to change that, and thereby render being human no longer special. After all, it is not usually an issue for us how bacterium we are. If anything, we're usually glad not to be limited in so many of the ways bacteria are limited. Why should it be more important for us to stay human than it is important for bacteria to stay bacterium? Rather than picking a certain point and staying there forever, I'd rather we try to keep improving ourselves, in order to enjoy the fruits of that improvement at every step along the way.

What is meant by 'intelligence', 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' is not always clear, especially with 'wisdom' which is a term I've seldom seen defined in philosophy.

At any rate, I'm not entirely sure how your response here is not merely to assume exactly the assumption I was questioning earlier, namely, that transhumanism can't or won't help our moral understanding. That transhumanism doesn't teach us to be nice is not the point, the point is that it can enable us to be nice. Right now, there are certain things our brains are able to do to certain degrees, such as planning, calculation, memory, and also compassion, empathy, and philosophical insight. We are not born knowing what is morally right any more than we are born knowing algebra, but because our brains are as advanced as they are, we have the ability to learn both when the learning opportunity is available. So why shouldn't making our brains better improve that ability across the board? I just see no basis for assuming that enhancing our brains, or replacing them with upgraded versions, will make us better at so many things, but specifically not moral understanding. What is special about morality that we shouldn't expect a better brain to be any better at it?

edited 3rd Jan '13 1:18:48 PM by Meklar

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I can understand the negative reaction to the prospect of human enhancement. It actually reminds me of the hostility toward genetically modified food and the current controversy regarding anabolic steroids. I have much more mixed feelings about the latter, but there tends to be a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that we can dramatically alter our minds and bodies using science. Without going too far off-topic, there are two videos I recommend watching that at least entertain the subject.

The first is from Bob Chipaw (AKA Movie Bob). He talks about how genetically modified food really isn't the sci-fi horror stuff people keep making it out to be. Yes, it's Movie Bob. No, I don't want to hear anyone bitching and raving about how much they hate him or the Escapist in general. Yes, I'm getting this out of the way now because people tend to get the pitchforks and torches out whenever Chipaw, Sterling or Croshaw are mentioned in conversation. I just like the video because it's pertinent to this perfectly understandable yet mistaken view on genetic engineering, and I believe that attitude has been transplanted toward genetic engineering on the human level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzraacAuuyk&list=PL83E3EDB4E8D2FCA5&index=42

The second video is one that I've been shouting on the rooftops, and I've gotten quite a few of my fitness buddies and biology classmates to watch it, even if they ultimately disagree (which is fine, I just want intelligent dialogue on the subject). Some of you probably wish I would shut up about it, along with my massive appreciation of the documentaries Shadow Company and Defamation.

It's called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, and it's a documentary about the current culture surrounding anabolic steroids. I don't agree with everything the narrator sets out to investigate, his ideological motivation are a wee shaky, and some of his findings are inaccurate. However, it touches on some great points about what we as a society are willing to do to increase the performance of our athletes and other professionals. Take special note of the bit about the fighter pilots who were found to have taken speed after they accidentally attacked friendlies during a nighttime mission. Also note the part about the cow with abnormally high musculature and how geneticists are trying to find a way to replicate that abnormality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApmX8Q0vqKI

edited 3rd Jan '13 1:03:46 AM by Aprilla

That's an... odd way of looking at it. Why would one welcome death in while in good heath and fear it in sickness? Unless you mean to say you that you fear the pain of sickness dying over the quick clean 'easy' death.

edited 3rd Jan '13 1:31:27 AM by joeyjojo

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This thread is for discussing the morality of human enhancements. You may disagree with me on this, but I think that advancing a certain field, knowing that it will make an existing problem even worse, isn't very moral.

Now, I'd like to point out that this is my only real objection to transhumanism. I'm fine with genetically modified food, I'm fine with stem cell research, and I will personally bury anyone who still insists on using fax machines.*

Humanity has what it takes to progress beyond, and should do so whenever possible.

But if progress in one area would suppress or damage the progress made elsewhere, we need to take a step back. Society as it is now simply can not support human enhancement without the eventual result being all-out class warfare or 1984. Introducing human enhancement now would be criminal.

Though I doubt it would make things even worse, I don't really believe that an increase in intelligence would make one more moral. One learns what is taught, and as much as I'd like to believe otherwise, society as it is doesn't do the whole "teaching" part right.