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Transhumanism: Sanctity of the Human Essence
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2018-11-20 at 12:46 AM UTCWith prosthetics getting better and better, it is only a matter of time before engineering and advances in material science will create prosthetic body parts that are superior to the ones fashioned by mother nature. Indeed, runners already believe amputees with prosthetic running legs have a speed advantage compared to runners using their natural legs.
In due time, we will create prosthetics that vastly improve the capacity of human physical abilities, to the point where they will essentially become superhuman. You will run faster, hit harder, perhaps even endure more. Your body will be efficient and precise to an (you guessed it) inhuman degree, and can learn skills with zero difficulty: you could program your cybernetic arms to play Mozart, pull off a Z shoryuken, aim guns with mechanical precision and speed, throw everyday objects with pinpoint accuracy and turn component pebbles and twigs into deadly projectiles.
But at what cost?
According to many philosophers, such as John Searle, human consciousness and the mind are an irreducible product of our physical, biological processes; that the neurochemistry itself is integral part of your human experience, and the process is important, rather than just the functional outcome. So you might be able to create a computer that can directly output the same answers as a human, but the subprocesses themselves are irreplaceable in generating the experience of consciousness and experience.
What is not to be ignored, is the fact that you have important neurons in every living part of your body. Very important, in fact:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140901090301.htm
Evolution is a thrifty artificer: it finds hacks and shortcuts to cut corners wherever it can, and reuses absolutely everything, because every excess calorie can be a matter of life and death in nature, so these tiny advantages do statistically change the gene pool. And every inch of our skin does math, and surely many other clusters of neurons must have similar properties and values, because it's a fact of neuroscience that our brain receives reports from every part of the body, the neural system is somewhat "irreducible", every neuron that dies within you constitutes a significant change in the state of the broader network. Your "consciousness" is pretty much spread throughout your whole body.
Furthermore, the nature of processing in our nervous system is fundamentally different than it is in silicon computing presently. Our "brain" (take this to extend to your whole body) is a big Bayesian inference engine. In fact, it is actually composed of a cascade of different levels of Bayesian units having "arguments", in order to sift out an output, down to the level of each individual neuron.
Your consciousness is not as accurate as a silicon computer. It would processes the gentle softness of the lover's skin rather than tell you the exact amount it deforms under what stress. It is imperfect in a way, but it's process and specific nature is integral to producing the richness of the manifest image of man.
So when you take your arm under the laser and have a neural interface attached to your stump, and put on a bionic arm, suddenly you trade not only your flesh for steel but your process consciousness for an output intelligence. Suddenly, the scent of a woman becomes the report of the chemical composition of your air intake. You lose your qualia and you receive data.
Would you trade in your essence for your form? How much? What would you enhance and what would you never change? -
2018-11-20 at 12:59 AM UTCwhen you look like a greek god and have mastered your emotions and soul completely and raise your aryan iq from 115 to 140 through perpetual focus and zen nazi meditation, then talk to me about replacing your flesh for electronics. until then you're just a lazy faggot who wants to be able to purchase personal worth and power somehow.
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2018-11-20 at 1:09 AM UTCI would trade my earlobes for LED fuzzy dice
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2018-11-20 at 1:11 AM UTCOr convert my ears into speakers and walk around blasting my shitty music with my own ear-mics using signal inversion to cancel it out.
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2018-11-20 at 1:12 AM UTCAnal 3D printer.
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2018-11-20 at 1:20 AM UTCI would ship of theseus myself, piece by piece enhancement so as to maintain my essence throughout.
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2018-11-20 at 1:32 AM UTCdid you just watch ghost in the shell?
I probably wouldn't, but not for any moral or philosophical reason -
2018-11-20 at 1:40 AM UTCthere are no functional or possible improvements that are currently imaginable. it's not even science fiction, it's fantasy.
we do not have the technology to improve on the human body. the carbon based lifeform we pilot was created by a race so far more advanced than us that the thought of using electricity for anything at all is merely amusing to them. -
2018-11-20 at 2:14 AM UTC
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2018-11-20 at 2:57 AM UTC
Originally posted by PhD in Condom Mechanics With prosthetics getting better and better, it is only a matter of time before engineering and advances in material science will create prosthetic body parts that are superior to the ones fashioned by mother nature.
This is speculation without, I think, great support. Yes, science and engineering has made a lot of "progress" in recent history, but it's not like there's a singular track along which these fields move, as the term "progress" seems to imply, and no promise that any such track passes through the set of things necessary to create the prosthetics you're describing. I'm not saying it's impossible by any means, perhaps even likely, I'm just saying it's not inevitable, it's not a mere matter of time.According to many philosophers, such as John Searle, human consciousness and the mind are an irreducible product of our physical, biological processes; that the neurochemistry itself is integral part of your human experience, and the process is important, rather than just the functional outcome. So you might be able to create a computer that can directly output the same answers as a human, but the subprocesses themselves are irreplaceable in generating the experience of consciousness and experience.
Would you care to present Searle's arguments for the, or your own?What is not to be ignored, is the fact that you have important neurons in every living part of your body. Very important, in fact:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140901090301.htm
Yes, it's been a well understood fact that some degree of information processing happens in the peripheral nervous system. Lettvin was doing research along just those lines in the 50s.Evolution is a thrifty artificer: it finds hacks and shortcuts to cut corners wherever it can, and reuses absolutely everything, because every excess calorie can be a matter of life and death in nature, so these tiny advantages do statistically change the gene pool. And every inch of our skin does math, and surely many other clusters of neurons must have similar properties and values, because it's a fact of neuroscience that our brain receives reports from every part of the body, the neural system is somewhat "irreducible", every neuron that dies within you constitutes a significant change in the state of the broader network. Your "consciousness" is pretty much spread throughout your whole body.
What's significant here? You (the speaking agent) can essentially lose communication with half your brain and not be able to notice. It's well understood that the brain is a massively redundant system that's constantly damaged without losing measurable degrees of function.
The fact that information processing happens in the peripheral nervous system doesn't seem to be sufficient to say your whole body is conscious. We can find brains not connected to hands that seem to be having pretty similar conscious experience to when they were. When we find hands not connected to brains, they don't really show any indication of having experience.
Are you familiar with theories of extended mind? I'm actually pretty sympathetic to them, I think you would be too. If you think information processing that happens in your skin is part of your consciousness, why not information processing that happens when you consult a notebook or interact with some tool which provides tactile feedback? But have we lost any of our "essence" when we loose a book, or some tool we're using breaks? We may lose some function, in some sense, but it seems quite intuitive to say that there is some conscious kernel of ourselves that survives loss of both biological and non-biological (a basically arbitrary distinction) information processing faculties.Furthermore, the nature of processing in our nervous system is fundamentally different than it is in silicon computing presently.
The nature of processing that happens in some neurons is fundamentally different than the processing that happens in others. Our nervous system is composed of a heterogeneous collection of neurons that work in different ways. Are just some of those neurons actually part of our conscious experience and others are inert? Which? When one sort of neuron takes on the role of another, as can happen after damage, is that experience not actually restored, and the recovery of associated function somehow non-conscious?
Of course not. It's a fact of neurology that parts of our nervous system are functionally replaceable, and unless you hold some really strange ideas about what what happens to consciousness in such situations, for which I don't think you can gather any evidence, then you're committed to the notion that replacing parts of the nervous system with functionally equivalent but materially different parts doesn't necessarily affect the conscious experience that's actualized by its working.Your consciousness is not as accurate as a silicon computer. It would processes the gentle softness of the lover's skin rather than tell you the exact amount it deforms under what stress. It is imperfect in a way, but it's process and specific nature is integral to producing the richness of the manifest image of man.
Suddenly, the scent of a woman becomes the report of the chemical composition of your air intake. You lose your qualia and you receive data.
At the physical/chemical level all you ever had was data to start with. From nose to brain, woman-scent was never anything other than electrochemical signals. Conscious experience is an emergent property of that physical system, and in fact an emergent process of many very similar but distinct physical systems across the span of the experience. It should be obvious that different physical configurations can give rise to analogous, similar, or identical experiences because cookies smell the same this week as they did last week but the physical system facilitating that experience is in a different, potentially quite different, state than it was last week.
So if different configurations of neurons can give rise to the same experience, why not different configurations of matter which give rise to the same structure?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-11-20 at 3:07 AM UTC^ fucking retard
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2018-11-20 at 3:21 AM UTCleave this thread if you're just going to call people names and not respond meaningfully to the arguments presented.
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2018-11-20 at 3:27 AM UTC
Originally posted by PhD in Condom Mechanics Edit: Also, why not?
trust
even if all components were completely open source, hardware, firmware and software, you wouldn't be able to install them yourself - you'd need a surgeon to do it which leaves you open to tampering.
today's tech companies regularly demonstrate a complete disregard for privacy and security, why would they act any differently if they were to move into cybernetics/mechanized prosthetics?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-11-20 at 5:17 AM UTCone minute you're looking through old WWII photos and think 'those SS uniforms sure look sharp!', the next you wake up in SPLC's 'racist recalibration' room with three hate crimes on your record and $5000 of chinese knockoff Hugo Boss on your credit card statementThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-11-21 at 1:52 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny This is speculation without, I think, great support. Yes, science and engineering has made a lot of "progress" in recent history, but it's not like there's a singular track along which these fields move, as the term "progress" seems to imply, and no promise that any such track passes through the set of things necessary to create the prosthetics you're describing. I'm not saying it's impossible by any means, perhaps even likely, I'm just saying it's not inevitable, it's not a mere matter of time.
Would you care to present Searle's arguments for the, or your own?
Yes, it's been a well understood fact that some degree of information processing happens in the peripheral nervous system. Lettvin was doing research along just those lines in the 50s.
What's significant here? You (the speaking agent) can essentially lose communication with half your brain and not be able to notice. It's well understood that the brain is a massively redundant system that's constantly damaged without losing measurable degrees of function.
The fact that information processing happens in the peripheral nervous system doesn't seem to be sufficient to say your whole body is conscious. We can find brains not connected to hands that seem to be having pretty similar conscious experience to when they were. When we find hands not connected to brains, they don't really show any indication of having experience.
Are you familiar with theories of extended mind? I'm actually pretty sympathetic to them, I think you would be too. If you think information processing that happens in your skin is part of your consciousness, why not information processing that happens when you consult a notebook or interact with some tool which provides tactile feedback? But have we lost any of our "essence" when we loose a book, or some tool we're using breaks? We may lose some function, in some sense, but it seems quite intuitive to say that there is some conscious kernel of ourselves that survives loss of both biological and non-biological (a basically arbitrary distinction) information processing faculties.
The nature of processing that happens in some neurons is fundamentally different than the processing that happens in others. Our nervous system is composed of a heterogeneous collection of neurons that work in different ways. Are just some of those neurons actually part of our conscious experience and others are inert? Which? When one sort of neuron takes on the role of another, as can happen after damage, is that experience not actually restored, and the recovery of associated function somehow non-conscious?
Of course not. It's a fact of neurology that parts of our nervous system are functionally replaceable, and unless you hold some really strange ideas about what what happens to consciousness in such situations, for which I don't think you can gather any evidence, then you're committed to the notion that replacing parts of the nervous system with functionally equivalent but materially different parts doesn't necessarily affect the conscious experience that's actualized by its working.
At the physical/chemical level all you ever had was data to start with. From nose to brain, woman-scent was never anything other than electrochemical signals. Conscious experience is an emergent property of that physical system, and in fact an emergent process of many very similar but distinct physical systems across the span of the experience. It should be obvious that different physical configurations can give rise to analogous, similar, or identical experiences because cookies smell the same this week as they did last week but the physical system facilitating that experience is in a different, potentially quite different, state than it was last week.
So if different configurations of neurons can give rise to the same experience, why not different configurations of matter which give rise to the same structure?
I wrote about four paragraphs in response then I remembered: this is basically intended to be a cyberpunk thread. So no thank you, mr Lanny. -
2018-11-21 at 1:58 AM UTClike this?
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2018-11-21 at 2 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny leave this thread if you're just going to call people names and not respond meaningfully to the arguments presented.
lmao shut the fuck up faggot. you are dumb as fuck. you don't merit a response because you bang your vagino on the keyboarde.
eat shit bitch you a silly nigga -
2018-11-21 at 2 AM UTC
Originally posted by aldra trust
even if all components were completely open source, hardware, firmware and software, you wouldn't be able to install them yourself - you'd need a surgeon to do it which leaves you open to tampering.
today's tech companies regularly demonstrate a complete disregard for privacy and security, why would they act any differently if they were to move into cybernetics/mechanized prosthetics?
I think eventually you will just be able to go to a booth in the mall and stick your leg in a tube to get it zooped. 5here will probably be appropriate options for nerds like u.
