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Transhumanism has many branches and assumptions, some of which are simply not true. For example, the belief that you can digitize your mind to become immortal. What actually happens is you die and a clone is created. In Star Trek Deep Space 9, there was an episode where the engineer was cloned by aliens, the whole episode is about the adventures of the clone, who believes himself to be the real person and everyone else is paranoid and possibly compromised. In the end he gets shot and dies. It's not only disturbing, it's prophetic. Your clone is not you. They may believe that they are, but they are not. There's a certain amount of "I" in the middle of you somewhere, that has to be there for the integrity of "you" to continue existing. Thus if you start hacking off limbs and replacing them, that's ok as long as they can continue to "feel", but when they don't feel "right", like the third episode of AD-Police, you will begin to suffer from sensory deprivation. People in chambers with sensory deprivation tend to go insane in a matter of minutes, some last several hours. Now imagine centuries. ******** that. You need to keep in mind the center of perception, the sensation, the self, and emotion.
There are transhumanists who devalue music, and believe it is inferior. These people are completely wrong on so many levels, primarily because music is a system of mathematics far more advanced than binary. There is some evidence that most if not all of our mathematics can be encapsulated in musical theory. Many transhumanists devalue the five senses as well, such as smell or taste, or as discussed previously, touch. We need to begin to realize these are our means of interacting with our environment on an analog scale. We purposely block out large amounts of information so that we can cope day to day.
Transhumanists often overlook the existing superhuman accomplishments and talents of existing savants. A good transhumanist would look to genetic engineering and chemical or surgical alteration as a viable means of human improvement using existing humans as a blue print, rather than trying to hack away body parts or inject nanites to turn each other into deep blue printers.
Transhumanism has an amazing potential to be a religious philosophical and physical response to an existential realization that we may some day discover, that there is no higher power, or if there is, they have nothing to do with us, or there is no afterlife. At which point, Transhumanism would be the kernel of progress toward a kind of paradise we could at least imagine, a kind of immortality we could at least try to produce. Perhaps life extension will stretch to several centuries or more, and perhaps we will grow so old and so bored that death will be a welcome gift after doing the 10000 different things on a bucket list. But what transhumanism should not become (and all means to stop them from doing so should be taken) is illustrated in this video:


Quote:
"Vannak"
And the end game comes down to people having control over the world around them from the mind instead of the body. Even if it turns out it's impossible to send stimuli directly into our brains like in the Matrix...


Hmmm... This assumes that you aren't already in a Matrix piloting around your bio-engineered avatar bodies, altering this time-space with your minds... (and besides, I know for a fact that neuroscientists have been working on behavioral modification technology since WW2). evil

But who knows? Maybe that's where that whole "original sin" thing originates from - some "civilized" notion that we are only "renting" these hydrogen-filled carbon sacks, and the machines that farm us merely see any individual lifeforms as a kind of investment who expect a bare minimum ROI that is "due" on our account. pirate

Perhaps the moment after you awaken in the morning, you get the chance to review and re-orientate to the bio-comp's "current story-line" after you jacked in from another dimension... (can you prove any theory one way or the other without it being classifiable as some form of mental illness in the collective conscious?) talk2hand
Transhumanism is a mixed bag. There is some good and lots bad that can come from it...

For instance, the notion of life extension technologies; who's to say that escaping the humdrum static nature of an immortal existence isn't why we chose to be "mortal" in the first place? Our evolved brains would definitely have "certain issues" when they started living in a static form that "chooses not to evolve". Who the hell wants to live long enough to be guaranteed being seen as the class retard among "your peers" while you live under a false assumption of superiority because of a greater experiential pool?

Then there's the whole issue of subversive use of nano-viruses building tracking-kill bugs inside everyone, etc., etc. evil

Mankind has always striven to look for some technology to exert control or advantage over neighbors/competitors first, followed shortly thereafter with the invention of a novel new justification for using it. emo

Largely, culture will be the largest determining factor in the outcome of trans-humanist revolutions. Allowing Transhumanism to become the culture is simply accepting willing enslavement by the Machine Minds... sweatdrop
With regard to transhumanism, the most important thing to work on is purpose of living, quality of living, and ethics of living. If you aren't enjoying it, if life isn't better, then no matter how "advanced" it becomes, you aren't advancing. Technology has the potential to become like a ditch that a fool digs to prove how deep he can go. Eventually, either he will fall into a pit so deep that he cannot survive, or he shall reach a steaming acid or magma pocket and destroy himself and everyone around him. "Newer, greater accomplishments" can actually be new and greater failures. There's a million different ways to hurt yourself and the ones you love - inventing newer, more efficient means to do so is not progress.

If you look at the trends of today's abuse of technology, where you should have flying cars and colonies on Mars, you instead have technology submissive to totalitarian whims. Your most advanced computer interfaces with the economic model you live in have only produced marked imbalances, debt, and suffering. Your technology is ethically inferior, and at the end of the day, that's the only measurement that matters.
Suicidesoldier#1
I don't think you change being human just by getting robot parts.

I wear glasses; am I a cyborg?!


I must not be human!

I CAN SEE FOREVER!


Yeah I don't think there will be a "class" difference for having say, a prosthetic heart.

Very few people will oppose that.
If there is a class difference, the freaks better not reparations.

Fanatical Zealot

I'm not a transhumanist.

I'm a pro humanist.


So get me that technology ASAP.

More likely, we'll have nanobots that chemically restructure our bodies, bones into buckypaper, cell walls into graphene, with computers in/are our bones, with little nanobots performing micro repairs, and replacing or augmenting our muscle with nano fibers say, 200 times stronger than muscle, giving say, a 200 pound person the ability to lift over 20 tons, etc.


You could be a dinosaur looking thing for all it mattered.

That will be the next step of mankind, not just curing every disease, but fundamentally restructuring our bodies, allowing us to do all kinds of things that were impossible to do before or not present in things like say, steel, or iron, materials literally hundreds of times stronger than that, and made from carbon.


Our bones will become center for producing nanobots, distributing it from the blood produced in our marrow, and serve not only as a hardpoint but also as computer, supercomputers, to wirelessly tell the nanobots what to do.

We have 5000 mitochondria per cell; why not nanobots? You could make yourself stronger at a basal level, even. You can could heal, repair, stave off DNA, hell get rid of DNA damage, who cares?
While you will get some class separation, as there is now, there will always be a larger profit for companies to make cheaper, yet still quality, models for the general public. Sure, we may not be toting the Bugatti Veyron of implants, but we can still save up for the Mustang if we really want it.

And Apple will, of course, come out with the iEye (or iSee) eye implant (or lens) that makes Google Glasses look like old bifocals by comparison.
And Google will come out with something horribly convenient as well.

I really want some of the Transhumanism from the book "Extreme Science Fiction." People becoming, basically, nanobots - becoming nanobots, as in, one moment, you look like a human, then next you transform into a soft comfy couch, the next, you are bubbles.

Or pure morphing.

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