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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySun Feb 17, 2013 4:29 pm

Neon thinks Satyr approaches the question of natural and artificial from a sociological point of view; while he's talking ethics. He is saying Paganism is about ethics and morals and virtues. He thinks since everything is Nature and there can be no divorce between man and nature, then everything man does can only be Natural - including the engineering of nature, introducing artificiality. He thinks man-made environments that exceed or dominate natural environments need not be called "evil" or "artificial" since it is still Nature in Man that makes him act whichever way he does. He's closer to Virilio than Baudrillard. He thinks nature lies underneath all 'artificiality' in the end. He thinks Paganism is only the Positive affirmation, the Yes to all things. Saying no is evil, and evil is Xt.

He therefore thinks bionic humans or engineered humans with facility for superior senses is Progress. He wants humans to be upgraded and calls such posthumans Neopagans.
He thinks only Progress is good.
Aging can be eradicated. Man can be corrected away and rendered superior.
He presents a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] world, which the wiki describes as a "biopunk vision of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]" where every disease and weakness is pre-diagnosed and can be eradicated through proper selection and combination, or 'corrected' away.
He visualizes an X-men world where gangs with superior skills will fight with other gangs with similar superior skills.
A 'natural' warfare of 'artificial' posthumans will errupt...
He's a "neopagan" [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
He thinks none of this is Nihilistic since Artificiality is only an extension of the Natural; and so any "correction" is not nature-hating, but nature-enhancement or nature-intensive.

The Pagan idea of Sovereignty becomes meaningless irrespective of what great power is offered and available at one's disposal, when all you create is a race of consumers still slavish to some capitalistic structure within a J.-Xt. vision of perfect transcendentalism...

A Master then simply becomes whoever dominates another with whatever toys and genetic software he manages to buy from a system that decides the quality and paradigm of human freedom.
Will to power? This is a Sell-out for power.  

Aish....


Neon's points [from ILP]:


1.

"Paganism does not necessarily imply deistic beliefs in god-beings or god-becomings. Paganism does not necessarily imply "magic" or supernatural belief. The key concepts and foundations of paganism, I will argue, is ideological, moral, ethical, and derived straight from values and virtues.
Atheism, rationalism, cynicism, and scientology have essentially destroyed concepts of "magic" and "supernaturalism". Everything can become broken down into "science". This is the core claim of postmodernism.
So let's add Postmodernism together with Neo-paganism. A "spiritual" system of belief can become created, or defined, or rationally explained, without appeals to nature, supernatural phenomenon, or magic. Spirituality can become deconstructed without removing its essential parts, which coincide with the emotions of fear and hope, respectively.
I say that "true" paganism is about values, virtues, beliefs, and genes. It's about "respecting nature" and respecting your traditions. These traditions can be rationalist, or, mystical. Either way, does not matter. The core idea of paganism is understanding nature and its antithesis, artificiality.
Paganism will not take the side of "nature" or artificiality. For example, I will later argue that the "Transhumanist" movement, the paganistic humanist ideology of merging machine together with man, although scientific, is perfectly within the realm of "paganism" today. There are no rules "for" or "against" merging machine and metal, with man.
But there will be ethical and moral consequences for transhumanism. This can fit within the realm of neo-paganism."


2.

"I see that transhumanism is already a type of paganism. It is cultish, regarding technology worship. It promotes the loss of "weak" flesh to "strong" steel. Why feel through flesh, when you can "feel" and sense the world through more advanced, more responsive, more manipulative electronic sensors and recordings?
As for the "natural v artificial" dichotomy, I reject it. Nothing is artificial. All is natural. What the nihilists call "evil" is natural. Good or evil, both are natural. Neither can ever become "nurtured out" by liberal education. Some people are born "good". Some people are born "evil".
I am not opposed to evil. I am not opposed to good. This pits paganism directly against the monotheists, like christianity."

3.

"I lean toward post-humanism, the consciously selective process of breeding certain human individuals and groups together, or genetic engineering and experimentation. I also could include some transhumanistic elements into this. If a baby could be grown with a metallic alloy internal skeleton, then why not try this out? Why not create a real "wolverine" x-man baby?
I promote people to consciously breed selective, specialized traits. Athletically superior human beings, like those playing in the NFL or navy seals, or marines, should breed together. Similarly, artistic people should breed together, and create a superior artistic race of people.
Intellectuals should do the same, breed together, create heightened intellects. Philosophers should breed with other philosophers. Scientists should breed with other scientists. Religious should breed with other religiosos. This should become consciously selected for, and consciously chosen by both men and women.
I promote cultural eugenics. Like should breed with like, as the norm. I promote advanced specialization of humanity."

4.

"Because there is no such thing as a "spiritual person". Calling him or her "pagan" is easier and simpler.
A pagan is the best way to say "I'm not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim". It's the most direct way to convey this point."

5.

"All is natural. Artificiality is impossible. There is no such thing as "artificial". The distinction is a false one.
Man is nature. All that he does is natural. "Evil" is natural. This is the biggest distinction, good and evil. Judaeo-Christians seek to assert that "man is born good" or "many is only good" or "man should only ever become good". It rejects evil. But this paradigm is false. What is "evil" in the first place? Who dictates good and evil, except the moralists, dogmatists, and Christians?
It is not YOU or I who lay claim to good and evil. The definitions of good and evil are claimed by the most religious. Pagans are left with nothing, except to fight for a (minority) morality or culture."

6.

"Man is nature. I am not a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Muslim. I am pagan. There is no such thing as a disconnection between man and nature. This disconnect from man and nature is a monotheistic element, philosophical moral dualism. I am not a dualist.
All that man does, is natural. What possible belief is more "pagan" than this?"

7.

"I'm not a racialist. I don't care about ethnicity or race. I only care about function and fluidity of motions. If we can breed a better warrior, farmer, basketball player, comedian, lawyer, businessman, whatever, then I see no recourse or drawback for doing this.
My goal is human efficiency, not politics. Let's raise all people of the world. I am a bottom-up ideologue. Let's raise all boats together.
I will help the thief to steal, just as well as I help the police officer to catch him. Let's increase the action of both. Both are human, all too human."

8.

"That's what I meant about the nature v artificiality dichotomy. The monotheists and Christians tend to automatically presume this, as a central ideological premise, without a doubt or second thought. This creates a divide and lack of communication between the pagan and the Christian.
The two are mutually opposed, unnecessarily. It doesn't have to be this way....or does it?"

9.

"Neopaganism is a resurgence of what was always there, but mostly hidden. As Christianity withdraws, and the cancerous tumor fades from the body, a nation can become healthy again. Paganism is that health underlying the Christian tumor."

10.

"If a CEO wants to marry and have children with another CEO, then they ought to create a superior breed of CEOs in the next generation.
Is there a drawback to promoting human greatness?"

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySun Feb 17, 2013 4:30 pm

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyMon Feb 18, 2013 5:35 pm

Quote :
My goal is human efficiency, not politics. Let's raise all people of the world

Why not "raise" the level of politics. Increasing the level of "talent" with genetic intervention doesn't eliminate politics.

A new era of hyper-efficient consumers. Professional sports becomes an even bigger cult with genetically enhanced players.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with wanting to increase human excellence. But what paradigm it develops within, and what meaning great human achievement is accorded, is what "greatness" truly is.... I.E. greatness is not just athletic displays on the football field glorified by mindless macho slobs, or big scientific advancements that are just subsumed by a nihilistic system... I think a synergy between the individual and the people creates greatness.

This guy seems to be yet another example of the above average intellect that has become mystified by the "potential" that science offers.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyMon Feb 18, 2013 6:12 pm

I've been reading Bataille's The Accursed Share for the past week.

Interesting perspective.

He makes the point, using many cultures other then the current one, that wealth was luxury expressing itself through expenditure.
The wealthy man returned the resources back into the economy, back into the system, just like in nature where the dominant male eventually returned himself back into the system he emerged form and then came to dominate.

His point is that the current Capitalist system pools resources never completely returning them back into the system. What is returned in the form of luxury and ostentatious symbolism, is not comparable to what is retained. Slowly wealth accumulates and accumulates to such proportions that no single man, or his entire family, can spend it fast enough to maintain an equilibrium...a natural balance.

The wealthy become increasingly more rich, and the poor even more impoverished, and this results in the system need to then find new resources or to grow the economy.
In nature this return of resources occurs automatically, at the dominant organism's death, or during its lifespan, as there is no way to accumulate and safeguard resources over a certain limit.

In man-made systems the entire structure is dedicated to preserving wealth and privilege, making this pooling of resources for time-spans beyond a single lifetime, more beyond one or two or ten generations, depending on the stability of the system and the power of the family.

This is a miserly economic system, as it does not expend its excess energies, but saves them, expending only a small portion of them in luxury and display, or in the practice of maintaining its accumulated wealth (resources).
It is an unnatural practice...resulting in sudden release of energies once control can no longer sustain itself (revolution).

The truly wealthy man is generous, because he can accumulated more of what he has an excess of, in the course of his lifetime.
It is the miser, the poor man, in spirit, who accumulates and accumulates, without wanting to release any energies, except a bare minimum, back into the system...or back into the world.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyMon Feb 18, 2013 11:21 pm

I've posted this about a million times, but some don't seem to get it.

My definition of artificial/natural is meant to facilitate, like all categories, understanding.
Everything in existence is natural, since nature and existence are often used to describe the same thing.

Here artificial is used to designate the intervention of an organism upon an environment.
All organisms intervene upon the environment, to one degree or another, because every action is an intervention, an imposition of will upon otherness.

My usage of the term describes the ambiguous point where the intervention of an organism upon the environment that made it possible results in repercussions upon the organism itself, which exceed the environment intervened upon.

My understanding of Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacrum is exactly in this.
It can also be called institutionalization, because of the intervention is successful and severe enough then nature, the environment which was changed or pushed aside or further back, becomes something the organisms entrenched with this institutionalized, artificiality, have little personal experience with.

Imagine an ape raised in a room with only windows.
Nature, the world, is something distant...something it cannot experience first-hand but can only observe from afar and from a distance that makes the observed lose its detail and its negative aspects.

There is only one organism on earth which has managed such a feat.
It is only man who with his interventions upon the environment which made him possible produces side-effects which affect him more than the environment "corrected."

These collateral effects may have many "positive" aspects to them, and man chooses to focus on them, but they also have "negative" aspects which we often call pollutants.

One more thing...depending on the severity and how extremely these interventions alter the environmental conditions that preexisted said interventions, man's dissatisfaction is revealed.

The more extreme and fantastic the alteration to the environment that made life possible all the more man exposes his death-wish through it.
In effect, man "changes" the circumstances that brought him about.
Self-hatred right there.

But, since most people alive today would not have been alive or would not have remained alive for long, if not for these interventions, this desire to alter nature, the past, the world, is really a desire to preserve self and to hide the fact of his own unfitness.
In time these collateral effects increase, adding layers upon layers on what was intervened upon, and so nature is buried in artifice. This compound effect also results in the need to intervene further so as to deal with the collateral effects of earlier interventions.

Eventually the system is unable to find the resources to do so, and the entire thing goes into a depression....a decay, like old age.
Biological aging can be thought of as an organism system reaching a level where the consequences of resisting entropy, and the damage done to the organism itself (attrition), exceed the organism's aggregate energies at its disposal. It allocates energies in self-sustenance, until they are no longer enough.
The organism begins to decline towards death: aging.

Therefore, artificial can be thought of as the total effects of an organism's interventions upon its environment, and their collateral effects, reaching a level where they surpass the effects of the environment intervened upon, and which preexisted the emergence of the organism.

An artifice is invented, a method, a technology, a tool, to deal with a natural problem.
Then another....then another.
In time nothing remains in the immediate but the artifices themselves.
Nature has been intervened out of the picture, yet not out of its presence.
The artifice often creates a conceptual, perceptual barrier which shelters the mind or protects it, to such a degree where the real world is no longer recognized, when it peeks through the cracks, because no artifice is ever perfect or strong enough to keep nature out of the picture for long.

Take the technique, the technology, of marriage.
Adultery is a constant reminder that no matter how man tries to "correct" human sexual behavior, nature is not totally out of the picture.
To take it out of the picture a more severe detachment form the past is necessary...here we are dealing with eugenics, no matter what the liberals may call it.

Socialization, in the modern western sense, is a form of social eugenics.
It is an attempt to change the nature of the organism, man, by redefining the past, or forgetting it, or slandering it.
For this reason the past, traditionalism included, is something modernity wants to forget or to dismiss as irrelevant.


.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyWed Feb 20, 2013 6:58 am

Need to go more deeper in this topic; am a little short for time. But for now, some poetry:


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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyFri Feb 22, 2013 11:07 am

"Death according to the Bible is not a natural condition of humanity. It is an aberration. When man was created he was not created to die, but to live indefinitely. In fact according to the Bible as all Christians know, “just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” Romans 5:12. So Adam and Eve were not created to die. Now some might say that transhumanism seeks to deny the influence of sin on humanity or to try to circumvent the decree of God. But this is not true. All transhumanism tries to do is extend life. Even when and if a human consciousness is implanted in a machine, this is still an extension of life. If one opposes this extension of life, then one would need to consistently resist all attempts at life extension, including all the efforts of physicians, and medical treatments. Did Jesus endorse this view by his actions and words? Certainly not. What do the Christian Scriptures tell us, “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” Matthew 4:23."
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Transhumanism simply extends the J.-Xt. conception that Man is the centre of the world.
"Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed." [N., WTP, 247] {cf. 167}
John Gray's 'Straw Dogs' deals with that whole angle.

In fact, this might even be reason to differ from the perspective Satyr and Dragon take on Abraham's "sacrifice" of Issac and Yahweh's intervention, etc. Rather than look at it as hatred for one's own son, or males, I think the idea was to argue *against* any sacrifice - Xt. continues this premise.

Transhumanism continues J-Xt.

The biggest irony is, one of the biggest opponents and critiques of Transhumanism comes from Xt. moralisms, when both are so anthropocentric.

How do the deflectors work? They argue that life is good, and anyone who doesn't want to extend and preserve life are Nihilists.
Xtians. say, any sacrifice of Man is evil, since *all* have equal importance before God. It is counter-selective.

To me, the will-to-preservation is a slave morale different from the will-to-self-assertion which demands sacrifice, death, and destruction.
This is why N. dedicates a passage distinguishing the Crucified from Dionysos [WTP, 1052].
He states the Xt. way of life is supposed to be a path to a holy existence *because* any suffering and the human condition is counted as an objection to life, but to the Dionysian, life is holy enough already to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. Its a philosophy of power within limitations.

Transhumanism is a J.-Xt. will-to-self-preservation.
It justifies using "towards a *beautiful* life", like Xt. defines towards a *holy* life.

It still rests on a faulty concept, a false abstraction that there exists something called "humanity" - a Xt. fiction after one has done away with all distinguishing factors and the common denominator is slumped together as humanism - Transhumanism makes this fiction progressive.

Transhumanism is also the ethical extension of Libertarianism which in its turns is a piece of Marxism, with the classes being reduced to the level of individuals, while the frame still revolves around a question of who owns whom, etc. - here "individuality" means, you have your way and I have mine, and as long as you don't harm me or my property, we can compete or cooperate side by side. Doing what you want within this agreement is called freedom and possessing individuality and self-expression.!!

All abnormal J-Xt. inflating the individual; Xt. *needed* a transcendental realm to support this abnormal ego inflation - such a distant point, where everyone appears equally important that any sacrifice is counted as evil. I agree with what Heesterman [Broken Scrifice] said; the J.-Xt. Crucification of Christ was the sacrifice to *end all sacrifice* once and for all. Christ would take on everything from now on. This transference was dubbed personal "Immortality". Xt. was already Transhumanism - one "corrected" one's "weakness/sin" through attaining Christ/techne and becoming Perfect/immortal as Man was before the "Fall"....

J.-Xt. introduces a false difference;
"The inorganic and the organic world," Nietzsche writes, "is a prejudice" [WTP, 655]. "The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type." [JW, 109].

One can define Transhumanism then as an intensification of the divorce in absolutes began by j.-Xt. It wants to create and even separate away Life from Death as two unrelated things.


Whether it could fit in a pagan paradigm, and if so, how?

“A Greek of noble descent found such tremendous intermediary stages and such distance between his own height and that ultimate baseness that he could scarcely see the slave clearly… when men were more savage, everybody was a hunter and practiced that art day after day.
Then hunting was common; but eventually it became a privilege of the powerful and noble; it lost its everyday character and its commonness because it ceased to be necessary; it became a matter of moods and luxury. The same might happen some day to buying and selling. One can imagine social conditions in which there is no buying and selling and in which this art gradually ceases to be necessary. Perhaps some individuals who are less subject to the laws of the general condition will then permit themselves to buy and sell as a luxury of sentiment.
At that point trade would acquire nobility, and the nobility might then enjoy trading as much as they have hitherto enjoyed war and politics, while the esteem for politics might undergo a total change.” [N., Joyful Wisdom, 18, 31]

Like the Romans [the emperor Constantine, for eg.] exploited Xt. to rule over and subjugate his subjects, the OverPagans could exploit Transhumanism... when, being human *will* become a "luxury" of the few, of the rare, of the select, and these will form a race apart. Being 'human' will eventually become a privilege of the few, in the face of these uniform and 'powerful' transhumans.

War revolves around values, and who gets to enforce what is good; the rest are all tools.

As long as "immortality" is defined as a fear and aversion of and to death and sacrifice, as Transhumanism does, having all the powerful senses and tools at one's disposal cannot make one a "Master".
Its like getting a cosmetic surgery or a face-lift and looking more beautiful and perfect and arriving at the ideal image of who you are, and how you picture yourself, when its done at the cost of wiping out your father's face, and every trace of history.
Does beauty mean mere symmetry?

Is nobility defined through success and perfection of how far you can carve out your ideal from self-disgust , or, how much restraint you can exercise in the amount of 'ugliness' you can bear, you can endure, you can carry lightly...?

There is a disgust that arises from weakness - wanting to be no more of this, and there's a disgust that arises from strength - wanting to be more than this *too*, an affirmation...

Immortality is a question of beauty and suffering.

The Master Dionysian values intensity of life lived, not duration - how many parasites, how many 'weaknesses' one can affirm.

Transhumanism asks, how many weaknesses can one do away with.

On the other hand too, the Master Apollonian seeks all eternity, not J.-Xt. immortality.

‎"The longing for immortality represents the temporalizing of the longing for the eternal: the desire to experience that which is beyond time and beyond all limitation becomes the desire that the self or the ego be everlasting and invulnerable." [Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche]

Here we see the slave-revolt clearly.

Power to the slave means postponing decay - it posits growth as an objection, while claiming to be pro-progressive.
Power to the master means turning even that decay to gold. Growth is counted in as a stimulus.

Individuality, against all that Libertarian rubbish of being an island, is about affirming the Whole Chain of one's past, of re-presenting the entire diversity of evolution in one's self.

This is what Genius means.
"And so the ideal genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and all their dislikes. There is in him not only the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets, to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of things to contrast and compare them with. The genius is he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely." [Weininger]

Increased specialization as Dragon suggests [philosophers breeding only with philosophers] will reduce overall fitness, since nothing is weak in itself; weakness too has an advantage in the right environment - what the theory of genetic drift works on...

I say, even if you have all the powerful senses and contraptions at your disposal, it will still be a question of Balance - how many diverse drives/powers/senses can you balance and not in merely having them - quality of ranking than quantity;

A man with two grand powers in perfect balance is more superior to a man with ten powers and lacking self-command.

"The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant "man" shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully, but are controlled." [N., WTP, 966]

Overpaganism is about Dionysian Balance.

How many 'powers' one can juggle about, command, switch on and off at one's will, live-lightly - i.e. to say exercise effortless effort, dominate without any sense of struggle, will continue to define Mastery; while the weak and meek continue to collapse and throw up temporary life-boats like humanism and marxism and libertarianism and transhumanism and what not to stay "afloat" pretending to be "living lightly".

Mastery is a Self-Organizing will-to-power; the weak are called Weak by the master because they lack this self-organizing firm will.
Before there is the question, who is to be Master, the Master thinks, and enforces, What is to be Master?

Health > Powers.

The way of the Master Pronounces Balance - denying Nothing, not even saying No to some things [where Dragon errs].

Transhumanism, another kind of Xt., whatever comes forth in the post-human future - an OverPagan would desire, actively will to have even these in their highest strength and then put them to service.
J.-Xt. eradicates, the Pagan Aryan subjugates - that is how he says No - with delight, not fear or hatred or contempt.

Reg. one last thing abt. the Dragon and Satyr; Dragon obtusely thinks Satyr has divorced all nature into a separate realm with his introduction of the artificial. The former is a typical Libertarian mentality - similar to eyesinthedark, and laconian as well.
Indivduality and everything defined as an island, as absolutes, standing separate and believing this to be masculine.
Libertarianism is for weak-hearted Dwarfs.

True Inidviduality, like I said, is about opening up chasms through nuances, bringing to light Degrees - Dominating is Creating an Order of Rank - its about standing on top after Chaining everything and affirming everything together as a Whole.

Satyr is defining a nuance and introducing Ranks - he's separating different degrees of nature.
The Artificial is that *Degree* where the influence of human nature Exceeds the influence of physical nature.

There are many kinds of Natures.
There are many kinds of Colours.
There are many kinds of Masculinities.
There are many kinds of Laughters.







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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyFri Feb 22, 2013 11:20 am

"When used to describe belief systems, technopaganism focuses on the spiritual side of technology. This can include the belief that technological items and artifacts of modern living - such as buildings, roads, parks, cars, and other such items - have pseudo-spirits, or totem spirits, of their own. This also extends to cities."
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[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is an age-old I.E. practice.

The Germanics venerated their Swords as the spirit and power of their Ancestors, and it was handed down generations.
The veneration of sacred groves by the Celts, and the polis by the Greeks - where the genii was thought to reside - that too is a Technopaganism.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySat Feb 23, 2013 8:35 am

"In late 2008, tech luminary Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, published a critique of what he calls “thinkism” — the idea of smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligences with accelerated thinking and acting speeds developing science, technology, civilization, and physical constructs at faster-than-human rates. The argument over “thinkism” is important to answering the question of whether Artificial Intelligence could quickly transform the world once it passes a certain threshold of intelligence, called the “intelligence explosion” scenario.

Kelly begins his blog post by stating that “thinkism doesn’t work”, specifically meaning that he doesn’t believe that a smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence could rapidly develop infrastructure to transform the world.
After using the Wikipedia definition of the Singularity, Kelly writes that Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil and others view the Singularity as deriving from smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligences (superintelligences) developing the skills to make themselves smarter, doing so at a rapid rate. Then, “technical problems are quickly solved, so that society’s overall progress makes it impossible for us to imagine what lies beyond the Singularity’s birth”, Kelly says. Specifically, he alludes to superintelligence developing the science to cure the effects of human aging faster than they accumulate, thereby giving us indefinite lifespans. The notion of the Singularity is roughly that the creation of superintelligence could lead to indefinite lifespans and post-scarcity abundance within a matter of years or even months, due to the vastly accelerated science and robotics that superintelligence could develop. Obviously, if this scenario is plausible, then it might be worth devoting more resources to developing human-friendly Artificial Intelligence than we are currently. A number of eminent scientists are beginning to take the scenario seriously, while Kelly stands out as an interesting critic.

Kelly does not dismiss the Singularity concept out of hand, saying “I agree with parts of that. There appears to be nothing in the composition of the universe, or our minds, that would prevent us from making a machine as smart as us, and probably (but not as surely) smarter than us.” However, he then rejects the hypothesis, saying, “the major trouble with this scenario is a confusion between intelligence and work. The notion of an instant Singularity rests upon the misguided idea that intelligence alone can solve problems.” Kelly quotes the Singularity Institute article, “Why Work Towards the Singularity”, arguing it implies an “approach [where] one only has to think about problems smartly enough to solve them.” Kelly calls this “thinkism”.

Kelly brings up concrete examples, such as curing cancer and prolonging life, stating that these problems cannot be solved by “thinkism.” “No amount of thinkism will discover how the cell ages, or how telomeres fall off”, Kelly writes. “No intelligence, no matter how super duper, can figure out how human body works simply by reading all the known scientific literature in the world and then contemplating it.” He then highlights the necessity of experimentation in deriving new knowledge and working hypotheses, concluding that, “thinking about the potential data will not yield the correct data. Thinking is only part of science; maybe even a small part.”

Part of Kelly’s argument rests on the idea that there are fixed-rate external processes, such as the metabolism of a cell, which cannot be sped up to provide more experimental data than they would otherwise. He explains, that “there is no doubt that a super AI can accelerate the process of science, as even non-AI computation has already sped it up. But the slow metabolism of a cell (which is what we are trying to augment) cannot be sped up.” He also uses physics as an example, saying “If we want to know what happens to subatomic particles, we can’t just think about them. We have to build very large, very complex, very tricky physical structures to find out. Even if the smartest physicists were 1,000 smarter than they are now, without a Collider, they will know nothing new.” Kelly acknowledges the potential of computer simulations but argues they are still constrained by fixed-rate external processes, noting, “Sure, we can make a computer simulation of an atom or cell (and will someday). We can speed up this simulations many factors, but the testing, vetting and proving of those models also has to take place in calendar time to match the rate of their targets.”

Continuing his argument, Kelly writes: “To be useful artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Thinkism is not enough. Without conducting experiements, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world’s problems. There won’t be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a smarter-than-human AI appears. The rate of discovery will hopefully be significantly accelerated. Even better, a super AI will ask questions no human would ask. But, to take one example, it will require many generations of experiments on living organisms, not even to mention humans, before such a difficult achievement as immortality is gained.”

Concluding, Kelly writes: “The Singularity is an illusion that will be constantly retreating — always “near” but never arriving. We’ll wonder why it never came after we got AI. Then one day in the future, we’ll realize it already happened. The super AI came, and all the things we thought it would bring instantly — personal nanotechnology, brain upgrades, immortality — did not come. Instead other benefits accrued, which we did not anticipate, and took long to appreciate. Since we did not see them coming, we look back and say, yes, that was the Singularity.”

1) Given sensory data X, how difficult is it for agent Y to come to conclusion Z?
2) Can experimentation be accelerated past the human-familiar rate or not?

These will be addressed below."
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySat Feb 23, 2013 8:37 am

Lyssa wrote:


As long as "immortality" is defined as a fear and aversion of and to death and sacrifice, as Transhumanism does, having all the powerful senses and tools at one's disposal cannot make one a "Master".
Its like getting a cosmetic surgery or a face-lift and looking more beautiful and perfect and arriving at the ideal image of who you are, and how you picture yourself, when its done at the cost of wiping out your father's face, and every trace of history.
Does beauty mean mere symmetry?

I forget to consider the other extreme; preserving the past, the dead immortaly...

"To Stephens, as to Fedorov, individual physical immortality, even resurrection, appeared to be distinct possibilities. Stephens argued that ultimate destruction is not an inexorable law of biology, not even of physics: the “cell-of-life” is potentially deathless, and material “elements” are virtually unchangeable. As in Fedorov, the possibilities of indefinite maintenance of human personality and resurrection are derived from the concepts of Lamarckian inheritance and the “Ether of Space.” Past personalities are said to be inherited (remembered) in the progeny, as they lie “dormant in the brain of their descendants,” and can be reawakened. Furthermore, human thoughts and memories form an imperishable physical trace, an “echo” or “mirror-picture” that are “present in the ether everywhere” and can be recaptured in some distant future (99-105). The concepts of life extension, physical immortality, symbolic immortality and resurrection are thus synthesized:

[We] may possibly know a species of resurrection, if our descendants shall desire to call us up… More than this we cannot yet hope. …Enough, till the grander day comes when our children, transfigured and perfected in their organisms by the growth of knowledge, shall cease to die. But even in that grander day we shall be with them. … And if we have worked for that grand day, they will love us. Morituri. But that thought is our compensation, our solace in death. (106.)

Thus, Stephens arrived at precisely the same conclusions as Fedorov regarding the possibility and necessity of physical immortality, on precisely opposite ideological grounds: the rejection of established religions. Stephens’ social vision, too, was radically different from Fedorov’s. In contrast to Fedorov’s conceptions of universal relatedness and equality, more than a slight tint of elitism and racism is present in Stephens’ work, as he affirmed that “the burden of progress and achievement will long rest with the dominant race.” And furthermore, “certain of the lower races, like the lower animals, will of necessity be coerced for the general good and for their own good” (117).

In The Struggle for Viability (1927), Bogdanov proposes the general view that vitality deteriorates due to an impairment of cells’ “organizational relations” and “internal milieu.” According to him, social imperfections and inequalities largely contribute to bodily dissonance and life-shortening. The “organizational relations,” both social and biological, are adjustable, their equilibrium can be enforced, whereby “our life should last 120-140 years” at the least. In the paper “Physiological Collectivism” (1922), Bogdanov provides further “collectivist” grounds for the blood transfusion technique (applicable to the organization of the society as well):

The conjugation of blood, as well as the conjugation of cells has this property that, even without the exact determination of the weakest components, it typically supports them…. And if there is only a little deficit, as usually happens in prolonged processes of deterioration, then even the smallest support can have a radical significance, allowing the organism to fully utilize its own resources for its own restoration, which was previously hindered by chain functional disarray.

By supporting the “weakest” elements, by sharing resources with them, a prolonged existence of the entire system can be accomplished. Such a support of the “weakest components” can be “only systematically achieved by transcending the limits of physiological individuality, as foreign as this thought may seem to the individualist worldview of our epoch.” In summary, the enhancement of human vitality and life-prolongation can be reached only in a society ripe for it, that is, in a society collectivist enough to share its resources, its blood, with the weakest elements. According to Bogdanov, such collectivism “is now only seldom present. But it is present, nonetheless, and it is augmenting with the progress of culture” (Bogdanov 1922). Thus, the purported ideological foundations of the emerging Socialist state – central planning, collectivism and support of the weakest members of the social organism – were heralded by Bogdanov as the first buds of a new life-affirming social order that he hoped would continue far into the future."

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySat Feb 23, 2013 8:42 am

perpetualburn wrote:


This guy seems to be yet another example of the above average intellect that has become mystified by the "potential" that science offers.

No, the point was not to draw attention to his intellect. I don't care about all that.
The onus is always on one to take away whatever one can from the other.
It serves nothing to call another stupid or mentally deficient or whatever. For me, its about giving tasks to yourself, and creating the freedom to finish it. I'm a self-ish person.



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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyMon Mar 04, 2013 12:31 pm

Trans-humanism is a tautology. Humanism is already "trans". In that it trans-cends any other differentiation markers as gender, race, star sign, nationality, caste, ...
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jun 25, 2013 3:15 pm

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyWed Nov 06, 2013 2:35 pm

Quote :
"Now, two hundred years later, what the Florentine goldsmith and humanist Lorenzo Ghiberti said to his co-conspirators in the early fifteenth century, at the start of their argonautical journey to the shores of universal art - 'Men can do all things if they will' - has almost become self-evident to the artistic and technical virtuosos, the modern people of skill, the entrepreneurs of their own lives, as well as the increasingly numerous prefects for the life of the others. Despite all periodically recurring cycles of historical discouragement and calls for self-reduction, the proud motto of the Modern Age would never be entirely forgotten; even the Soviet educators from the time of change around 1920 still repeated this revolutionary-optimistic thesis in every register, though perhaps adding the qualification that aside from the resolute will to act, the social conditions must also be given.

The great Comenius (1592-1670), founder of Baroque pedagogy and idea provider for the construction of modern large-scale learning machines, knew what it meant to undertake greater things after so many wasted centuries: grace is great, but technology applied to man is even greater; and election takes us a certain distance, but the new art of education takes us further. Where there had been the exception, there would now be the rule. Now was the time to apply the letter­ press to young souls and print annual volumes of students who would emerge like prize specimens from the erratum-free human publishing house. It was no coincidence that the visionary educator spoke of his school project as a typographaeum llillum, a live typesetting appara­ tus that would populate the world with masterpieces of human print. He thus presented an idea that could be newly acknowledged by the media theorists of the late twentieth century - although these would speak less of the subject being printed in a press than of its mental for­ matting. The early twentieth century revealed its concerns when Leon Trotsky lectured in the style of the enthusing hardware ideologue:

"Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society, man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product."

According to the revolutionary cult of science, completion could only take place in the mints of the New Human Being which the Soviet state was planning to create. The periods after Trotsky showed that work on the human being continued in quite different treatment centres. The semi-finished product man has its dangers that resist reprocessing, whether into educated man, the 'overman' or the New Human Being. But at least, since the end of the Second World War, the news has been all over town: 'Man has reached the point of treat­ing the human race as material.'

The path to the age of production, which culminated in the pro­duction of the producer, began long before the twentieth century. Whenever there was progress along this route, it was announced with great pomp that humans were becoming 'accessible' to themselves.

Around the year 2000, when the decoding of the human genome was imminent. Tempus est, Comenius wrote on the wall in fiery letters in 1639: 'It is time' - this formula continues to determine agendas for the futurized world to this day. The most pressing item on these agendas is the systematic production of human beings who meet the highest standards of anthropomorphism - we are speaking of the seventeenth century in Europe, when the zeitgeists of change were becoming strong (though the word Zeitgeist only entered the modern German vocabulary around 1800).

Humanity was now to go into serial production in order to populate every area of this continent - and later the planet - with individuals at the level of the humanly possible. Patience with the old inadequacies had come to an end: it was time for humans to cease being an outgrowth of moral coincidence.

The new educators believed that they knew how to overhaul each individual's coincidental weariness of their previous life: the whole system of moulding humans was arranged metanoetically...

It is high time to clear up a misunderstanding to which Foucault contributed: it is not in the prisons and places of oppressive super­ vision but in the frequently strict schools and academies of the Modern Age, along with the craftsmen's workshops and artists' studios, that the main human orthopaedics of modernity is carried out - that is to say, the moulding of the young by the standards of Christian-humanist discipline. The real aim of the departure to the age of arts and technologies was to train ever new generations of virtuosos. Certainly, the disciplinary imperative shows its second face in the 'heterotopic' background inhabited by the droves of 'infamous humans' (in the age of absolutist population politics, they inevitably constitute a massive group) - and this face must be mentioned by anyone seeking to reconstruct the 'birth of the prison' from the spirit of responsibility for the human surplus. It would be absurd, however, to reduce the concept of disciplining in general to the penitentiary, repressive and surveillance-state meanings on which Foucault placed such deliberately exaggerated emphasis in the writings of his middle period.

Anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with all phases of the production of the New Human Being, at any rate, must probe as far back as the seventeenth century, even to the turbulences of the Reformation - and further still, to their preludes in late medieval mysticism. Whoever wanted, like the young Gorky - clearly under Nietzsche's influence - to 'write "man" in capital letters' almost unknowingly joined a tradition that had begun with the recruits of Christ in the Egyptian desert monasteries and the Pauline communi­ties in Greece and Asia Minor, those pneumatic aggregations through which the Holy Spirit, supported by the exercises in crucifixion of the flesh, was meant to bring about a 'new creation'.

The early Christians began to transform their whole lives into an experiment in order to resemble the God-man: nos autem in experi­ mentis volvimur, Augustine writes in his Confessions - only God always remains identical to himself, whereas we are tossed from trial to trialY Modern humans augmented the ascetic experimental­ism of the ancients with technical and artistic, then finally political experimentalism. The task they set themselves, in all seriousness, was to rewrite the text of the human condition - partly with updated Christian-humanist procedures, partly following the guidelines of post-Christian and post-humanist schemes of existence. The essay and the experiment are not merely literary and scientific procedures; they shaped modernity's style of existence as a whole - and, after 1789, also that of major politics and the national and global economy. An experimenter is someone who takes a chance every time, convinced that the new is always right. Needless to say, the American president Theodore Roosevelt placed himself in the same tradition when he invoked the 'great work of uplifting mankind' in 1899, exchanging the Christian world mission for civilizatory messianism."[Sloterdijk, You Must Change Yourself]

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyThu Nov 21, 2013 6:17 pm

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySat Jan 04, 2014 5:50 pm

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyMon Jun 02, 2014 6:26 am

Quote :
"Ontological subjectivity

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective." In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.


Artificial intelligence


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A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI. (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, translate what it says onto the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique. Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program."

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jun 03, 2014 1:03 am

Lyssa wrote:

He therefore thinks bionic humans or engineered humans with facility for superior senses is Progress.
Possible I suppose, but I think very unlikely. The little childish modern ego will choose its upgrading. And we can already see how people are choosing to upgrade now. And we can see how the powers at be want people to think of uppgrading. There will be so little wisdom and good gut sense in physically powerful, ram enhanced cyborgs who will be only better at making shit, appreciating shit, and turning the world(s) into shit. And they will all have backdoors programmed in in case any of them actually have some sense about them. One thing people have excessive hubris about is their ego ideal. They toss off all these things in themselves, if given half a chance, that evolution took millions of years to develop and hone. You can see this here in the worship of the partial human. They'll end up being one facet of paganism, the anarchistic boistrous side. And most likely well branded by the oligarchy.
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jun 03, 2014 6:28 am

Kovacs wrote:
Lyssa wrote:

He therefore thinks bionic humans or engineered humans with facility for superior senses is Progress.

One thing people have excessive hubris about is their ego ideal.  They toss off all these things in themselves, if given half a chance, that evolution took millions of years to develop and hone.

Yes, that's well said and I couldn't agree more.

Technology originally meant a poeisis, a self-making, an inner sculpting outwards to make manifest potentials within, while the shift now is towards creating prosthetics like the body were a cripple, Invalid-ating it!


Quote :
You can see this here in the worship of the partial human.   They'll end up being one facet of paganism, the anarchistic boistrous side.  And most likely well branded by the oligarchy.

Yes; and don't forget the other 'new age paganism' in the name of pure potential and 'inner light' trending towards de-sexualization or a de-gendering that endorses 'icons' and 'self-worshipping' of the likes of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyWed Jun 04, 2014 6:49 pm

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyFri Jun 13, 2014 8:02 am

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySun Jun 22, 2014 2:48 pm

Transhumanism:

The wet dream of those in power enslaving the rest of humanity through technology under a style of technocracy.

[Through that of A.I./robotics, genetic manipulation, and superior technological means.]

The belief that one day humanity can become technological gods of the universe thus elevating the existential position of the species to that of universal godhood itself.

The quest of immortality through that of technology or genetic manipulation.

In other words, an arrogant philosophy full of absolute hubris that once initiated globally would more than likely destroy humanity instead of elevating it which that it claims are its aims.



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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptySun Jun 22, 2014 2:54 pm



In the xmen franchise, the mutant Wolverine represents the merging of metal and skeleton. He can survive this process of full metallic integration due to his overwhelming ability to regenerate tissue.
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jul 15, 2014 5:19 pm

.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jul 15, 2014 8:46 pm

Quote :
"I have traced several lines of connection between Judaism and Transhumanism: The rise of apocalyptic, with a focus on a material rather than an other-worldly Utopia; the outsized contribution of Jews to Transhumanism; and the role of the state of Israel in benefiting humanity through technological progress.

David Pearce’s negative hedonism, the elimination of suffering, can be extrapolated to a world where no living being, neither human nor any other animal, experiences the subjective pain which today serves as a low-level driver for higher-level behavioral choices. Eliminating suffering is important, and it would be unfair to deprecate Pearce’s philosophy for “compromising” by seeking nothing more than the total elimination of pain.
...The Singularity Institute is working on the formal definition of a decision-theory based on utilitarianism, which in the limiting case fulfills each human’s true desires with the help of a friendly superintelligence. Again, a simple definition and a relatively simple extrapolation."

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jul 15, 2014 9:15 pm

Whilst on the subject of genetic manipulation, apparently they've already made a 3 parent monkey. They'll soon be splicing two (homosexual) male/female gene sets into a surrogate mother to create something which could never occur under ordinary circumstances. But hey! It's all going to be cushy and sweet because we'll be genetically modifying your favourite foods to grow wherever the fuck it wants. Electric blue tomatoes growing all years in Scandinavia anyone?
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Hrodeberto

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jul 15, 2014 10:28 pm

Satyr wrote:
I've been reading Bataille's The Accursed Share for the past week.

Interesting perspective.

He makes the point, using many cultures other then the current one, that wealth was luxury expressing itself through expenditure.
The wealthy man returned the resources back into the economy, back into the system, just like in nature where the dominant male eventually returned himself back into the system he emerged form and then came to dominate.

His point is that the current Capitalist system pools resources never completely returning them back into the system. What is returned in the form of luxury and ostentatious symbolism, is not comparable to what is retained. Slowly wealth accumulates and accumulates to such proportions that no single man, or his entire family, can spend it fast enough to maintain an equilibrium...a natural balance.

The wealthy become increasingly more rich, and the poor even more impoverished, and this results in the system need to then find new resources or to grow the economy.
In nature this return of resources occurs automatically, at the dominant organism's death, or during its lifespan, as there is no way to accumulate and safeguard resources over a certain limit.  

In man-made systems the entire structure is dedicated to preserving wealth and privilege, making this pooling of resources for time-spans beyond a single lifetime, more beyond one or two or ten generations, depending on the stability of the system and the power of the family.

This is a miserly economic system, as it does not expend its excess energies, but saves them, expending only a small portion of them in luxury and display, or in the practice of maintaining its accumulated wealth (resources).
It is an unnatural practice...resulting in sudden release of energies once control can no longer sustain itself (revolution).

The truly wealthy man is generous, because he can accumulated more of what he has an excess of, in the course of his lifetime.
It is the miser, the poor man, in spirit, who accumulates and accumulates, without wanting to release any energies, except a bare minimum, back into the system...or back into the world.

Rudolf Steiner asserted along the lines: The frugal/cheap man is spiritually expensive/wasteful. I did not ascertain its meaning much until now, from the angle presented in your post.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyTue Jul 15, 2014 11:28 pm

We can see transhumanism in today's plastic surgery. However outlandish some of the faces become the modifications are rather small compared to the fantasies of the transhumanists. Let's take a modest case: Nicole Kidman. I think NIcole Kidman actually became a rather solid actress, especially post Cruise. Then she did her lips. Now when I see her in a role, I see a woman with fake looking lips that lack the expressive range they had. She had a concept, the concept was the beauty of a younger woman, or perhaps a sexier one. She tweaked her body around that one image, and deprioritized, for example, the function of a mouth in an actor. So one thing that I think will happen with transhuman changes is that the idea that relations are internal will be ignored. X will change quality/ability 6 and think that all this will do is change quality ability 6 and nothing else. REad: side effects, just as they are with current psychotropics, will be ignored, downplayed and denied. There are many studies that show that restricted movement of facial muscles dampens one's experience of one's own emotions. Bodies are minds. NK has reduced her own range of feeling her self and her own feelings. She is rigid where she was flexible. Interpersonally, her mouth no longer participates as well in the complicated only partial body language communication with others. This would be really rather huge if she had a newborn now, but even with other adults - whose development is not going to be affected - she is more a mute. She has less to 'say'. The plastic surgeons did not just alter her lips, they altered her mind - mind in the full sense of emotions, thoughts and so on. I think transhumanism will also reflect a whole range of reductions in the range of being human, and these will be denied, just the way a significant portion of men seem not to care how odd fake breasts look at feel. This denial has been paved the way for by the plasticization of everyone into surfaces - faces and bodies whose image is the self. We are made out to be surfaces only. Only being a key word there. I am not denying that looks have significance or implying that one should not care. In a sense quite the opposite. Nicole has moved herself one step towards being a blow up sex doll, intentionally. For some, sex with a doll or machine is not less than sex with a human because they believe - as commercials and schools and much of modern society says they should - that the surface is what is real and matters. So a smooth surface that looks as smooth as skin - if not quite like skin - well, that's fine, who cares if no one is home. And NK is just a little less at home. There is a little less of a person inside there since it can no longer feel and move its mouth. If you look at homonculi y ou can see just how much of the brain focuses and prioritizes the mouth. The incredible feedback loop from the mouth to the brain to the self to the mind, soul even if you like, is not just how the lips would look if isolated in a photograph, a still shot, that is, cut off from the face.

This is how people choose. In pieces. No respect for emergent properties or interconnectedness or systems.

Modular. They think we are modular, lego piece objects that can be improved by ordering the new lego block colors and add ons.

And because of both shame and utter inability to feel themselves and notice things, transhumans will NOT give accurate reports about the damage they have done to themselves. And more idiots will become products.

This is all not pure and simple. A hearing aid can be a fine thing. Glasses. Lost abilities, certain kinds of enhancements. I am not a pure luddite. And for people who want a rule as to what is good and what is not, my suggestion is that you are identifying way too much with the words in your mind and you might want to consider meeting the rest of yourself and respecting it.
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Satyr
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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyWed Jul 16, 2014 8:48 am

Techniques/Technologies intervene upon nature/past producing artificiality.
Only after this intervention does appearance become superficial, because it has been modified, according to an idea(l), burying nature/past but not erasing it.
Techniques/Technologies, whether they are surgical, fashion, cosmetic, or learned behavior, offers the potential for imitation - hypocrisy, pretentiousness.

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Most of modern social (inter)actions are ritualized techniques, learned, imitated, and established as proper.
It gives us the illusion of parity and comforts us with its ordered patterns - we expect it as part of our routines.
Then, because of this, it bores us, and we seek in the hyperbole, the controlled experience with fear, the unexpected, the dangerous, an experience with existence.
Some seek it in philosophy.
They want to find in philosophy a mental prosthetic.
But, the majority, having become habituated with the comfort these behavioral patterns provide, and although they claim to seek clarity, honesty, insight into a reality covered up and masked by these techniques/technologies, rarely have the psychological constitution to endure exposure to a world outside the social/cultural norms.

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Their admiration of honesty and insight, and their evaluation of these possibilities, falls within their experiential standards.
They feel that there is a lot of duplicity in the human world and they crave to taste honesty, intimacy, clarity, expecting a deeper, version of their usual routines.
When they come into contact with an indifferent, colder world than the hypocritical, reliable, predictable one they've grown accustomed to they recoil in fear.

Anger, and hate, becomes their reaction, accusing the source of hate and anger to explain the feelings it produced in them.

From my experience people who claim to want intimacy and honesty and to see the reality of the world, only expect something benevolent and more profound - and rarely expect something that would contradict the reality they have become used to.

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If this process of human hybridization proceeds, a cyborg future awaits.
At some point, as with the concept of artificiality as I've defined it, the prosthetics will cover the genetic form with their corrective enhancements.

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The idea of human will cease to have a sexual implication - as no intimate relationship will be required to pass on the genetic code, and the manifestations of the past/nature, as appearance will be buried in manmade contrivances,a dding to the effect of behavioral pretenses, imitations, learned ritualized persona.

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The internet where only the mind is present, and each can choose the image (s)he wishes to project, is a precursor to a future world where the avatar can be put on, as a prosthetic, and worn like a permanent mask.
At that point the brain, still being flesh and blood, will be the only part which could expose a genetic inheritance, through subtle behavioral ticks, which contradict the techniques through their performance.
Once more action will be what exposes the past.

My comments on the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] thread apply here.
The exoskeleton prosthetic now morphs into an internally embedded gadget.
The internet, itself, is a brain prosthesis, offering each individual the capacity to appear more intelligence, educated, knowledgeable, than they truly are.
Cosmetics are for females a prosthesis; the sports car is for males a technological enhancement.  
Money, also...with it all genetic failings are compensated for; with it one can buy almost anything, including then illusion of quality.

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Memetic prosthetics are already a fact.
Idea(l)s are manufactured, packaged into neat little packets, and embedded into the human psyche to the point where it cannot function without them.
It follows that genetic prosthetics will loop back to complete the effect.

Genes evolve into memes, which manifest as idea(l)s, which evolve into techniques/technologies that then intervene upon nature/past, to enhance the increasing artificiality of the human condition - a detachment on the next level.

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PostSubject: Re: Transhumanism Transhumanism EmptyWed Jul 16, 2014 10:57 am

If people want a future prison planet where everything is controlled by a tyrannical technocratic minority, then yes, keep on supporting transhumanism. A technological nightmare with the seeds of humanity's own destruction.
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