I guess it was inevitable. Any philosophy oriented toward a better tomorrow eventually accrues passionate evangelists, and with enough groundswell verges on becoming a movement, often manifesting at least one cult or political party in the process.
^ If your movement primarily attracts zealots it's either not ready yet or it's done.
At the beginning of a movement when nothing can really be done yet you mostly only attract zealots. At the end of a movement when you've achieved many of your goals, you only have zealots remaining.
In case like me, you were also wondering what Transhumanists are supposed to believe in (what the article says is):
> transhumanists have deepened their belief in a fated future in which the human species will achieve “augmented” evolution through fusing with machines, leading to the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that will far outstrip all human knowledge and achieve God-like powers (The Singularity). This digital deity will lead us to a new era, in which all human biological limitations will be transcended; bringing about end to sickness, suffering and even death, and leading us to colonise the cosmos
Which is gross mischaracterization. Many transhumanists do not think the singularity is real. It is just a prediction of simplified model, where in reality technological progress would hit limitations not accounted in the model. And even if the singulary happened, it would be unpredictable what it would bring.
Frankly, this is wrong.
The singularity is first of all, mischaracterized.
The singularity is the point in time when AI has become smarter(however you may define it) than humans. The point is, we don't know what will happen beyond that point. It does not necessarily imply "God-like powers".
It is the "not knowing" I think that is interesting.
Transhumanists simply believe in augmenting their bodies beyond their natural capabilities. The rest is just misrepresentation.
Me personally, I believe we should throw a wrench in the whole thing because the people who are in control are some of the worst people.
Unless that changes, it would be a mistake to develop this technology further.
Transhumanism has an extremely rich literary history. Just grab any hard sci fi book from Greg Bear, his entire 21 century future history has transhumanists as part of the unspoken environment of normal, where transhumanists are just normal everyday people, despite being half or more composed of machinery.
What the transhumanist cultists don't realize is that Bear's novels, along with most of the transhumanist subgenre, are cautionary tales, not blueprints for a bright, shining future.
This is only talking about a very specific and extreme type of transhumanist. Not acknowledging that makes the author sound to me like a crank with an axe to grind. (I'm choosing to ignore here the substantial an-LLM-wrote-this vibe I get.)
If you wear glasses or had braces or use an insulin pump or take Ritalin, then, congratulations, you're a transhumanist. The rest is just a matter of degrees.
As wizzwizz4 says in a sibling comment, the post is conflating TESCREAL and transhumanism.
I don’t think this is accurate at all. Transhumanism is a pretty clearly defined group with specific moral beliefs that not everyone agrees with. It’s like saying if you’ve ever forgiven someone when they did something bad to you, you’re a Christian.
You've completely missed the argument and tried to turn it into a No True Scotsman.
Transhumanism is not about human augmentation, it's about a misty-eyed view of human augmentation experienced through a haze of hand-me-down religiosity.
I spent some time following these people in the early 00s and they were talking about replacing nerves with Cat 5 - and other obvious nonsense. Complete lunacy.
It's a fundamentalist millenarian movement which is inherently faith-based, contemptuous of physical and psychological reality, and irrational. As the article says - it's just another in a long, long cycle of similar movements with similar dynamics.
The only thing that changes is the set dressing. The play is always the same, and always ends in horror and tragedy.
No, this time will not be different. Affirming that it will be is part of the sales pitch. But somehow - for reasons that are unsurprising to anyone who knows a little psychology - that never quite seems to happen.
No, wearing glasses doesn't make you the adept of any ideological current, such as transhumanism. At best you could say it precludes you from being an adept of certain ideologies that would oppose wearing glasses, such as very strict "naturalism" (i.e. people who believe it's important to only eat or wear all-natural products), if you want to be self-consistent.
You could also say that wearing glasses or having an insulin pump installed makes you a transhuman, but it can't make you a transhumanist. And plenty of people are perfectly happy to be slightly ideologically inconsistent, or follow more nuanced ideologies, where, say, certain artificial enhancements are allowed and others are not. After all, even the biggest anti-drug crusaders accept coffee or at least tea as acceptable substances.
> If you wear glasses or had braces or use an insulin pump, then, congratulations, you're a transhumanist. The rest is just a matter of degrees.
Glasses restore a function that was supposed to be there in the first place. They are called "corrective lenses" for a reason; to correct is to presuppose a defect which must be corrected to restore what is normative. Insulin pumps also restore a function that was supposed to be there in the first place. That it is implanted into the body is totally irrelevant. As with glasses, the relationship between the person and the pump is instrumental. My heart or brain, however, are not my instruments. They are part of me.
However, the essence of transhumanism, and the ultimate source of issues, is that it turns the human being into an engineering project that seeks to transcend the human. Metaphysically, this is, as polite academic philosophers might say, problematic. To transcend presupposes an existing limit inherent to the thing by virtue of its nature. You wouldn't say that adding a new video card to your computer or building an additional floor on a building transcends the original computer or the original building. This was always possible, as these things are effectively aggregates. The mechanistic metaphysics here precludes the possibility of transcendence, because all you can ever really do is rearrange the furniture. You also wouldn't say that adulthood is the transcendence of childhood, or that adaptation is some kind of transcendence of the species. You're still operating within the scope of possibilities of the species. The nature of a thing is what circumscribes its limits. Technology is not able to transcend human nature, because technology is already within the scope of human power. You can no more cause your own transcendence than you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Transcendence is not merely the actualization of the potentials already present within a thing. It entails the intrinsic "expansion" of the powers of a thing beyond what is possible by virtue of the nature of a thing. However, any modification of a human being can only be either instrumental, the introduction of defect, or restorative. In the best case, we're talking medicine and health. In the worst case, dehumanization, objectification, and commodification of human beings.
I agree with the mistakenly conflated definitions, and that this is talking about something more specific than transhumanism.
The tools you mention don't alter the species itself. Once we start heavily GMing our offspring (does anyone think this won't take hold culturally in the next 4 or 5 generations?) those folks will start to become transhuman.
> This is only talking about a very specific and extreme type of transhumanist.
The one with the tendencies to treat it as a cult? Isn't that the point of the article?
I am not really sure what point you're trying to make. It's like everytime I critique capitalism, someone appears and corrects me that what we have is actually a "crony capitalism", and the real good capitalism is somewhere in a mystical faraway place. Why insist on correcting the name then?
If you used a wheel to move something heavy from one place to another, you're a transhuman.
If you used fire to disinfect your recently caught prey, you're a transhumanist.
If you read a book ..
The only conclusion to be made from this article, is that humans have been on a transformation treadmill for a long, long time - long enough that we can no longer recognize transformation when we see it, or we are so tired of acknowledging it that we just don't any more, or such that we need to see it before we believe it is happening - i.e. next years new iPhone purchase, etc.
I can't take seriously any written document with a typo in the first words, and of the title nonetheless. Literally the first thing that came to my mind after I read the title was "tranhumanism" must be a new concept unrelated to transhumanism.
I remember meeting a few transhumanists when I lived in Silicon Valley. Whenever they would go into their schpeal, I'd respond with: "Well, if you go to church every Sunday and behave, you'll go to heaven."
It would catch them off guard, and then I would point out that they have faith in transhumanism like Christians have faith in Jesus. There would be a quick "get it" facial expression, then we'd both laugh. The transhumanists who I encountered were opened-minded enough to realize the difference between faith and reason.
I'd then point out that the Egyptians had similar beliefs, and say that if you freeze your body, or head, at death; most likely someone would use it for some strange science experiment in the future.
That being said, if I was wealthy, I'd love to freeze my body. I'm sure it'll come in handy for someone at some point, just like Egyptian mummies did.
I think we will live longer, and even achieve suspended animation. But a brain deprived of oxygen is damaged way too fast be useful. But who knows, humanity in 10,000 years will be very different from now, if we survive that long as a species.
Except Christianity would find transhumanism exceedingly bland, for being an unoriginal repeat of the Original Sin; the latest scheme of humanity to be a God.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
> I would point out that they have faith in transhumanism like Christians have faith in Jesus
That's just wrong. Pacemakers are a form of transhumanism, improving the human condition through technology. When you comment on the difference between faith and reason, say transhumanism is based in faith, you're implying it's not reasonable.
Even if you're talking specifically of those that support cryonics like Alcor, or hope for mind uploading your statement is still flawed. Most don't have an absolute belief these technologies will come about, but hope they do and work towards bringing about that future.
Maybe the word you're looking for is hope. Transhumanists hope for a better future in the same way Christians hope they'll go to heaven.
The article basically builds up a straw man definition, which makes the whole thing rather worthless.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism) gives a much better overview of what the movement is and its history; the "came about in the 1990s in silicon valley" is just wrong, to start with.
Um. The Singularity isn't religious in its origin. It's literally a reference to a mathematical singularity.
I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characterization, but this is a big one to get wrong. What the term has become in its pseudo-cult modern context is entirely divorced from what it came out of.
The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events to a specific point in the future that will lead to some very religious sounding results:
* Eternal life
* A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong
- An end to poverty
- An end to disease
* Personal Freedom
This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.
I don't know; there was definitely an apocalyptic quality to the Singularity in Marooned In Real Time, and superintelligences in A Fire Upon the Deep were literally referred to as Gods (there's a brief reference to Applied Theology in there, IIRC.) So you could argue that there was at least an unconscious parallel to religion in the way Vernor Vinge saw the Singularity.
I agree. I believe in all those things, but in a sense that they seem inevitable, not as something I’m rooting for.
The singularity, distilled, is that if/when we get AGI or other world-changing technology, accurately predicting what happens next is impossible. As the rate of technology advance increases, the interval over which you can make reasonable predictions shortens until eventually what happens tomorrow is a role of the dice.
I believe in aliens in the same way: the universe is huge so I think they must exist because (small likelihood) x (huge number of chances) seems inevitable. I don’t think they’re flying over Idaho to terrorize farmers, though.
The more I hear about Transhumanism, the more I think that people in NorCal need some real problems to deal with.
EDIT:
The tech industry went from resolving everyday problems ("how do I make spreadsheets more quickly", "how do I send this information to a person on the other side of the country") to trying to play God with AI.
>The biologist Julian Huxley popularised the term "transhumanism" in a 1957 essay.[ The contemporary meaning of the term was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".[7] The assertion laid the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More
Huxley was British, The New School was in NYC, More also British. I'm not sure you can pin it all on NorCal.
many of the weird singularity/transhumanist people do have real problems. lot of childhood trauma. lot of OCD. i guess if you call autism a mental illness now someone will jump out from behind a bush and correct you, but lots of mental health problems downstream of living with autism. if you read about the most extreme groups, people are in and out of mental hospitals with psychotic symptoms.
NorCal has been a feeding ground for cult leaders for 100+ years, but I actually think fewer real problems would be better. the people out there without real problems, just have GPT wrapper startups and go lie to people on podcasts, which is annoying, but better for them and everyone else.
[+] [-] wryoak|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|11 months ago|reply
At the beginning of a movement when nothing can really be done yet you mostly only attract zealots. At the end of a movement when you've achieved many of your goals, you only have zealots remaining.
[+] [-] nico|11 months ago|reply
> transhumanists have deepened their belief in a fated future in which the human species will achieve “augmented” evolution through fusing with machines, leading to the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that will far outstrip all human knowledge and achieve God-like powers (The Singularity). This digital deity will lead us to a new era, in which all human biological limitations will be transcended; bringing about end to sickness, suffering and even death, and leading us to colonise the cosmos
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zajio1am|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Gud|11 months ago|reply
Transhumanists simply believe in augmenting their bodies beyond their natural capabilities. The rest is just misrepresentation.
Me personally, I believe we should throw a wrench in the whole thing because the people who are in control are some of the worst people. Unless that changes, it would be a mistake to develop this technology further.
[+] [-] edanm|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ctkhn|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cguess|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bsenftner|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|11 months ago|reply
If you wear glasses or had braces or use an insulin pump or take Ritalin, then, congratulations, you're a transhumanist. The rest is just a matter of degrees.
As wizzwizz4 says in a sibling comment, the post is conflating TESCREAL and transhumanism.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] elicksaur|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gabruoy|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|11 months ago|reply
Transhumanism is not about human augmentation, it's about a misty-eyed view of human augmentation experienced through a haze of hand-me-down religiosity.
I spent some time following these people in the early 00s and they were talking about replacing nerves with Cat 5 - and other obvious nonsense. Complete lunacy.
It's a fundamentalist millenarian movement which is inherently faith-based, contemptuous of physical and psychological reality, and irrational. As the article says - it's just another in a long, long cycle of similar movements with similar dynamics.
The only thing that changes is the set dressing. The play is always the same, and always ends in horror and tragedy.
No, this time will not be different. Affirming that it will be is part of the sales pitch. But somehow - for reasons that are unsurprising to anyone who knows a little psychology - that never quite seems to happen.
[+] [-] simiones|11 months ago|reply
You could also say that wearing glasses or having an insulin pump installed makes you a transhuman, but it can't make you a transhumanist. And plenty of people are perfectly happy to be slightly ideologically inconsistent, or follow more nuanced ideologies, where, say, certain artificial enhancements are allowed and others are not. After all, even the biggest anti-drug crusaders accept coffee or at least tea as acceptable substances.
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|11 months ago|reply
Glasses restore a function that was supposed to be there in the first place. They are called "corrective lenses" for a reason; to correct is to presuppose a defect which must be corrected to restore what is normative. Insulin pumps also restore a function that was supposed to be there in the first place. That it is implanted into the body is totally irrelevant. As with glasses, the relationship between the person and the pump is instrumental. My heart or brain, however, are not my instruments. They are part of me.
However, the essence of transhumanism, and the ultimate source of issues, is that it turns the human being into an engineering project that seeks to transcend the human. Metaphysically, this is, as polite academic philosophers might say, problematic. To transcend presupposes an existing limit inherent to the thing by virtue of its nature. You wouldn't say that adding a new video card to your computer or building an additional floor on a building transcends the original computer or the original building. This was always possible, as these things are effectively aggregates. The mechanistic metaphysics here precludes the possibility of transcendence, because all you can ever really do is rearrange the furniture. You also wouldn't say that adulthood is the transcendence of childhood, or that adaptation is some kind of transcendence of the species. You're still operating within the scope of possibilities of the species. The nature of a thing is what circumscribes its limits. Technology is not able to transcend human nature, because technology is already within the scope of human power. You can no more cause your own transcendence than you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Transcendence is not merely the actualization of the potentials already present within a thing. It entails the intrinsic "expansion" of the powers of a thing beyond what is possible by virtue of the nature of a thing. However, any modification of a human being can only be either instrumental, the introduction of defect, or restorative. In the best case, we're talking medicine and health. In the worst case, dehumanization, objectification, and commodification of human beings.
[+] [-] throwaway345238|11 months ago|reply
The tools you mention don't alter the species itself. Once we start heavily GMing our offspring (does anyone think this won't take hold culturally in the next 4 or 5 generations?) those folks will start to become transhuman.
[+] [-] js8|11 months ago|reply
The one with the tendencies to treat it as a cult? Isn't that the point of the article?
I am not really sure what point you're trying to make. It's like everytime I critique capitalism, someone appears and corrects me that what we have is actually a "crony capitalism", and the real good capitalism is somewhere in a mystical faraway place. Why insist on correcting the name then?
[+] [-] aa-jv|11 months ago|reply
If you used fire to disinfect your recently caught prey, you're a transhumanist.
If you read a book ..
The only conclusion to be made from this article, is that humans have been on a transformation treadmill for a long, long time - long enough that we can no longer recognize transformation when we see it, or we are so tired of acknowledging it that we just don't any more, or such that we need to see it before we believe it is happening - i.e. next years new iPhone purchase, etc.
[+] [-] lutusp|11 months ago|reply
Wait ... isn't it "transhumanist"? This typo appears once more in the article, just enough to thwart efficient computer content searches.
[+] [-] mrb|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|11 months ago|reply
It would catch them off guard, and then I would point out that they have faith in transhumanism like Christians have faith in Jesus. There would be a quick "get it" facial expression, then we'd both laugh. The transhumanists who I encountered were opened-minded enough to realize the difference between faith and reason.
I'd then point out that the Egyptians had similar beliefs, and say that if you freeze your body, or head, at death; most likely someone would use it for some strange science experiment in the future.
That being said, if I was wealthy, I'd love to freeze my body. I'm sure it'll come in handy for someone at some point, just like Egyptian mummies did.
[+] [-] throw_m239339|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|11 months ago|reply
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
[+] [-] adleyjulian|11 months ago|reply
That's just wrong. Pacemakers are a form of transhumanism, improving the human condition through technology. When you comment on the difference between faith and reason, say transhumanism is based in faith, you're implying it's not reasonable.
Even if you're talking specifically of those that support cryonics like Alcor, or hope for mind uploading your statement is still flawed. Most don't have an absolute belief these technologies will come about, but hope they do and work towards bringing about that future.
Maybe the word you're looking for is hope. Transhumanists hope for a better future in the same way Christians hope they'll go to heaven.
[+] [-] jmclnx|11 months ago|reply
>Transhumanism first emerged in Silicon Valley in the 1990s
That alone give me pause over this movement :)
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|11 months ago|reply
Yep, we've seen this before.
[+] [-] myrmidon|11 months ago|reply
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism) gives a much better overview of what the movement is and its history; the "came about in the 1990s in silicon valley" is just wrong, to start with.
[+] [-] readthenotes1|11 months ago|reply
Its not difficult...
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nh23423fefe|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] blogabegonija|11 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] michaelgburton|11 months ago|reply
I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characterization, but this is a big one to get wrong. What the term has become in its pseudo-cult modern context is entirely divorced from what it came out of.
[+] [-] zaphar|11 months ago|reply
* Eternal life
* A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong
- An end to poverty
- An end to disease
* Personal Freedom
This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Rhapso|11 months ago|reply
I personally think the singularity happened back in the 90s and its just been very disappointing instead of the rapture that was imagined.
[+] [-] kstrauser|11 months ago|reply
The singularity, distilled, is that if/when we get AGI or other world-changing technology, accurately predicting what happens next is impossible. As the rate of technology advance increases, the interval over which you can make reasonable predictions shortens until eventually what happens tomorrow is a role of the dice.
I believe in aliens in the same way: the universe is huge so I think they must exist because (small likelihood) x (huge number of chances) seems inevitable. I don’t think they’re flying over Idaho to terrorize farmers, though.
[+] [-] lenerdenator|11 months ago|reply
EDIT: The tech industry went from resolving everyday problems ("how do I make spreadsheets more quickly", "how do I send this information to a person on the other side of the country") to trying to play God with AI.
[+] [-] kstrauser|11 months ago|reply
(It’s one of the reasons I love it here. That same energy manifests amazing art, hackerspaces, meetups, and other fun things.)
[+] [-] tim333|11 months ago|reply
>The biologist Julian Huxley popularised the term "transhumanism" in a 1957 essay.[ The contemporary meaning of the term was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".[7] The assertion laid the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More
Huxley was British, The New School was in NYC, More also British. I'm not sure you can pin it all on NorCal.
[+] [-] throwaway91257|11 months ago|reply
NorCal has been a feeding ground for cult leaders for 100+ years, but I actually think fewer real problems would be better. the people out there without real problems, just have GPT wrapper startups and go lie to people on podcasts, which is annoying, but better for them and everyone else.