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Comments
Everything I have read about it agrees with you. It is a very long-term thing (and, in fact, that's why many believers in it are looking into cryo-freezing, as a stepping point).
You have it backwards.
People do not pay for the money- they pay for someone else to do the work to get the money. It is not the product that is being paid for, but the labour in getting the product.
Blah, that sounds silly.
It is like paying somebody to do a high-school essay for you. Yes, you're technically paying someone to produce an end product for you, but in reality, you are just paying someone else to take the time out to do the work for you.
Then again, emotions aren't solely information-based, but are triggered by an incredibly complex array of chemical reactions that are still fairly obscure to science. I'm not sure how effectively that could be simulated in an artificial body, especially at the level of knowledge that we have now.
I am sure that transhumanists have good intentions and all that, but that doesn't mean that they aren't doing it the wrong way.
-shrug-
I do not know enough about the sciences to be able to know whether it is possible.
However, it does seem to me that you are judging it too quickly. If you do not know how it would be done (if it could be done, please note), it seems rather ridiculous to me to judge it for what it might do to people.
For example-
It also does not mean they are doing it the wrong way.
I guess I should just ask you one question;
What, exactly, about transhumanity is it that makes you think that it is going to strip people of their emotion?
(Also, please note that I'm not even a transhumanist here. I just think it's silly to dismiss it because of problems with it that might crop up.)
I get what you're saying, and in an ideal sense that's true, but that's not the real outcome when labour is so heavily undervalued. After all, we live in a social context where labour is largely undervalued; having is important, doing is not. So while the the money is technically transferred as a means of saving labour on part of the paying individual, the perceived value (and, therefore and unfortunately, the true value) is in the resource itself. Take the real gold example once more; while it requires labour to find, excavate and refine, it generates its own value by virtue of being gold rather than some other resource. In this case, the labour isn't generating value -- it's the perception of gold as valuable.
I would honestly say that it is not really either the product or the labour, but both- you're paying somebody else to do the work to get you the end product.
It's really, really stupid, but that's what it is.
Bleh, I already said that in several of my previous posts.
Mind you, if you don't find those explanations sufficient, it's not my only argument against transhumanism, it was only the first one on the top of my head. There's also the problem of authority and responsiblity - radical transhumanist technologies have the power to change the very fundamentals of humanity. Would you trust any institution sufficiently enough to let them control it? From a psychological perspective, the mentality and thoughts of a transhuman would be radically different from what they are now, due to factors such as immortality, biological invinciblity etc. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but is a potentially worrying factor open to speculations. If I sat down and thought about the subject, I could probably think of more.
Speculation is the root of critical thinking.
Well, no, you didn't. At least, not in a way that doesn't show a misunderstanding of how transhumanity (wants to) work(s).
That is a point I will allow you.
In an ideal world, yes, there would be. In the world we live in... No, not so long as there are people who would continue to want to abuse it.
Then again, transhumanity would require an ideal world to even happen, due to the sciences required for it and all that.
That may be, butjesus christ how did I get suckered into this?
I wiped my post because I didn't want to get into this, how'd you draw me back in.
I have been compared to a tornado.
I helped! I helped!
Look, just suffice it to say that transhumanity is an ideal that a lot of people wish to work towards, not something that can practically be put into effect for a long, long time.
And that's it. If you want to debate the value of gold in MMO's, OK, but other than that I'm out.
I wasn't planning on continuing the debate, unless you did. Obviously, that's not the case, so I guess I'll call it quits.
I totally would dig being a cyborg-guy.
Sign me up when it's finally safe.
Sorry for reviving the thread of argument, but, isn't it possible that by the point we replace biological bodies with mechanical ones we are going to have artificial intelligence advanced enough to be able to have emotions, or at least run on a decent facsimile?
I find transhumanism silly by and large.
More "radical" we-must-all-become-computers transhumanism anyway. I really don't have any opinions on augmentations, other than I fear they might widen the gap between the poor and the rich.
@vandro:
Questionable. Prosthetic body parts are something that we're making a lot of progress in, with new innovations constantly coming. We're pretty far off from building an artificial body but it's easy to imagine that we will get there eventually if we continue along our current path.AI (in the sense of simulating human intelligence/emotions) is something that has had a considerable amount of work put into it with almost no real progress at all and is the sort of thing that's been "ten years away" for an awful lot longer than ten years. I still think it could be possible, but I wouldn't make any speculation as to when other than "not any time soon".
Argh, didn't get to say my take on the argument when it was actually going on.
Basically, I don't think brain uploading won't be feasible in the next few centuries. And even then, I doubt it will catch on because of the whole "killing the person and making a copy" thing.
Well, there's persistence of "self" from the uploaded brain's perspective; it would certainly consider itself to be the same person as the original brain. It's less "killing the person and making a copy" and more "splitting the person into two copies and killing one of them".
Which is...not necessarily better, but still arguably quite different, all in all. It's a philosophical distinction more than anything.
True.
Still, it involves killing a guy, which is not good.
From a physical perspective, yeah. From a philosophical one, you could get into all sorts of arguments about whether the end of biological life is necessarily the end of a "person" and blah blah blah.
If a person persists as long as their thoughts or ideas do, death doesn't kill a person anyway, so there's no need for brain uploading.
Sure, but that doesn't really wring true. Besides, nobody shares all their thoughts and ideas with others.
You could say a person persists as long as their mind does, but then you have to define "mind"...
Brain uploading is physically impossible?
*sighs and crosses that off the list of, "Ways I may achieve immortality"*
Nobody said that. The issue is whether your uploaded brain is technically still "you" or just a copy of you, which is mainly a philosophical issue rather than a physical one.
Although if my actual body wasn't killed immediately, I'd expect a constant hookup that streams my memories and such (if that's possible) right up to when I die as otherwise it would feel odd
Every time I see that phrase, for reasons that Alex went over while I was asleep, I can only respond with this:
There will never be any such thing as "post-scarcity". Even if we ever get enough resources to pull it off (or rather, stop using too much because what we already use in the developed world is too much to be sustainable for everyone in the world to use), certain people are going to own or at least have disproportionate influence over those resources. They will always artificially create scarcity. Always.
I'm willing to go ahead and say it's gonna be a "never". AI works via algorithms as a consequence of circuit flow, and the biological brain works via fuzzy associative reinforcement as a consequence of how neurons are connected and reinforced. Trying to shoehorn the latter into the former's paradigm results in a hideous amount of computational overhead to produce what's essentially an ordinary cache that looks like it got hit by a hurricane.
The thing is, there's little reason you'd want to anyway. Computers are good at doing sequences of things lightning fast, and biological brains are good at abstract pattern recognition and creative processes that are frankly more important in our daily lives.
We will eliminate scarcity by using up everything, thus everyone is dead and we no longer have to get into stupid debates about transhumanism.
Don't be so pessimist! We'll just have to kill all the capitalist pigs! And then implement the thought police!
Why would anyone ever need to artificially create scarcity? The universe is finite, the planet even more so.
The post-scarcity concept, as anything other than fuel for speculative fiction, is absurd.
I think post-scarcity refers more to the functionally infinite presence of useful resources, not actually infinite presence of any and all resources.
Yeah, but the former really can't happen when you consider the tendency of the human population to grow, the fact that living space is a vital resource, and that not all places to live are interchangeable (and thus, many people will want to live in the same place).