ooh! mucho inteagument. my kind of thread. yeah... discuss Transhumanism... a friend sent me a text message that simply said: Right here, right now, one quanta away, is a raging universe that is both transhuman and hyperdimensional
Its just that I think I suffer from an extremly mild technophobia. (still refuse to own a cellphone) At first. transhumanism -- it seems like the last dying breaths of a sentient race in denial to where our technological progress had brought up; the brink of total destruction. But I recently read an article by astrophysicist Martin Rees about it being the future of human evolution and he really just put it in terms which made sense to me.
I think before transhuminists goals can be acheived we need to kill about 4 or 5 billion people. Streamline the population little bit. Ever read the book Rainbow Six? I was routing for the terrorists.
..this is where I fear transhumanism may also bring us. The realm of the elitism globalist. Just check out the Georgia Guidestones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones Goal number one: maintain humanity under 500,000,000.
Yea, see I don\'t really want that many people to die, but I don\'t see how we can restore our ecosystem and resources to a manageable state unless it happens. I don\'t believe a Utopian society can exist with so many brainwashed humans walking around. We need to wipe the slate clean, in a fucked up sense. But then again I have conflicting belief systems in constant struggle with each other to control my thoughts. So I don\'t know what I want.
Anybody who is pro-transhuman I view as someone who is simply afraid of either (a)dying or (b)losing power/control.
woah woah woah on all the depopulating rubbish. there\'s plenty space for us all. we havnt spent the last of centuries learning how to build things only to go \"where do we put everyone, there\'s too many of us... maybe we should thin the numbers\". anyone play sim city? archologies? i got my own picture of them... kinda more like the hanging gardens. imagine a huuuuge piramid, stuck on an upside-down piramid poking out of the pacific ocean... every layer open, and every open layer awash with vegetation.... plenty for a few hundred billion, and you guys are freakin out just when the population boom is starting to level out!? fek, hadn\'t you realised we have space travel capability too? its a really big place out there. the over-population thing is an illusion, utter jibberish, bulderdash, hobswackle, bull, crap, bs, lies. space is infinate, and short of coming up with some reeeeeally fancy ftl travel, will always be expanding more than we could catch up with it... and so, we can never run out of space! hurray!
I believe that the smarter we get, the worse the world and future gets. We need to become dumber or reach a thinking hiatus, lol. Obviously that is not possible, but transhumanism promotes expanding technology and knowledge to even greater lengths, therefore I think it just perpetuates the problems that we face today. The smarter we get, the more removed we become from our natural state, which serves a dinosauric purpose to keep our race alive. When we fiddle with things, we fiddle with nature, and nature will always win over humanity in the sense that we are a part of it and can\'t escape it. When we start to broaden our technologies we also decrease something else that we don\'t know about. For example, we have the internet but we lose the personal contact with someone else, which is something that keeps the human mind in balance. We use our basic instincts to form these technologies (path of least resistance, desire to interact with others) but then we end up eliminating these same desires by the technology we create...
Thats the conundrum though, some believers in transhumanism would argue that maybe organic breeding and evolution is only the first stage of human progression and then our integration with technology IS our natural . I\'ll attempt to find the article but some neural-psychologists say that we\'ve reached an optimum brain size, and that we as a species can\'t get any more intelligent because if our brain gets any bigger, it looses communication power and process power is lost. So the proposition is that our natural path of evolution is to integrate ourself with the technology we\'ve been able to invent. This seems to be happening too -- ever since the advent of irrigation and agriculture, since the advent of civilization the human gene pool has begun to get a lot more cluttered. We aren\'t exposed to the same elements which define a species (natural selection) I don\'t know, I need to come back to this, I\'m over thinking it.
The transhumanism is what we are living right now look at technology between 1930 and 2000 we are living the future. Thomas Jefferson would shit himself if he saw that America became one of th greatest countries in the world. But the Georiga Guidestones interested me. For one thing no disease/viruses. Think if we took all the people who had viruses from society and let them live the last of their years and all the viruses won\'t be transmitted to the people who don\'t have them. For instance America has aids because of the slaves who came over in the 1700\'s and 1800\'s. I\'m not blaming the blacks for aids if they were never brought here we would be aid\'s free. But we should blame the British back in that day for it. But it really doesn\'t matter. But we could get rid of all viruses by doing what I said earlier in the reply. Just take all the people who have them and distort them from society. Ok don\'t think I\'m the new Hitler, that will never happen and it would cost too much money if that ever happened and I don\'t want that to happen that would be horrible and reason why I posted the idea is because it would be the only real way to get rid of viruses but it doesn\'t really matter we die we die. But wiping out 6 billion people and creating a new life is just messed up. We need to let the world grow and see what happens could be good and could be bad or it could simply be the end. In 2012 2/3\'s of the world is supposve to die. Lets see what happens I can\'t wait
Maybe we\'re just not using our intelligence responsibly. Certain technologies, perhaps, have been misused by the population, who want instant gratification without using their better judgement (I\'m not elevating my own status in this respect, by the way). I don\'t think getting smarter is a problem, but maybe we need to get a little bit wiser at the same time. It\'s just another viewpoint. Scientific discoveries are morally ambiguous. It\'s what people do with those discoveries that can make them seem \"good\" or \"evil\". I think Carl Sagan once said something to that effect. It might apply here.
the idea of it any time soon worries me because i just can\'t think of the average ppl around me having more means to persue what they want as what they persue is already harmful to each other. ppl are by nature - rright now as i see it - selfish, petty, insecure, and competitive - so who, when, and how ppl will be better than each other may mean an even bigger gap between rich and poor. to me i just don\'t trust the government and pwer elite - who have a hold of everything before anybody else. the one equalizing factor is that anybody can b born with an amazing mind - the concept of buying one really disturbs me. i am all for things that can correct problems - help the deaf hear - help the blind see, etc. but as for enhancing anything - i think we have enough separating us from each other as it is. how could u have a little kids soccer team if the rich kid in town has olympic grade breathing software? i just don\'t beleive there is anyway this stuff won\'t exacerbate class differences. maybe i\'m just a pessimist - but i think humanity needs alot more work on the soul before we start enhancing the mind or body.
I personally think from what I read that when Julian Huxley coined the term in 1957, he meant it more like thinking outside the box, expanding your mind, \"zooming out\" on the world in essence. Examining the bigger picture of life and the world and how everything goes together. Like when you trip enough and u can take a step back and see the world in an abstract way. Back then it seems life was more basic. You ate, slept, found a mate, procreated, raised your kids, and died. I don\'t think a large percentage of the population thought about anything outside of that. Now, the way I see it, I think what the Transhumanists have been doing since the eighties is not neccesarily a good thing for civilization. Sure not getting sick or hurt or losing people that you love sounds like its all peaches and cream, but I think that would most likely put us in a whole new world of hurt. I don\'t feel that you should mess with things you don\'t fully understand, and I don\'t believe any human could possibly completely comprehend whats going on here. Nobody could undeniably say for sure why we\'re really here, or what we\'re supposed to be doing, or what\'s going to happen next. The way I see it, we can speculate until we\'re blue in the face but I don\'t think anyone can ever know for sure untill the end. We could all be a figment of some creatures imagination in a different reality for all we really know about it. I know thats completely far fetched, I don\'t really believe that, understand that I was just illustrating a point. I don\'t know, hopefully your catching my drift. Maybe i\'m just underconfident, or pesimistic, but I would never have the audacity to attempt something like that. I would be very reluctant to change any major part of the entire human experience because you can\'t forsee all of the consequences and reprocutions of your actions. We\'re running this rat race for some reason and i guess i\'m more of a go with the flow kinda girl in that respect. On the other hand, I suppose its possible that death is a problem that humanity is meant to find an answer to. For whatever reason that just seems highly unlikely to me. If there was no death, what would make life worth living? I think we\'re all kind of driven by the fact that our time on this earth is limited. We only have so many chances to love and experience all that is this world. How could we know if we eliminated aging and death that we aren\'t denying our selves something even better?
its not all that far fetched hinduism and a few other religions see time has the inhale/exhale of god IE universes are created and crushed within this cycle creating ages of enlighenment ect personally it\'s easy to see technology already becoming a crutch but who the fucks gonna revert to whippin\' up mungbeans in used toilet paper in some remote woodland just to avoid progress
I really agree with some of the principals in hinduism and even more so trancendentalism. I would definatly entertain the idea that \"god\" is the one-ness of everything or the universe. Therefore when you die, you decompose, turn to earth, that dirt grows trees and sustains life, then the cycle is complete. Your one with the world. It makes sense to me.
p.s. WHen I was a little girl, like 6 or 7, I would always wonder if my life was just like a movie that something somewhere was watching
round the same age this lil boy upon spotting stray dogs/cats would get insomnia pondering how fucked up that life would be to the point of tears same concept cept instead of questioning a higher power watching me I by some weird OCD based mental state tried to project myself into others