Transhumanism: What's the Plan? (2020)
paulskallas.substack.com
paulskallas.substack.com
Also, it's important to understand that our understanding of interfacing with the human nervous system is not as in the gutters as most people think. Right now you can find labs interfacing computers with nerves:
A recent, of many, example: https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/health-tech/its-like-you-have...
Going back slightly further, this is a company interfacing with your retina: https://secondsight.com/discover-argus/#
Going back even further, this is a person interfacing with your visual cortex: http://web.archive.org/web/20050404225434/http://www.artific...
Here are some videos of the original prototypes in one of the first patients: http://web.archive.org/web/20050312143129/http://www.artific...
What's very interesting is there's a breakdown of the costs/components of this system on this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20050312145543/http://www.artific...
1 miniature camera mounted on eyeglasses
1 frame grabber
1 microcomputer
1 stimulus generation module
2 implanted electrode arrays with percutaneous pedestals
3 sets of rechargeable batteries and 1 charger (customer is responsible for replacement batteries as needed)
Prosthetic optics -> Stimulation (input)
I'm pretty confident these visionaries are asking the bold questions:
What can be?
Why not give it a shot?
Reading your words I can't determine if you are expressing doubt or admiration, but assuming admiration, I think they are planning for a greater vision of the future with future tech.
If that sounds cool then the places to find out about it and to talk about it are Less Wrong and Scott Alexander's substack. In no way do I consider myself affiliated to transhumanism as a movement, but I do, still strongly encourage exploring the ideas.
>The NIA Interventions Testing Program (ITP) has to date reported on four drugs with consistent major effects on mouse lifespan in one or both sexes and found evidence for significant but less dramatic effect of four other drugs.
>Rapamycin, started at 9 months of age, was found to increase median lifespan by as much as 26% in females and 23% in males, and to retard many aspects of age‐related pathological change (Harrison et al., 2009; Miller et al., 2014). Surprisingly, similarly strong lifespan effects were seen even in mice not given rapamycin until 20 months of age (Harrison et al., 2009).
>Acarbose can lead to an increase of 22% in median lifespan in male mice, and to a significant, but smaller, 5% increase in female mice (Harrison, 2014; Strong, 2016). Both rapamycin and acarbose improve longevity in the oldest age‐groups, as indicated by a statistical test that compares the proportion of control and drug‐treated mice surviving to the 90th percentile age of the joint distribution, the Wang/Allison test (Wang, Li, Redden, Weindruch, & Allison, 2004). Acarbose produces significant longevity increases, including survival to the 90th percentile, in both sexes, when started as late as 16 months of age (Strong, 2016).
>A third drug, 17‐α‐estradiol (17aE2), a nonfeminizing congener of the well‐known estrogen 17‐β‐estradiol, increases lifespan of male mice by 19% (Harrison, 2014; Strong, 2016) and has a significant effect on survival to the 90th percentile age, but has no significant effect on female mice. Male mice given 17aE2 live significantly longer than female mice whether or not the females have been exposed to 17aE2.
>Lastly, NDGA (nordihydroguaiaretic acid) has been shown to increase lifespan of male mice only, with an increase of 12% in median in two independent experimental groups (Strong, 2016; Strong et al., 2008), without a significant effect in female mice. Nordihydroguaiaretic acid, at the doses used, did not lead to significant changes in survival to the 90th percentile age.
This is not an exhaustive list, for an expanded list of positive findings read an infobox on NIA ITP trials in [2] and read [3].
So, it's a well-replicated fact that there are substances delaying aging in mice, the question is - are humans really that different kind of mammal that none of these substances works on us, at least with the effect in the same direction?
We'll see the answer this decade.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6516426/
I feel like I must be missing something in your comment, but... Saying how something must be doesn't sound like a plan? It's a goal, but it seems like a plan should detail how to achieve that goal?
Knowledge is infinite.
If you want to build some piece of electronics, it helps if you know the value of pi to a certain precision. But does it really matter for someone making a guitar amp what is the 100th digit of pi?
How many times have you done a Google search and went beyond the first page to check if you find what you were looking for?
If Michael Phelps were to live forever, how many Olympic Games and Gold medals would it take for him to say "you know what? I am tired of spending 30 hours per week on a swimming pool. Gimme a hit of that bong."?
If historians had access to the recorded history of 1% of the population, we certainly would have a better understanding of the past. 10%, even more. But would this understanding change in any significant way if we had access to 50%, 80%, 100%?
Does it? At the very least, the relationships between prime numbers "seems likely" to be infinite, and that's only taking into account patterns in a countably infinite set, which likely have measure 0 as a subset of patterns in any uncountably infinite set (and there is an infinite progression of such sets uncountable sets such that each is of measure 0 compared to another).
This attitude seems very "all science has been discovered and it's only a matter of precision" to me.
It would certainly be a feat to formalize any of this, and we'd still be debating definitions and assumptions if we could formally prove anything.
> Learning the next thousand thousand prime numbers is not very interesting if you already know the first few million, and of very limited practical use.
Maybe your intuition here is right but my hunch is that if you were able to prove this conjecture, it would absolutely blow the socks off the mathematics community.
I look at it as a Pascal's Wager w/ regards to knowledge: either there's more to know that we don't know we don't know, or there isn't. If there is, we'll likely only find it out if we believe there is more knowledge to uncover and spend our time trying to uncover it.
My overall hunch here is that a lot of our current knowledge is constrained by our mental semantic structure, which is bounded by the working set of objects we can mentally manipulate at an instant in time. That set is probably O(10) for most of the population, and likely O(100) for everybody. We can increase the number of semantic objects we can operate on by working on them temporally using logical rules, but those rules themselves are bound by this O(100) limit, and so on for any meta-rules.
I would find it very surprising if all interesting things that could be stated were relationships between O(100) semantic objects, however abstract.
A 68 ft human sure is scary!
Stuff like this:
> Indeed, since we live in a post religious world now, they will become gods themselves. Transhumanism is a contemporary version of a modern project of human self-deification.
is mostly just sensationalism; most transhumanists I know of don't think like that.
Also the article you linked to does not contradict me:
> The rapture is an eschatological term used by certain Christians, particularly within branches of North American evangelicalism, referring to an end time event when all Christian believers—living and dead—will rise into Heaven and join Christ.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_univers...
Isn't this basically the same as Roko's basilisk?
It isn't really a big difference anyway. Both are pursuing an instant of uplifting immortality. The fact that the 'new' form is non-exclusionary is just like the fact that it's non-religious: unimportant.
> Also transhumanism doesn’t promise immortality. Best case, consciousness would persist until the heat death of the universe. A very long time, but infinitely less time than infinity.
sounds like a distinction without a difference.
So to me, this is still "human", they still want a long, healthy life, but their means to it is by via negativa: instead of adding things to your body hoping to increase the quality of life, they would avoid the things that are consider harmful.
Contrast that with "transhumanism", whose idea is to be able to control the environment and elements of nature to the point where they can shape everything to their liking, even if it means adding whatever it takes to their bodies. If that's not some sign of trying to outmake our own Maker, what is?
I think most of transhumanist don't think there is a Maker. How could they take this view? I myself am a godless person - religion wasn't even a topic during my childhood, in school, etc. I wouldn't even think about this without you telling me the idea.
The point is, no matter if you believe that life-as-we-know-it is a creation of God or a result of millions and millions of an ongoing evolutionary process; it seems to me that a transhumanist core belief goes beyond the idea of "wanting to live healthy long lives" and that they can take control over their own nature.
It is this "wanting to take control over nature" that, put simply, reflects as an attempt to become a (lowercased) god. You don't need to think "I want to become God" to share that idea. A simple "I don't want to die" or "I want to enhance my intelectual capability beyond any natural limit" would be enough for me to claim the same thing as the author and I don't think it sensationalist in the slightest.
> If we ask who was more correct—the theologians who argued for a Creator-God, or the intellectually unfulfilled atheists who argued that mice spontaneously generated—then the theologians must be declared the victors: evolution is not God, but it is closer to God than it is to pure random entropy.
…
> Well, more power to us humans. I like having a Creator I can outwit.
To me it seems more like falling prey to some very obvious and predictable instinctual drives without being consciously aware of it.
Nothing has happened since 1996 or whenever; lets you know how impractical it all is. Fascinating sci-fi read though.
What? Old people have never been looked up to for their superior fitness.
And until we do we're not going to be able to build lasting, stable systems for humans to live in.
Hyper-upgrading human hardware without understanding our own psychology is going to to make our already dysfunctional systems even more hostile and aggressively un-survivable.
"Cannot" fundamentally misunderstands the design goals. It is a mass market product where one of the major end goals is presentation so it propagates.
One could go with a demoscene essentially CLI user interface with compressed maps but there wouldn't really be a user base for it defeating the point of a connection app.
Sure it is, according to the invisible hand.
It pays better than just about any other job you can get working in technology. If economics is about how humanity chooses to allocate scarce resources, the peak achievements of human technology are taxi apps and online ads.
Humanity is historically bad at allocating their scarce resources. Faster horses and all that.
The basic premise of transhumanism rests on the idea that humans should transcend nature and shape the world and all life, including humanity, into a world shaped by humans.
I really despise this idea for so many reasons...
Humans, despite their arrogance are incapable of even basically managing this planet. We know basically nothing about its proper functioning and we arrogantly assume we should take responsibility of it all and shape it and all the life here as we choose.
Humans have barely managed to keep a functioning society together in the brief 10000 years or so we've been trying to have one. 6000 years if we're going back to the beginnings of agriculture and such.
To think we have even the slightest idea as to how to control nature and this world that's existed for billions of years is completely ridiculous.
The fundamentals of transhumanism are no different than the fundamentals that led judeo-christian religions to exploit and destroy the world.
The idea that somehow, either through divine gift or supreme intelligence, this world belongs to us and should be used and shaped how we please.
We presume we should expand beyond life itself, yet all we manage to do on this earth is destroy and conquer.
> And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
This is foundational Judaism/Christianity, and is the evident subtext behind many of the movements that have led to its dominance. To wit: the Crusades, conquistadors, manifest destiny, catholic missions, modern evangelism. Domination and exploitation are consistent principles embedded within the culture and religious framework.
I mean, we know of a lot of domination and exploitation that happened before judeo-christian religions had come into place, or that happened in places free of their influence. The Bantu peoples massacring most of the population of the southern half of Africa comes to mind.