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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting article, thanks! Where can I find out more about this topic? Are there online communities?

Nothing has happened since 1996 or whenever; lets you know how impractical it all is. Fascinating sci-fi read though.

There are, but this article isn't terribly accurate. (It's not bad, but it's not as good as the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism)

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.

depends on which transhumanists I guess. There's certainly a lot that are obsessed with the singularity and the God-AI, which seems to be to be a post-religious projection of Christian Rapture. Or mind-uploading, or cryonics, or other over-simplified approaches to something like immortality. But there's also those who are interested in things like the quantified self, human physical/cognitive enhancement, bioengineering, that sort of thing. It's a big tent.

One big difference is that the Christian rapture only rewards believers and punishes nonbelievers with eternal torture. The goal of transhumanism is to allow everyone to live as long and as healthy of a life as possible. 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.

Christian eschatology is much more complicated than what you’ve said.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology

I was using the simplified definition of the rapture that the parent poster was most likely referencing. I’m aware that different sects have different beliefs about what happens to nonbelievers. Still, the vast majority of Christians do not think that atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, or Scientologists will get into heaven.

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.

Again, it is very complicated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_univers...

> One big difference is that the Christian rapture only rewards believers and punishes nonbelievers with eternal torture.

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.

I'm very interested in the second group, especially in topics around mind. Do you have any tips where I could meet these people?

The extropian mailing list has both groups on it, including some fairly 'big' names in the field. Hal Finney was a member before he died and is cryogenically preserved, I met Anders Sandburg on there once who works on things like whole-brain emulation.

Which is the most active community online outside of r/transhumanism?

Could you provide any counterexample? What you call sensationalist I would call almost tautological: those who want to find a way to live forever reject natural order of life and all of its metaphysics.

I think the sensational part is where it describes transhumanists as wanting to become deities, not just live long healthy lives. I personally think it's a natural path to go down, in a similar vein as clothing, tools, and air conditioning. There are definitely ethical issues, like poor people not being able to afford augmentations and compete in the world, but I think elective medical/mechanical enhancements are an inevitability.

We had people with "long healthy lives" for millennia already, they were just the exception and not the norm. They were still human. A monk in the Middle Ages would live well into their seventies and eighties without wishing to find ways to live forever. A more contemporary example would be to talk about all the "natural life" followers or those closer to the temperance movement: equally interested in long healthy lives, but dismissive of the idea that "augmentations" or "enhancements" are something necessary or even desirable.

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?

> 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.

I shouldn't have capitalized "maker" if that caused any confusion. I am not talking about any specific religion, but the metaphysical in general.

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.

I suppose that might be true. This reminds me of the Yudkowsky essay “An Alien God”: https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Alien-God

> 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.

I'm curious why anyone would think TH was all about rejecting the natural order of life and all of its metaphysics.

To me it seems more like falling prey to some very obvious and predictable instinctual drives without being consciously aware of it.

https://transhumanism.reddit.com

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