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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

> To become transhuman or posthuman, you'd first have to understand what it is to be human

What? Why?

I'm post-adolescent (at least biologically, please don't bring up all of my emotional immaturity), and I still don't (and definitely didn't then) understand what it is to be adolescent.

I live in a post-feudal society, and while I think we understand a few things about what it means to be feudal, I wouldn't bet on us having a full and complete understanding.

There's a plant on my balcony that's post-living, and as far as I know it never understood anything at all, much less understood what it was to be living.

Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?

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I am interpreting the parent as saying before we can say something is post-human, we have to define (understand) what "human" is. If we cannot agree on what it is to be human, how can anyone be post-human? I.e. you can't define a "noun with modifier" until you define the noun.

You can differentiate a human from a dolphin ?

Then you know all that is to be known about what an human is.

You don't need to understand "dolphin-ness" to know that by enabling a dolphin to talk or fly you created a post-dolphin.

Post/Transhumanism is not just about physical changes. Those changes , of course, will create/lead to philosophical/metaphysical questions, but no one understands transhumanism as a "branch of philosophy that questions itself about ...."

The "know it when you see it" kind of argument is cognitively vacuous. You are simply creating word salad using such an argument.

A dolphin you enabled to talk is in no meaningfull way a post-dolphin, it is still a dolphin.

The post- prefix presuposes a chronological posteriori point of view, and you can not confirm the veracity of that point of view until you reach it.

In other words you can not call something posthuman until reaching posthumanity and drawing a line, or transhuman until you transcend humanity and can draw the line. The post-adolescent and post-feudalism examples work because they are chronologically in the past and we are arbitrarily drawing a line. Someone in the future might draw the line elsewhere.

You didn’t have to create a new technology that enabled you to transition to post-adolescent.

I think your parent commenter meant “_we_ would have to understand”, as a species, rather than all or any of us individually.

In practice just the people creating the technology. But it’s a big leap.

But we did have to invent the (social) technology that enabled us to transition to a post-feudal society. And we did so without fully understanding feudal society.

For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse).

> we did so without fully understanding feudal society.

No human understood feudal society? What about the leaders of those societies?

There is probably some folk theorem about this.

The emergent structure of a society is always more complex than the analytical tools available in that society are capable of modeling. As the tools become more sophisticated, the same technologies and institutions that enabled their development results in a correlated increase in complexity in the social structures. Forever keeping true contemporary introspection out of reach.

The best sci-fi counterexample is probably Seldon's Psychohistory from The Foundation Trilogy.

A thought experiment related to this: how dominant would the average macro hedge fund from 2022 be if they were transported back to 1985, with no knowledge of specific future events but with all of their scientific knowledge, models (and maybe computing power?) etc.

> more complex than the analytical tools available in that society are capable of modeling

One would need to include non-public analytical tools, which are unfortunately not available for inspection.

There are different economic incentives for public and private tools of analysis and thought.

One modern equivalent would be export-controlled tools and technology, but there are many more onion layers.

I don’t disagree with the emergence/complexity progression statement but the issue is more fundamental: you cannot accurately model a system within that system.

The thought experiment doesn’t work because the hedge fund would need to be transported back with networking and information access they can’t get in 1985. They would show up, try to get onto the trading floor, be rejected, have to get re-trained, have to hire an army of data entry folks, and they would still get beat by the good old boys network and insider trading that wasn’t yet being identified and prosecuted.

That’s all if they weren’t just investigated and arrested for cheating while their computers worked through their planned obsolescence timeline in some closet.

No one person had to understand everything about feudal society for the next stage to emerge. It just emerged, as always happens in an evolutionary process.

To try again with a more complete answer to your initial question:

Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception for the to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?

In all the examples you’ve given, organic life is the common denominator. Each is a case of the natural progression of life, either the natural life cycles that have existed for billions of years, or of the culture that has emerged out of that.

If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.

If we mean something else then people need to explain what they mean, but that’s really why we get stuck in the weeds on this topic; we don’t have a simple, agreed understanding of what it is we’re transitioning from/to and what is doing the transitioning.

But the simple answer to your central question is that the key difference here from the rule you’re positing is that we’re talking about a departure from the natural biological and cultural evolution that has brought us to this point.

> If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.

What you mean by that? Except for "mind uploading" I don't see what you referring to...

Like the Iron Age didn't succeed the Bronze Age in one night there is nothing to understand or to prepare to pass into a "transhumanist society"... because we already are...or even we always were.

Glasses, prosthesis, eye surgery, ... : all are the start of what is called transhumanism. That's why I think it should be used rather as a mindset than as a social goal.

Well sure, but as I said, this topic very quickly gets stuck in the weeds over definitions and “what do you mean by ...?” questions, as the above couple of comments illustrate.

I’d regard the augmentations you list in your last paragraph as remedies to help restore capabilities that are present in other humans of normal health/ability, prior to aging or injury. Other augmentations that are commonplace are tools that make us more efficient at doing things we can already do; I.e, computers enable us to do much larger calculations, data operations or information archivals/retrievals. But they don’t fundamentally change our evolved nature, so it’s hard to see how the prefix “trans” applies.

Despite many claims of breakthroughs, we’ve yet to see any technology that profoundly alters human genetics, cognition or mortality away from its state of natural evolution a few decades or centuries ago, and it’s not clear that anyone has serious answers for how such transitions will happen, nor how they could happen without a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underpin them.

That seems like an artificial barrier.

We can improve certain aspects of ourselves without deeply understanding the entirety of what it is to be human.

Came to say the same thing with the same post-adolescent argument ;)

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