Beautiful piece.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
We are destroying the environments humans were designed to thrive in.
Yes, but that kind of ignores the more active elements. This story didn't languish with few upvotes and a few shallow comments, it was an instant HN darling so had to be killed, or it would still be on the front page.
[0] https://hnrankings.info/48323101/
And whatever the reasons or rationalizations for that may be, you can be 100% sure it was by a tiny minority.
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
I am very confused by these people you say argue that we don't exist. I have never heard anyone argue that.
Those people frighten me.
This is a belief system which one does not have to believe in order to accept the findings of physical science.
> I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
There's two things this can mean:
(1) You do genuinely believe you exist, but just that you're arising from a temporary arrangement of molecules -- essentially, all the statements that one can make about souls is true of you. In that case, you're not who I'm talking about.
(2) There is no such thing as "you", it is purely an illusion, and no legitimate subjective entities really exist.
To me, the contradictory view is the one assuming that everything in the world can be explained, except for humans. So far, people found that, given enough time and core knowledge, they could understand anything about the natural world, and we've been refining that process ever since. Since humans are a part of that world, are created in it and live in it, why would I think we're any different? There's a difference between thinking that humans are unique (in a way that makes us have immensely interesting properties) and thinking that humans are special (not subject to natural laws or constraints).
The troubling view for me is the alternative - the one that always tries to draw a hard line between humans and the 'explainable' rest of nature, like we must be different, alien and special to be worthy of interest and appreciation.
I think you've distilled it well: I don't believe that human consciousness can be explained.
Obviously, we find neural mechanisms for aspects of it: of cognition, learning, language, movement, etc. And obviously there are the effects of drugs, e.g. anesthesia, psychedelics, anti-anxiety, etc.
But these are all effects on consciousness, they are not an explanation for the very existence of the observer, so to speak. And I don't believe that can be touched rigorously. The best we'll ever be able to do is gesture at it broadly and say "well, it certainly seems like everything has a physical cause and explanation." Whereas I take a different view: it certainly seems as though there is something special about consciousness.
It is certainly of the universe, and obviously interacts with the physical. But it also seems to go beyond it. The experience itself exists. And I do believe that this is intuitively obvious - we know we exist, we know we have a type of free will (obviously imperfect, affected by various circumstances, but nevertheless we exist).
But because we want to feel that everything has an explanation, and physical science has been so powerful and effective in every other domain, there's a tendency to say - "well, that stuff must be an illusion. Human perception is fallible."
-Max Frisch
But the more you lean on the internet or on technology, the more you feed that feedback loop of "in-person interaction = hard". Yes, things are difficult, but you're never going to figure out how to be comfortable in those situations if you're not actively putting yourself in them. Growth takes struggle, and I say that with all the empathy in the world.
As Snaut says in Solaris, man needs man.
Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
Transhumanism when put into practice will be about changing our environment to take away everything that allows humans to thrive and be happy and fulfilled.
It's about the destruction of families, communities, and human cultures built up over millennia with no serious thought put into what comes next and why it might or might not be better for human beings.
> How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
This is not Transhumanism, the desire for these things far pre-date Transhumanism as a philosophy.
> Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
So maybe we work on that before diving head long into the post human future?
It's the same as Elon Musk "worrying" about saving humans and then it turns out it's all racism after all.
> Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic?
What. These current class of tech oligarch support MAGA, which came to power with this being the major culture war flashpoint. They didn't seem to mind.