Hah. You’re very kind. Individual transhumanists are all too human. But your essential point stands. The abolitionist strand in modern transhumanism i...
Absolutely. At the risk of sounding like a crude technological determinist, some strands of the transhumanist agenda are bound to happen anyway. For i...
Alas, naysayers exist, even on this forum. But yes, transhuman life based on gradients of superhuman bliss will exceed our wildest expectations. My vi...
You have a point. I've never read The Beast in the Jungle, but I get the gist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_in_the_Jungle However, here is ...
I would guess that next century most people will be transhumanists. Presumably, inhabitants of twenty-second century won't use the label "transhumanis...
Posthuman heaven is probably just a foretaste of the wonders in store for sentience. Humans don’t have the conceptual scheme to describe life in a low...
Shawn, thank you for the invite. Defeating death and aging is going to be insanely difficult, but transhumans will be quasi-immortal. Whole-body repla...
Alien state-spaces of consciousness interest me: https://www.hedweb.com/funpages/sasha-dave.html A drug-naïve conceptual scheme recognises only two st...
Does suffering define what it means to be human? (cf. "A World Without Pain Does hurting make us human?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13...
It’s uncivilised for sentient beings to hurt, harm and kill each other. It’s uncivilised for sentient beings to undergo involuntary pain and suffering...
I'm sceptical! Either way, I think the point stands. The end of suffering isn't tantamount to the end of competition, let alone the end of intellectua...
Perhaps consider e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/07/alphazero-google-deepmind-ai-beats-champion-program-teaching-itself-to-play-f...
What's in question isn't whether suffering in all its guises can sometimes be functionally useful; it sure can. Rather, what needs questioning is the ...
But to return to the earlier example of playing chess, one can fanatically aspire to improve one's game and play to win even though one will invariabl...
In what sense is aiming to phase out the biology of suffering "Frankenstein-esque"? Either way, the biggest obstacle to tackling man-made climate chan...
Many completely paralysed people with "locked in" syndrome suffer terribly. But the high genetic loading of default hedonic tone together with the neg...
Niki, awesome, would you consider getting your own website / YouTube channel with a version in bahasa Indonesia? People tend to be more receptive to a...
Competing against earlier iterations of oneself or an insentient AI doesn't raise ethical problems. More controversial would be competing in zero-sum ...
"It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail", said Gore Vidal. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” Yes, evolution has engineered humans ...
I'm inclined to agree. If we accept the contention of Rare Earthers that the rest of our galaxy is lifeless, then the allure of interstellar travel ma...
Yes. Human lifespans are inadequate for interstellar travel, let alone galactic exploration. Human lifespans are inadequate for investigating the bill...
A high capacity for self-deception is probably critical to what now passes for mental health. Until recently, helping people rationalise aging, death ...
Thanks for the kind words. They are very much appreciated. A lot to chew on. Let me start with your question: Knowledge. The suffering in the world (m...
There's no tension between radical life-extension, genetic mood-enrichment and responsible stewardship of Earth. For instance, one reason that many pe...
The claim: aging, death, disease, cognitive infirmity and indeed involuntary suffering of any kind are wrong. A transhumanist civilization of superlon...
Will God-like superintelligences be akin to Nietzschean Übermenschen – contemptuous of the weak, the vulnerable and the cognitively humble? Or does su...
I could have said much more, e.g. about personal identity (or rather its absence) over time: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#parfit However, I ...
"Hyperhumanism" might be a more reassuring brand than transhumanism. But the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. It...
Hell has an escape-hatch. Reaching it is a daunting challenge. But biotech offers tools of emancipation. Maybe posthumans will indeed enjoy eons of in...
I spoke in jest. But there's a serious point here. Evolution via natural selection is a fiendish engine for spreading unimaginable suffering. But sele...
Compare the peaks and dips of lovemaking, which (if one isn't celibate) are generically enjoyable throughout. Relationships in which one wants a loved...
I'm a researcher, not the leader of a millenarian cult with messianic delusions. Yes, just setting out a blueprint of what needs to be done feels inad...
David Benatar's version of the asymmetry argument purports to show that existence is always comparatively worse than non-existence. After intelligent ...
With a hedonic range of, say, +20 to +50, our imaginations could be stunningly enriched. I feel entitled to want my death or misfortune to diminish th...
Recall I'm a "soft" anti-natalist. I don't feel ethically entitled to bring more suffering into the world, genetically mitigated or otherwise: https:/...
Just as, tragically, a few genetic tweaks can make someone chronically depressed and pain-ridden, conversely a few genetic tweaks can make someone chr...
Yes, the legal obstacles to transhumanism are significant. For instance, if one is an older person who doesn't want to miss out on transhuman life, th...
Not humanity, but transhumanity. No one ever gets bored of mu-opioidergic activation of their hedonic hotspot in the posterior ventral pallidum. But t...
All experience below hedonic zero has something in common. This property deserves to be retired – made physiologically impossible because its molecula...
Sorry, I should have clarified. By an "accelerated biointelligence explosion would be unlikely to pass an ethics committee", I had in mind a deliberat...
Yes, I agree. Ferocious controversy lies ahead. Recall the first CRISPR babies were produced not to enhance the innate well-being of the gene-edited t...
Suppose that a minority of parents do indeed decide they want "designer babies" rather than haphazardly-created babies. The explosive popularity of pe...
Thank you. You are very kind. Some people may be a bit disconcerted that a negative utilitarian should talk so much about happiness, pleasure and even...
Why "outlandish"? For sure, untested genetic experiments conceived in the heat of sexual passion are "normal" today. But there may come a time when cr...
Biologists define a species as a group of organisms that can reproduce with one another in their natural habitat to produce fertile offspring. We can ...
A good question. IMO a plea of "not my problem" is irrational and immoral. In my view, closed individualism is a false theory of personal identity: ht...
Thank you. Lots of complications to unpack here! We now know that wireheading, i.e. intracranial self-stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system, s...
A morgue doesn't quite evoke the grandeur of a "triple S" civilisation. But I guess it's conceivable. Even today, we each spend our life encased withi...
Comments