OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Future Hi is no longer aligning itself with transhumanists, because their point of view has become a dead end, a spiritually vacant empty shell of heartlessness and banality. It has nothing to offer but more tiresomely arrogant attempts to convert everything to materialist descriptions and computational metaphors- eliminating everything else that doesn't fit them.
The transhumanist outlook is only grim and depressing if you want it to be. Personally, I don't take much stock in any one person's definition of the term; I think the future is too important for trite labels. So while the term "transhumanist" appeals to me in a general sense, I share Future Hi's reservation.
5 comments:
I have much love for Paul Evan Hughes but ... just no. All transhumanist thought, be it the cold souless computronium kind kind or be it the bright gooey mystical kind, ultimately leads to the same place.
Paul isn't excluding cold rational thinking at all. He's bemoaning the fact that it is becoming nothing but cold, rational thinking.
Post-Transhumanism, Trans-transhumanism, or Trans-Post Humanism?
Fnord indeed!
bear, repugnance does not make it false. Please note that my saying so doesn't make it true either.
Fortunately, it looks like we'll all live long enough to find out the answer one way or another
Bear, I largely agree with you. Certain things are becoming every more apparent in neuroscience, and one of those things is that although the central nervous system is certainly where a large amount of computation in concentrated, it's far from the only place. Even if you equate brain and mind (which you shouldn't), it's not so easy to say where the brain ends. Practically, you have to say that it's the entire body.
In my opinion the impact of this on AI is limited, depending on your goal. If you want to build a human intelligence, then you have to build an entire body -- and if you gotta do that, then it's easiest do do it by having sex.
I'm of the opinion that the mind/body duality that is so deeply rooted in western philosophy and science is completely wrong and arbitrary. That it would be equally correct to say that the body is just the densest manifestation of the mind. This is why I believe that it's the next best thing to impossible to ever download your mind into a computer -- you can't seperate mind and body and still be a human consciousness.
If your goal is to build a consciousness of any sort, not just human, that's a whole different story.
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