WaveSpace - Transhumanism

Immortal Worms

nospam@example.com (Guy McArthur) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:21:25 -0400

Okay, not really. But the results from a Stanford biology team are pretty astounding; they show that in a certain species of worm, aging is accounted for primarily by genes. The press release sums up the implication...

If aging is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the aging process may not be inevitable. It is at least theoretically possible to slow down or stop developmental drift.

Of course, this may or may not be the case in humans. And if you switch off the gene drift, it may not necessarily result in extended lifetimes, aging damage may predominate in our species.

Why Transhumanism

nospam@example.com (Guy McArthur) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:32:53 -0400

Michael Anissimov, in his incredible blog Accelerating Future, collected these seven definitions of transhumanism in an entry last year.

Transhumanism shares roots with secular humanism in the Enlightenment-era ideas of Progress, a movement that brought us concepts like democracy and equal rights, concepts that are yet to be fully realized. But it specifically promotes the use of technology to achieve a better world, a world where our potential is greatly expanded. It is true that the technologies we are now embarking upon, such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, could be incredibly dangerous. Transhumanists seem to be more cognizant of the risks as well as the rewards, and advocate proceeding with great care.

Dorian Sagan, in his book Biospheres, makes a compelling argument that technology is a natural development. Furthermore, he proposes that it is the mechanism by which the biosphere reproduces. At some point in the future, we will be able to form closed-loop biospheres in other places.

One might ask, what utility is there in life expanding and evolving to new niches? Here are some possible answers.

A livelier universe is a more beautiful universe.
Greater amounts of awareness/consciousness are inherently good.
Maximizing thought & creativity fulfills our potential.
Richer thought ecosystems provide for the next level of life, whatever that might be.

I particularly like the open-ended nature of the last idea, that consciousness itself might ultimately provide a substrate for some type of virtual entities that take a life of their own. It's waaay out there, but fun to think about. Memes are like the atomic level in this virtual world, riding from host to host, transmitted by language and expression. Sets of connected memes form meta-organic structures. A branch of science for instance, could be seen as life-like, but only connected to physical reality through our thought processes. Or imagine a distributed simulation that uses small parts of our brain power as a computational grid. Could that simulation itself become aware? Would you mind being the host for such a process, if you were barely aware of it, or derived some benefit from being aware of it? What would it, having access to all knowledge, think about? Would creatures such as this use memes to attract our attention to capture our spare thought cycles? Ultimately, will our "branches of thought" become more alive than we?

A.C.C.

nospam@example.com (Guy McArthur) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:29:19 -0400

The news of the death of Arthur C. Clarke flashed around the world via the telecommunications system he himself envisioned over sixty years ago. He was the real architect of the global village; we just happen to live in it.

I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke novels, short stories and non-fiction since I was a kid. One of the first stories that made a huge impression on me was Dial F for Frankenstein in which the global network becomes self-aware and, shortly thereafter, takes over the world. It was one of the first, stories that imagined the emergence of a post-human intelligence.

In 2001 the monolith boosts astronaut Dave Bowman to levels of intelligence and awareness far beyond human. Kubrick visually depicts this Singularity (beyond which even sci-fi authors can barely speculate) in the famously psychedelic ending.

His non-fiction works are the equal of his many novels. He likened the emergence of our species into space as the beginning of a transformation comparable to that of life from ocean to land.

I always liked his frequent use of trailing ellipses. I'd like to imagine that his life ended on one....

Transhumanism

nospam@example.com (Guy McArthur) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:46:37 -0500

"Transhumanism" is a social and scientific movement that aims to improve humanity. (Sounds innocuous, right?) More accurately, it aims to make humanity radically better. Most accurately, it aims to improve humanity to the point that the result would be a new species. Or many new species. In other words, to find ways to bring into being our successors. Darwin no longer in the drivers seat. Evolution is very, very good--the trade-off is that it is very, very slow and has a very high cost in terms of how much it discards. It is "a twisty maze of passages, all alike". The idea here is that we can use our higher level faculties to jump ahead to a next level, whatever that might be. Some degree of natural selection may still be appropriate ("Darwin is my co-pilot?", Darwin as a back-seat driver?)... we do not want to be more unfit to our environment.

A way of reaching that next level may be through genetic engineering, for instance, to eliminate common genetic diseases or add capabilities, perhaps the ability to regrow lost limbs. It's not really about freaky super-powered mutants from the likes of X-Men and Heroes, though certainly it is about giving individuals the freedom to change themselves into whatever is safe for the rest of us (and allowed by the laws of physics). The medical breakthroughs made along the way would eliminate a vast amount of human suffering.

Another way may be through the augmentation of cybernetic interfaces, for example, to have fast direct mental access to a stored archive of all human knowledge. Or to develop ways to facilitate mind-to-mind communication, whether 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and so forth. Or to develop true Artificial Intelligence.

Or, it possible that transhuman lifeforms would be entirely artificial and live in computer-generated simulations, their thoughts occuring in software. Or some amalgamation of any or all of these ideas.

It may sound dangerous. It is. It may sound completely terrifying. It could be. On the other hand, advocates of transhumanism (myself included), seem to be more cognizant of the risks as well as the rewards, then those that oppose it.