“transhumanism”
24 posts under this tag.
Hans Moravec’s Mind Children is dated at parts but it is as lyric, visionary, and deep as anything I’ve read. Here 2 excerpts I particularly enjoyed: one on robot bushes (forget many-armed Vishnu, this will be the avatar of the gods), the other on artificial life, spontaneous and deliberate (a great story of a virus put deep inside Unix by Ken Thompson himself and a subtle but intriguing example of spontaneous alife).
I’m experimenting with taking quick page snaps and bundling them into PDFs, so these are rather crude. No matter, it’s early days and I’ll get better at it. PDF/CBR is the new MP3!
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening… All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
H. G. Wells
Es posible creer que todo el pasado es solo el principio del principio, y que todo lo que es y ha sido es solo el crespusculo del amanecer. Es posible creer que todo lo que la mente humana ha logrado jamas es solo el suenho antes del despertar… Todo este mundo esta cargado con la promesa de cosas mas grandes, y el dia llegara, un dia en la interminable sucesion de dias, cuando seres, seres ya latentes en nuestros pensamientos y escondidos en nuestras ingles, habran de erguirse sobre esta tierra como se yergue uno sobre un banquillo, y habran de reirse y estirar sus manos entre las estrellas.
First read it at Alcor’s epilogue. It has kept me in thrall since.
(Alcor’s website, apropos, has a wonderful, content-rich website. See, for instance, their detailed FAQs on cryonics or Mike Darwin’s rousing, impassioned Why we are cryonicists)
It’s been a while now since I read this Reason interview to Peter Thiel but I’m still moved by it. The purpose of life is life. How mindblowing a concept, huh?
Thiel: One of the things that’s very misleading about acceleration and exponential growth is that it’s slow at first and then it’s fast, and so the future happens more slowly than people expect and then it happens more quickly.
reason: There’s another popular narrative for the 21st century that says humanity is going to wreck the planet. Are the environmentalist doomsayers right?
Thiel: My sense is that they’re not right. I’m not an expert on it, but what I think is different from climate-change catastrophe vs. the Singularity is that climate seems like such a pedestrian thing to talk about. You talk about it every day. There’s a tendency to overdramatize the climate, and it’s something everybody can have opinions about. So I don’t think there’s a cognitive bias where people are incapable of imagining the world’s climate changing. That seems like a very easy thing for people to imagine, and maybe it’s also an easy thing for people to get hysterical about. On the other hand, computers running the world or this radical progress of technology —that’s something where I think there’s just no imagination at all.
reason: Do you consider yourself a transhumanist?
Thiel: The problem with the label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human. Take the question of aging. If you define that as the essence of being human, then transhumanists are anti-aging and therefore you try to transcend this human limitation. I don’t think that death and life are inextricably interconnected in some sort of Eastern mystical sense in which for everything white there’s something black and there’s always a yin/yang type of thing. Every myth on this planet tells us the purpose of life is death, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the purpose of life is life.
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.
To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.
his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.
From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).
Larry King: What are your plans for the future?
Albert: I take one day at a time. I enjoy learning new things, playing games and talking with my friends. I just love being alive and savoring every new experience. It is so exciting and so much fun! I love it all so much, I wish it will never end!
Larry King: Do you even wonder about how you came to be so lucky?
Albert: Yes, I once asked Dr. Cole about that, and he said there was no scientific answer. Then I asked if there was an unscientific answer? And he said: “Well, there will be if you make one up”.
So then I went away and thought about that for while. I thought about Laika, the unlucky dog that they sent up into space, and all the other dogs that never became famous. I thought about the rabbits in the animal labs, the pet rabbits, and the rabbits in the wild. Then I thought about the foxes that ate the rabbits and the hounds that hunted the foxes. Then I thought about all the humans, and how some had been kings and some had been slaves; how some had had families and loved ones, and how some had died alone in the cold. And again I asked myself, how come I had been a lucky one? But I couldn’t think of any answer. Not even an unscientific one.
Larry King: (pause) Do feel that you have a mission?
Albert: I want everyone to be the lucky one.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
134 sayings by John McCarthyWP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.
Here 8 of the very best:
As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.
Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.
If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.
People mourn when a person dies, but no-one mourns the billions of intestinal bacteria that his death dooms. Speciesism, I calls it.
It’s possible to program a computer in English. It’s also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.
If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.
Rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.
My grandfather, Luis Cardenas Chavez, died last Saturday from lung cancer. It was a struggle, a mourning, of many months, many of them at my house, at that room up there ↑.
We buried him yesterday, Father’s day here in Mexico. Next Thursday was to be his 85th birthday.
Maybe it was good that his agony ended but, me, all I see is the many meaningful centuries he could have lived. I don’t say that lightly. He had more life and more lives with him than anyone I’ve known and there was at least that much still inside him. He died young. Never without a reason to wake up every morning, today he won’t.
And I feel like I have to say it because only pleasantries and comforting lies were spoken thick and fast at his most Catholic funeral: he’s dead, absolutely annihilated, choked, nothing left of him. We’ve been robbed, someone precious and irreplaceable has been taken from us, for no reason at all, taken and shattered, and we are never getting him back.ELZR
We never wrote down his memories as we both once planned.ELZR Always thought there would be a better time later. There wasn’t. What most disappointed me though was myself and how I reacted to his sickness. Or rather, how I not reacted, how I retracted. Oh I helped along, but I did not fight, didn’t read, didn’t research. I never understood his sickness, his ailments, his medicine. It was the scientific, idealistic, techno-utopian thing to do and I left it undone, I muddled thru.
But, to my horror, on top and despite all the sadness, all the frustration, all the personal disappointment, there’s ChristinaWP-frantic, exhilarating sensafreedom thru and thru. At last. Just the six of us.
I felt so trapped in this house for so long. So unhappily submerged in rude relatives that diluted my family in their toxic, stupid undertows. Some days ago I realized sadly it would never be my home again. It was just a place all of a sudden. It’s time to go.
But for now I’m here. And I’m happy to. And it’s rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.
He was a good man.
The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).
And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.
Also not to be missed are…
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