In the Bible, weren’t Noah, Moses and others said to have lived for hundreds of years? There are even small fringe sects of Christianity that see transhumanist thought and science as the fulfilment of their vision of the world and humanities relationship with the divine.
It would provide more time for moral advancement as they say age brings wisdom. Yes. Part of transhumanist thought involves democratic principles, not capitalism but actual democracy.
Much of what could go wrong should transhumanist goals succeed has to be addressed in cultural reform. So it isn’t just about controlling human biological evolution, but changing the conditions that would affect everyone’s quality of life. If old age could be eliminated, the vaccine or treatment would have to be universally available, and voluntary.
What, in short, is the view of humanism? That we not intervene medically at all? Humanism holds the human essence as an ideal, and believes primarily in ethical reform. They see transhumanism as a way to skirt the ethical issues.
But isn’t that more of a political or ethical decision rather than a “scientific” one? A question transhumanists need to ask themselves is, who is setting my goals and purposes and intentions? Receiving age treatments? Their goals don’t involve any form of forced implementation.
Perhaps another example would shed some light on life extension. It’s a commonly held view in transhumanist thought that with the advance of computer science we will be able to upload our consciousness into a computer medium, leaving biological issues completely behind, but continuing to live in the only way we are actually aware of anyway.
Galactica. One possible model yes, but in the Galactica scenario the Cylons were an artificially created species.
Mind uploading, sometimes referred to as non-biological intelligence, centres around the controversial proposition that cognitive processing can be implemented on substrates other than our current neurons. Considering decades of successful results in neurophysiology, and the recent construction of the world’s first brain prosthesis — an artificial copy of the hippocampus — this seems very likely. It appears that our minds are defined more by the information pattern they embody than the particular hardware they are implemented on. I myself agree that hardware in not the essence or defining issue behind mind. That’s my personal view.
But the first one created had the scientists’ daughters mind uploaded in it. Matrix like. Which may have led to the corruption of the technology over all.
There is also this notion of some that we are to evolve to pure light bodies, so that would also align with the idea that the material body does not define us. Indeed, it has a metaphysical parallel even outside of transhumanist thought. For myself, I feel that they have to do more than create a simulation of human neural nets. They would have to recreate the causative footprint that gave rise to the individuals mind, the quantum processes that now have been concretely connected to many macroscopic biological systems.
“Causative footprint” seems infinite. Well, there is a point that delineates the individuals sector of the quantum field, and otherwise even with mind uploading you couldn’t effectively sever or “disentangle” the newly transferred mind from the broader reality it would still exist in, and well, they are saying that quantum, even biological computing looks very likely.
My reason for describing this technology in reference to the other is, they don’t espouse any agenda of involuntary morphological tyranny. They actually want the range of human rights broadened; liberty of consciousness, liberty of biology, preserving the right to modify or abstain from modification, and even extension of classifications we now reserve strictly for humans, to computer and future artificial life as well, as well as other species we currently share the planet with.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~