To our resident transhumanists

[Jokodo]

I'm not sure this is the right forum, but on the old board our resident transhumanists seemed to mostly hang out in the science section, so there goes, via SMBC :

 

[AdamWho]

I predict that Transhumanism with become a full-blown religion in the next couple of decades.

 

[dystopian]

I predict that Transhumanism with become a full-blown religion in the next couple of decades.

Not possible. You may get new cults that *incorporate* elements associated with transhumanism; but that's not the same as transhumanism itself becoming a religion anymore than that the existence of a cult that incorporates vegetarian dietary restrictions means vegetarianism has become a religion. Transhumanism is really just a philosophy of life that states that we can and should use technology to improve *ourselves* as well as our environment; which seems blatantly obvious to me. A transhumanist seeks to utilize technology to become something 'more' than human, which to shallow observation might sound religious but which it really isn'. It's something of a pet peeve of mine whenever people make the mistake of conflating transhumanism with some of the more far-out ideas that have been espoused by transhumanist thinkers; as interesting and potentially plausible as some of those ideas are, they're not particularly integral to transhumanism nor, I suspect, the average transhumanist.

 

[travc]

I predict that Transhumanism with become a full-blown religion in the next couple of decades.

We're currently lacking a charismatic leader and widespread (but ultimately ineffective) persecution.

dystopian does have a point about transhumanism being a philosophy, so it can really become a religion as such. But "Jew" describes an ethicity, a race, and a religion.

 

[Unbeatable]

I predict that Transhumanism with become a full-blown religion in the next couple of decades.

I share your emotional bias against the immortalists, but I don't get the prediction. The things that transhumanists want are essentially already happening. Vaccines, wheelchairs, pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, laser eye surgery, sexual reassignment surgery, Google Glass, etc.-- we're already transcending human limitations through increased integration with technology. We're already becoming cyborgs. It seems to me that transhumanism is on the road to becoming more mundane and trivial, not more religious.

I'm not so sure about singularitarianism, though.

 

[dystopian]

I'm not so sure about singularitarianism, though.

The problem with the singularity is that people have made it into something it's not, mistaking some of the wild predictions that futurists say *might* result from the singularity as being the same thing as the singularity itself. Personally, I like the idea of the technological singularity (though I hardly think it's a given); it's certainly plausible and a possibility we should plan for: better that we're prepared for it happening and it doesn't, then that it takes us by complete surprise. It seems odd to me that anyone would assign any religious significance to it though; the singularity is just a hypothetical period in time when the rate of technological progress appears almost vertical to us, and has moved beyond our control. Sure, what lies beyond it could turn out to be 'the apocalypse', or a practical utopia, and some people might interpret those possibilities in a religious manner...

... but I don't think any transhumanists would; being a transhumanist is kind of about using technology and science to *actually* accomplish the sort of things that past societies (and sometimes modern people) wanted, but relied on faith to get. At the low end of the technological spectrum, a transhumanist would use technology to cure an illness where a religious person would pray to god; on the high end of the technology spectrum, a transhumanist would use (or try to develop using science) technology to achieve immortality where a religious person would pray to god, again. So faith doesn't really come into the equation for the transhumanist, and I don't really see how you can have a religion without some form of faith.

 

[Jokodo]

<snip>technology to achieve immortality where a religious person would pray to god, again. So faith doesn't really come into the equation for the transhumanist,<snip>

Yes, it does. Immortality through technology requires faith. With any non-zero death rate through external causes, halting the aging process doesn't give you immortality. For example, with a death rate of .01% per year (roughly 1/10 of the current death rate of prime-age (25-35) people in Western countries), 63.2% will have died within the first 10,000 years, and 99.995% within the first 100,000 - and we all know that that's still a blink of the eye on geological timescales. That's the point of the comic posted in the OP, even if Zach may have been to pessimistic about his ambient death ambient death rate.

So immortality does require faith. That, or not understanding the logic of exponential decay processes.

 

[dystopian]

<snip>technology to achieve immortality where a religious person would pray to god, again. So faith doesn't really come into the equation for the transhumanist,<snip>

Yes, it does. Immortality through technology requires faith. With any non-zero death rate through external causes, halting the aging process doesn't give you immortality. For example, with a death rate of .01% per year (roughly 1/10 of the current death rate of prime-age (25-35) people in Western countries), 63.2% will have died within the first 10,000 years, and 99.995% within the first 100,000 - and we all know that that's still a blink of the eye on geological timescales. That's the point of the comic posted in the OP, even if Zach may have been to pessimistic about his ambient death ambient death rate.

Yes, we've gone over this before. A couple of points:

First, when we're talking about immortality through technological means, we're not generally talking about the kind of immortality that can last billions of years. Is it the technically correct term to use? No, but it suffices for most people. It's just a colloqial term to say: "not dying of natural causes". So in that sense there's really no problem with it whatsoever, and faith is not required.

Secondly, even true immortality through technology does not require faith; though believing it is inevitable of course, does. There's a number of problems with your argument. For one, you make a needless assumption of there being an actual death rate, and then use that long-term numbers that result from that as an argument against immortality... that's circular reasoning. You need to address the actual likelihood of developing the means to stave off death completely. Dismissing the possibility is not as easy as you may think. There are a number of hypothetical ways in which technology might be developed that does this; for instance, if we accept the idea that a copy of a person's brain; exact enough to reproduce the entire personality and memories; is for all intents and purposes the same as the original (and I don't see why we shouldn't), and the technology is developed to copy the brain and transfer it to a new body, then the .01% death rate disappears. This would also be the case if we could gradually replace the neurons in the human brain with artificial counterparts without a loss of consciousness/identity, and when achieving a 100% replacement rate then disperse consciousness across multiple secure mediums. Furthermore, one could imagine hypothetical technologies that allow forms of regeneration to take place on a biological body so extreme as to make any individuals so outfitted practically invincible. These hypothetical technologies are of course by no means a certainty; it could well be that there's some fundamental law of reality that prohibits them. However, we have NOT as yet discovered such a law; there is absolutely nothing in our current scientific understanding that prohibits any of these three (or other similar) hypothetical technologies from being plausible. Right now, to our science, it just looks like an extremely complicated matter of engineering currently beyond us.

Once you've truly eliminated death as anything other than a voluntary end, the only caveat is the eventual end of the universe... but even this is a problem that could theoretically be bridged, especially for a civilization that has billions; or even trillions (depending on which way the universe ends) of years to think about the problem.

See, the thing isn't that believing these technologies and their effects COULD arise (and wanting or trying to develop them) is a form of faith: it clearly isn't. Keeping one's mind open to future possibilities, and trying to make them a reality through applied reasoning and science is not even remotely similar to faith.

Only believing that they WILL inevitably happen, no question about it, could be called faith. And I don't think most transhumanists are quite so certain in the future.

 

[Jokodo]

<snip>technology to achieve immortality where a religious person would pray to god, again. So faith doesn't really come into the equation for the transhumanist,<snip>

Yes, it does. Immortality through technology requires faith. With any non-zero death rate through external causes, halting the aging process doesn't give you immortality. For example, with a death rate of .01% per year (roughly 1/10 of the current death rate of prime-age (25-35) people in Western countries), 63.2% will have died within the first 10,000 years, and 99.995% within the first 100,000 - and we all know that that's still a blink of the eye on geological timescales. That's the point of the comic posted in the OP, even if Zach may have been to pessimistic about his ambient death ambient death rate.

Yes, we've gone over this before. A couple of points:

First, when we're talking about immortality through technological means, we're not generally talking about the kind of immortality that can last billions of years. Is it the technically correct term to use? No, but it suffices for most people. It's just a colloqial term to say: "not dying of natural causes". So in that sense there's really no problem with it whatsoever, and faith is not required.

Secondly, even true immortality through technology does not require faith; though believing it is inevitable of course, does. There's a number of problems with your argument. For one, you make a needless assumption of there being an actual death rate, and then use that long-term numbers that result from that as an argument against immortality... that's circular reasoning. You need to address the actual likelihood of developing the means to stave off death completely. Dismissing the possibility is not as easy as you may think. There are a number of hypothetical ways in which technology might be developed that does this; for instance, if we accept the idea that a copy of a person's brain; exact enough to reproduce the entire personality and memories; is for all intents and purposes the same as the original (and I don't see why we shouldn't), and the technology is developed to copy the brain and transfer it to a new body, then the .01% death rate disappears. This would also be the case if we could gradually replace the neurons in the human brain with artificial counterparts without a loss of consciousness/identity, and when achieving a 100% replacement rate then disperse consciousness across multiple secure mediums. Furthermore, one could imagine hypothetical technologies that allow forms of regeneration to take place on a biological body so extreme as to make any individuals so outfitted practically invincible. These hypothetical technologies are of course by no means a certainty; it could well be that there's some fundamental law of reality that prohibits them. However, we have NOT as yet discovered such a law; there is absolutely nothing in our current scientific understanding that prohibits any of these three (or other similar) hypothetical technologies from being plausible. Right now, to our science, it just looks like an extremely complicated matter of engineering currently beyond us.

Once you've truly eliminated death as anything other than a voluntary end, the only caveat is the eventual end of the universe... but even this is a problem that could theoretically be bridged, especially for a civilization that has billions; or even trillions (depending on which way the universe ends) of years to think about the problem.

See, the thing isn't that believing these technologies and their effects COULD arise (and wanting or trying to develop them) is a form of faith: it clearly isn't. Keeping one's mind open to future possibilities, and trying to make them a reality through applied reasoning and science is not even remotely similar to faith.

Only believing that they WILL inevitably happen, no question about it, could be called faith. And I don't think most transhumanists are quite so certain in the future.

An actual death rate isn't a "needless assumption". It follows logically from the conjuction of the following premises:

A) anything physical can be destroyed by a big enough blast
B) big blasts happen in this universe of ours
C) the self, however defined, requires a physical medium to exist

Do tell me which one of those you reject?

 

[dystopian]

A) anything physical can be destroyed by a big enough blast
B) big blasts happen in this universe of ours
C) the self, however defined, requires a physical medium to exist

Do tell me which one of those you reject?

I don't really have to, since your argument rests on the assumed inevitability of a blast big enough to wipe out all of the physical media housing the self. Assuming we reach the state I hypothesized in my previous post, and then go a little further still with some of our other tech, I can easily envision a state in which that blast you're talking about just isn't going to be big enough. Even a blast big enough to destroy an entire solar system, or even a cluster of them, isn't going to be big enough to permanently 'kill' an entity with a dozen backups stowed across interstellar space. Once the supernova or gamma ray burst is done and over with, the last recorded mindstate (which could even have been transmitted to secure storage just seconds before death) just gets transferred to a new body, and you live again.

You'd need at least a galaxy destroying blast once society has progressed far enough (and by far enough, I don't mean it has to have spread *across* the galaxy, just a tiny portion of it would suffice), and A) there just isn't anything we know capable of that, and B) it isn't going to be an infinitely spreading blast and it's going to be bound by the speed of light... for a civilization capable of the things we've already talked about, it's not going to be impossible to outrun such a blast even assuming nothing like a warp drive.

So, your logical argument has two main flaws:

1) It does not allow for the possibility of a technologically-fueled 'resurrection'.
2) It does not properly account for the fact that a sufficiently spread-out civilization, with the aforementioned capability, is essentially immune to any of the types of big blast we know to be possible.

However, you asked me which of your A,B,C's I rejected. At first, I thought none of them... but on second thought, I have to go with A. After all, space itself is physical, is it not? Can space itself be destroyed by a blast? Not to my knowledge. What about energy? Energy is physical. Can it be destroyed? Well, no, it can't; it can just be changed into a different form. I can imagine a civilization so advanced that it's become capable of encoding its own constituent minds directly into the fabric of space-time; after all, there's no reason why a 'mind' has to be fueled by either gray matter or sillicon... why can it not function through quantum fluctuations, or cosmic strings, or any number of things? Would such a civilization even be affected by "big blasts" as we know them? (Assuming they couldn't quite easily avoid or just neutralize them altogether). Would it even matter if it was affected, when such a mind might be spread out over a million lightyears?

Now; don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that any of this IS going to happen or even IS possible; so there's no real faith involved there. I'm merely saying; "I can *imagine* this to be possible."; that isn't faith, unless you're using a very different definition of the word than the one I'm familiar with (and one that I don't think is particularly useful). I have hope and dreams, not faith; and there's nothing wrong with having either hope or dreams, however likely or unlikely their realization may or may not be.

 

[ryan]

Dystopian, why do you even acknowledge this pessimism?

Jokodo, think of it this way. Life has adapted to various conditions on Earth by accident. Think about what we will be able to adapt to with our intensions and the progress of our technologies. Humans can now survive under water, in the Arctic and even in space for Christ sakes; don't you notice the trajectory of our abilities?

Our technology is analogous to the "natural technology" that other life-forms have as part of their biological makeups. There are only so many more conditions that we need to adapt to.

 

[Jokodo]

<snip>a dozen backups stowed across interstellar space.<snip>

Because there's nothing at all problematic about keeping a dozen backups spread across interstellar space synchronised.

Speed of light, anyone? Or how about inverse square law?

<snip>I can imagine a civilization so advanced that it's become capable of encoding its own constituent minds directly into the fabric of space-time; after all, there's no reason why a 'mind' has to be fueled by either gray matter or sillicon... why can it not function through quantum fluctuations, or cosmic strings, or any number of things?<snip>

Can you be a bit more specific about how this encoding minds into the fabric of spacetime business is going to work? Not the engineering details, just a general outline?

unless you're using a very different definition of the word than the one I'm familiar with (and one that I don't think is particularly useful). I have hope and dreams, not faith

I don't think I am using an unusual definition, not necessarily so. If we agree that practicing Muslims or Catholics have faith in heaven, we must allow for faith to be expressed in hope and dreams, not (only) convictions. After all, they're less then confident that they'll make it there, that's why they do all those things like praying or fasting or confessing or going to mass to up their odds.

 

[Jokodo]

Dystopian, why do you even acknowledge this pessimism?

Jokodo, think of it this way. Life has adapted to various conditions on Earth by accident. Think about what we will be able to adapt to with our intensions and the progress of our technologies. Humans can now survive under water, in the Arctic and even in space for Christ sakes; don't you notice the trajectory of our abilities?

Our technology is analogous to the "natural technology" that other life-forms have as part of their biological makeups. There are only so many more conditions that we need to adapt to.

Humans can now survive under water, in the Arctic and even in space

… and in none of those places are they immune against dying from a big enough blast. Indeed, in all of them, people have died.

There are only so many more conditions that we need to adapt to.

Where "adapt" means reach a state where we don't necessarily die under those conditions. What you need for immortality is a state where we necessarily don't die. Quite a different animal.

 

[dystopian]

Because there's nothing at all problematic about keeping a dozen backups spread across interstellar space synchronised.

Who says they need to be synchronized in real-time? Just send regular updates. Sure, there might be a fifty year gap between your death and resurrection, but so what? Also, there's always the possibility that we figure out a way to create stable microwormholes for FTL communication, or something we can't even imagine yet.

Can you be a bit more specific about how this encoding minds into the fabric of spacetime business is going to work? Not the engineering details, just a general outline?

Sure, essentially by creating something akin to an artificial Boltzmann brain.

I don't think I am using an unusual definition, not necessarily so. If we agree that practicing Muslims or Catholics have faith in heaven, we must allow for faith to be expressed in hope and dreams, not (only) convictions. After all, they're less then confident that they'll make it there, that's why they do all those things like praying or fasting or confessing or going to mass.

They have 'certainty' (ie; faith) that there is such a thing as heaven, and a god, and all that; but they also have 'certainty' (ie; faith) that getting to heaven requires adherence to all these arcane rules and rituals and that if they don't they go to the other place. That doesn't mean that you can somehow call hope/dreams the same as faith, or even roughly equivalent. I can hope that I will randomly find a million dollars on the street, but I sure as fuck don't have *faith* in it.

You can certainly have hopes and dreams that are tangentially *related* to a central faith you may have, such as god or heaven. However, there is no such central faith involved in transhumanism. Certainly not one that you've identified. Nobody, after all, is talking about these hypothetical future scenarios and technologies with anything remotely approaching certainty.

To me, it just sounds like you're the sort of person who overshoots in their skepticism, as quite a few people tend do. "We don't know of a way to do x right now, and it seems unlikely to me, therefore we will never have x," for example. Or like the inventor of the vacuum tube saying; "To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth – all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances." (which was uttered by Lee DeForest in 1926)

I think that you look at the some of the wilder dreams of transhumanists , and basically think that they are the flawed stance of assuming that science will magically find a way to do whatever they want in the future, and that they take this stance on faith. I think then, that in response to that perception, you take the complete opposite stance; and shut down or narrow the possibilities to an unreasonable degree, based on our current ignorance/incompetence and extrapolating it to the future.

It is unreasonable to think that science *will* solve a problem, before it actually has. However, it is similarly unreasonable to think that science *can't* solve a problem, because it hasn't yet. Holding either of these positions requires faith, the middle ground between them does not.

 

[Jokodo]

Who says they need to be synchronized in real-time? Just send regular updates.

OK, forget the speed of light. You won't get around the inverse square law, though. Sending an update of a brain requires bandwidth, and sending those kinds of information over interstellar distances requires energy. A lot of it. When they send a laser to the moon to measure it's distance, the beam is spread out over 6.5 km by the time is arrives there, and that's barely over a lightsecond away.

Now, much of that divergence is caused by the atmosphere, so you could probably cut down on the rate of divergence quite a bit by employing a sender in space. Let's say we improve our focus to 1/1,000,000 archsecond instead of the figure of ~1.0 archsecond we manage for the moon. My preliminary calculations suggests that the light would be spread out over an area 16 orders of magnite larger than our lasers on moon, and thus the signal 16 orders of magnitude weaker, by the time it reaches Alpha Cen - and that is allowing for a millionfold improvement of focus. There are physical limits on how much information you can reliably transmit with that kind of connection.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Who says they need to be synchronized in real-time? Just send regular updates.

OK, forget the speed of light. You won't get around the inverse square law, though. Sending an update of a brain requires bandwidth, and sending those kinds of information over interstellar distances requires energy. A lot of it. When they send a laser to the moon to measure it's distance, the beam is spread out over 6.5 km by the time is arrives there, and that's barely over a lightsecond away.

Now, much of that divergence is caused by the atmosphere, so you could probably cut down on the rate of divergence quite a bit by employing a sender in space. Let's say we improve our focus to 1/1,000,000 archsecond instead of the figure of ~1.0 archsecond we manage for the moon. My preliminary calculations suggests that the light would be spread out over an area 16 orders of magnite larger than our lasers on moon, and thus the signal 16 orders of magnitude weaker, by the time it reaches Alpha Cen - and that is allowing for a millionfold improvement of focus. There are physical limits on how much information you can reliably transmit with that kind of connection.

So load it on a hard drive and send a ship. If the interval between death and ressurrection is 10 million years instead of 50 years, what's the difference?

 

[ryan]

Humans can now survive under water, in the Arctic and even in space

… and in none of those places are they immune against dying from a big enough blast. Indeed, in all of them, people have died.

There are only so many more conditions that we need to adapt to.

Where "adapt" means reach a state where we don't necessarily die under those conditions. What you need for immortality is a state where we necessarily don't die. Quite a different animal.

The important part is where I said, "don't you notice the trajectory of our abilities?" Especially note the motivation behind medicine and the thought of extending lives. What is more valuable than one's own life/health and the lives of loved ones? The motivation goes to infinity as does the value of the goal.

It's like saying that we don't have the material to support a 3 km high-rise now, so we never will.

 

[ryan]

Check out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0lvxTm2iLg . Aubrey de Grey seems like the real deal.

 

[Jokodo]

Humans can now survive under water, in the Arctic and even in space

… and in none of those places are they immune against dying from a big enough blast. Indeed, in all of them, people have died.

There are only so many more conditions that we need to adapt to.

Where "adapt" means reach a state where we don't necessarily die under those conditions. What you need for immortality is a state where we necessarily don't die. Quite a different animal.

The important part is where I said, "don't you notice the trajectory of our abilities?" Especially note the motivation behind medicine and the thought of extending lives. What is more valuable than one's own life/health and the lives of loved ones? The motivation goes to infinity as does the value of the goal.

It's like saying that we don't have the material to support a 3 km high-rise now, so we never will.

Read some old science-fiction for examples of what people thought would be achievable within a generation that we still haven't achieved, or that we now know to be impossible. Just because some things are becoming possible that might have once been considered impossible doesn't mean everything imaginable is possible, and motivation doesn't beat physics.

 

[Jokodo]

Who says they need to be synchronized in real-time? Just send regular updates.

OK, forget the speed of light. You won't get around the inverse square law, though. Sending an update of a brain requires bandwidth, and sending those kinds of information over interstellar distances requires energy. A lot of it. When they send a laser to the moon to measure it's distance, the beam is spread out over 6.5 km by the time is arrives there, and that's barely over a lightsecond away.

Now, much of that divergence is caused by the atmosphere, so you could probably cut down on the rate of divergence quite a bit by employing a sender in space. Let's say we improve our focus to 1/1,000,000 archsecond instead of the figure of ~1.0 archsecond we manage for the moon. My preliminary calculations suggests that the light would be spread out over an area 16 orders of magnite larger than our lasers on moon, and thus the signal 16 orders of magnitude weaker, by the time it reaches Alpha Cen - and that is allowing for a millionfold improvement of focus. There are physical limits on how much information you can reliably transmit with that kind of connection.

So load it on a hard drive and send a ship. If the interval between death and ressurrection is 10 million years instead of 50 years, what's the difference?

Ironically, it's probably true: If speed isn't your concern, it probably always will be more reasonable/economical to pack a voyager-type probe with micro-SD chips than to transmit the information directly through space.

Still: How often do you want to make your backups? Are you going to ship them immediately, or just once a century? How much of your previous experiences can get lost (because there hasn't been a backup recently, or because the probe carrying the most recent one was still close enough to your home planet to be destroyed in the blast that got you) for us to still talk about resurrection?