Invictus - I guess the unanswered question is whether or the biological "circuits" of the brain can be duplicated with silicon. The sci-fi geek in my says, "I hope so"...but I'm certain that's true. So, if you can't duplicate the biological function of the brain in hard silicon, can you really duplicate the brain and human consciousness? Not certain we can.

And I think it's also more than just node a connects to node b, etc. I'm presuming that with the biological "circuits" of neurons - which are a chemical transport mechanism, maybe even such things as signal propagation time, and strength/duration of signals may have an impact on consciousness. Not sure...really talking out my ass given my obviously very limited knowledge of the brain/nervous systems/etc...but it is certainly *not* a 1-for-1 analogy to silicon.

Which is why I suppose they have basically "gel-packs" in Star Trek for their machine brains....lol

You might as well say penicillin was a bad idea. Which is crazy town.

We will live longer, and I earnestly hope that we will continue to advance and expand what it means to be human.

You may fear the future, synapse. I for one am looking forward to it.

http://www.startrek.com/boards-topic/32722354/Gel-Packs_1020545141_32722354

I really think you're all underestimating the changes that would happen to society and our individual psychologies if people's thoughts were integrated with the internet. But it's not a fight worth having and, frankly, I don't want to bump the Luddite SYnapse's misanthropic thread any further.

Invictus: we are primates half a chromosome from a chimp, evolved to be hunter gatherers. The fact that we work 8 hour days in an office, and communicate with handheld electronics across the globe speaks to our adaptability.

Will there be Sturm und drang? Yes. But I think we'll be ok in the end.

Some day our progeny will look back at us the same way we look back on single celled organisms.

Transhumanism (I've also heard the term "singularity" to describe a related phenomenon in which the human body becomes integrated with all available and relevant technology) scares the living shit out of me.

Invictus is right; we will change the human condition. Would we need to talk to anyone? Would we need to go to school? No. Also, if we integrate technology and humans directly, it is reasonable to surmise that we will have created an advanced to perform every human job. We may very well invent ourselves out of existence.

Still saving up for my heavily armed remote mountain cabin.

Yeah because of course if everyone except you has evolved into a hive-mind robot super-race, hiding in a shack in the mountains will be a great way to ensure your survival.

Jack makes a great point (oh my God, now I'm agreeing with Jack!). Eliminating the need to learn the basics and instead teach how to think and analyze and deduce would allow for much greater intellectual achievment. Add in the longer life span of the individual and the elimination of mind consuming diseases like Alzheimer's and the ability for the individual intellectual achievement is amplified. Then when the collaborative capabilities come into play, our advances as a species would be staggering.

I don't believe we would ever lose our sense of self because even transhumanism looks at the morality and potnetial abuse and would insist on a level of willful voluntary disconnect so that each individual's experiences would be their own. Posthumanism might eliminate self, but not transhumanism.

"@Jamie - of course a furnace isn't transhumanism" - just one point - humans have this really special feature which uses a furnace/fire it is called cooking, and allows us to digestion things which would otherwise nit he possible - basically you can look at it as external pre-digestion. We have a much shorter digestive tract compared to other animals of a similar size (who don't cook)

I think this is the closest thing to transhumanism which we've been doing for more thousands of years than even writing. Though i'll avoid getting into a semantic arguement about what exactly transhumanism is, this fact is very cool feature of our species.

The other side is how to digitize the human soul (as opposed to just our digestion being outside our body) But escaping our biology completely would alter what it means to be human.

" If we find a way to integrate our thoughts with the internet we'll already "know" everything, making education superfluous."

We still need to learn how to navigate this information, which is something google does for us at the moment because there is more information that any one human can understand. Knowing and understanding are two totally different things...

Ugh....I wasn't arguing that furnaces are transhumanism.....I was specifically addressing SYnners assertion that he doesn't like human advances that extend life....furnaces extend life, but are not transhumanism...I get it. I was making the argument that the internet troll is yet another hypocrite hating on technology while he embraces it daily.

But a pacemaker is as much transhumanism as curing cancer or Alzheimer's or HIV/AIDS.

So would the Borg be transhuman or posthuman?

To be fair I am sympathetic with the general idea Synapse is promulgating in that the "savior in technology" and/or "immortality through technology" crowd is kind of sad and certainly naive.

Especially the immortality thing. Okay, let's say we can download your brain onto the cloud. Cool. Thing is, it may behave just like you do (without a body, if that is even possible), but it is not actually you. You still have to die. It's more like a sophisticated gravestone than immortality.

Granted, if all that bothers you about death is that you will no longer able to exert your influence on the world then it is indeed a panacea. But if what bothers you about mortality is ceasing to exist, or having to experience physical death, you're still out of luck.

You're mortal, get used to it. Contrary to popular belief, it can help make life worth living, not the other way around.

@Krellin, i think i'm arguing that the use of fire (well cooking) is trans-human, in the sense that it takes biological functions and extends them beyond the body with technology.

I know that's not what you were saying, but i think this is hard to define because of all the things which have been happening slowly over thousands of years... I might be mis-using the word, but i really think our 'external digestion' is cool; Not SY's assertion may be closely based around a very tight definition of trans-humanism: upload our minds to the cloud, but i agree with you on pace-makers and other assistive technologies.

The singularity is a related idea - that if we learn new things faster tomorrow than we did today and our collective knowledge begins to increase exponentially eventually we will reach a point where tomorrow is not like today - where there is a run-away increase and instead of a century or decade for things to change a single day makes a huge difference.

It is not the same thing as transhumanism, but it is related to the ideas of enhanced learning which transhumanists might support.

@Orath - I understand your contention, and in the widest definition I guess I would agree with...but no "transhumanist" would ever buy in to the definition. Of course, miniaturize that stove, stick it in someone's head in place of their mouth with a outlet valve to squirt the now-predigested-food (i.e. cooked) into their next digestive stop and it would be transhuman....so yes, I get it...but nobody else will, I suspect.

But generally, everything I have mentioned falls in the same vein. We make a furnace because our bodies fail to keep us hot enough. We build a structure - an outer skin - because out own frail skin isn't suited to protect us from all the elements. An automobile compensates for our slow, tired legs and our lack of carrying power...supplements the body. A phone replaces our soft voice and our limited hearing.

So yes, all of human technology compensates for some human deficiency.

Arguably, the "tomorrow is completely unlike today" concept is almost posthuman and should result in time travel and the Q continuum style god-like abilities.

As for the "singularity" or whatever so changing humanity that we no longer are what we are blah blah blah...yeah, so has every human advancement. Our society today is vastly different than whatever they were doing in 1,000 B.C.....except that as humans, we still need to eat, shit and fuck, and along the way we feel emotions and have needs tied to these emotions.

Instant access to data...or even instant comprehension of information...will not eliminate these human fundamentals unless they are somehow eliminated from the brain, and or compensated for with electronics (i.e. need intimacy? The implant satisfies the need electronically...) But since porn represents a revoltingly large portion of the internet, electronic intimacy is already replacing human contact...

Porn is a transhumanism concept! I love it! +1!

' Granted, if all that bothers you about death is that you will no longer able to exert your influence on the world then it is indeed a panacea. But if what
bothers you about mortality is ceasing to exist, or having to experience
physical death, you're still out of luck.'

The question is how much of you survives the transition to a bodyless form. With our current technology we'll be able to copy the massive amount of data shared on social networks and model how we would expect to behave on those same social networks, which is a rather limited amount.

Our ability will only improve, but whether it 'counts as' us surviving will be a large numbe of small steps. Imagine the best AI we could build to play dip based only on copying a single person's play-style and in-game messaging.

At the moment our bes efforts would be rather poor.

But if we get good at copying human personality i think they will be recognised as seperate individuals with seperate rights, like having children a copy of a human mind into a different corpus; without the biochemistry of the brain there will be fundamental differences, and they may not be human, but it will be like being immortal in a sense... Still i suspect cures for degenerative brain illness, cancer, and 'old age' will bring us closer to immortality sooner than uploading.

So far I'd say that there are:

technological advances - which assist us in being human/humans to exist

other advances - which force us to redefine what a human is

So yeah, giving your brain access to google would be a technological advace. But uploading your brain onto the cloud would be in the "other" category. Do cloud-brains have human rights? What if they become second class citizens? "Fleshies only" signs up on some blogs etc.

You may jest, but people automatically assume that the future will be bright, and it certainly as hell may not be.

Also try to imagine if there are people like jmo in charge of the cloud, and you get silenced for 1000 years for saying something stupid.

@SYn - that's hilarious!!.....and so true...

Meh...you'll just replace the deficiency of a biological body with the concerns of an electronics one. Hardware failure, data corruption, viruses, etc will be the next bane of trans-human existence...And not just the loss of data, but people corrupting your personality profile to add to it. Electronic love potions...guilty feelings for the murder you never committed, etc...

EEw....might have to start writing a story tonight...

@krellin: 'changing humanity that we no longer
are what we are blah blah blah...yeah, so has every human advancement.' - the idea of the singularity is that tuese human advancements make the next one faster, and exponentially so.

But you are entirely correct - there are phyiscal needs which don't change, much - (fyi i think porn is only about 1% of the internet, by data available to the public, but that might be a smaller % than the amount of data consumed) i think there are other more fundamental limits, one on information transfer (ie between people, buying in to new ideas, though the rapid spread and creation of memes shows what even a small percentage of the population online 24/7 can quickly do)

However i also think there are hard limits - moore's law is about to hit a physcal (quantum) limit and even in the last 5 years i don't think processors have gotten much faster (instead we have multiple cores at the same high speed)

I really don't think that a singularity is likely, even as we get massve collaborations of humans working on things like protien folding (games at home like 'foldit' which 'enhance' research with millions of human minds, each playing a game and sharing the result; are awesome but i still think they are far too limited in interaction and understanding to give rise to an exponential growth... Though maybe i'm being too pessimistic)

@orathaic

My point is even if we could build another human exactly like you with your body and personality that will never ever die, you yourself will still experience death and your unique consciousness (which is necessarily never going to be exactly the same as your clone, if only because you don't occupy the same physical area) will be extinguished, just like every other human who ever lived.

To others we may get to a point where it seems like you never died. We may even get a society of immortal human-robots, all based on people alive in Year X. (Though that seems odd, you'd think they engineer themselves to have less shitty traits). But ultimately, like I said, this is only comforting in the sense that your personal wishes will continue to be played out past your death, like a really assiduous lawyer looking after your estate. You yourself are still dead, and will still have felt death.

'.And not just the loss of data, but people corrupting your personality profile to add to it.' - you mean advertised adding to your preferences (i'm pretty sure some friends have 'liked' stupid things on facebook which i know they'd never click, because 'criminals' take 'advertising' money and promise 1 million new likes for a product, and then convince facebook that 1 million real people have liked various products... )


How and Ever: "technological advances - which assist us in being human/humans to exist
other advances - which force us to redefine what a human is"

Is there not a blurry line between these two - what is it to be human beyond our behaviour?

Do you notice the change in conversation when wiki is there to lookup any given topic? There is no need to argue out questions (when sitting around with friends in the pub) when someone with a smartphone can look it up almost instantly...

Because our children* will not notice this change in behaviour. Will they not be different humans just by having access to google?

" if we could build another human exactly like you with your body and personality that will never ever die"

Impossible. This is the statement of someone that needs to take more science classes.

*Exactly* is a very exact word...use it with caution.