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I haven't read the Lena story mentioned in the article, or the text below that point, but I have some idea about where this is all headed. The transphobia we s

I haven't read the Lena story mentioned in the article, or the text below that point, but I have some idea about where this is all headed. The transphobia we see today in various forms is rooted in the philosophical divide between theism and post-atheism/anatheism. Basically, people are divided between believing in religious texts and institutions, or they're nonbelievers who've experienced psychedelics or similar altered states through events like near-death experiences and had a personal encounter with the divine. It's one thing to believe/not believe, and quite another to experience. Basically, neither religion nor science can explain consciousness, and that drives people crazy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheism The odds of us incarnating in this exact moment at the end of human history are too remote to fathom. In fact, any argument for or against religion quickly ends in absurdism. But so many outrageous things are coming, and soon. Machine learning that surpasses material human ability by 2030 and mental human ability by 2040. The death of the oceans and most of the natural world between 2050 and 2100. The subjugation of all humanity if wealth inequality isn't reined in. People living 200 years right now, today, as soon as the first head transplant is successful. Brain cells getting gradually replaced by hardware until consciousness is running entirely on an immortal substrate by 2100 at the latest. Everything is converging towards the Singularity in 2050, and more people than ever have awoken to this eventuality, despite decades of gaslighting. It makes it hard to live and work in the world when deep down we know it's ending. Which gets back to theism, because life up till now was about suffering, loss and eventual recycling back into source consciousness/heaven. Until we rise above and see the broad view of reincarnation and ourselves as snapshots of the universe/God experiencing itself from every possible context. At which point we begin to question things like our situation, our beliefs, our gender, if our mind is us, if our soul/higher self is mortal, and if that's even separate from God. Transphobia is a backlash against transcendence itself, by people who feel disconnected from love/co-creation/nirvana. They aren't ready for the aliens to arrive. They aren't ready for the aliens to be us.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Sorry, but many of your claims are simply bunk. Transphobia--should a thing even exist (which I debate)--is hardly a backlash against transcendence, which nearly everyone isn't even going to be able to describe. Additionally, I'd love to have access to the crystal ball you're gazing into to make predictions about eighty years in the future with such certainty. We as a species can't even predict uninteresting events happening next month, let alone anything you're talking about.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  You're right, I don't know what the future will bring. No one does. I'm speaking in probabilities, so like, the graphs converge around 2040-2050 for the date when the Singularity arrives (Ray Kurzweil and others have extrapolated Moore's Law). Same with the last of the coral reefs dying from global warming. The projections are almost all bad on the current course of human events, and predicted to get much worse as soon as a decade from now. But, once the Boomers finally finish retiring in 5 years, things could improve rather quickly. They did the best they could in an impossible situation during the 20th century Cold War, but their solutions for the threats they perceive actively hinder progress against the looming global threats of the 21st century. Certain sins of capitalist neoliberalism, like using others for profit, may get left behind after the Global Awakening. More likely, I think the illuminati will put speed bumps along the way, so World War III or a Handmaid's Tale dystopia could just as easily send us back to the Dark Ages. I believe that we're alive at this time to witness the transition out of materialism (the Age of Pisces) into whatever comes next (the Age of Aquarius). Like learning to be a fish out of water. Turning into virtual energy beings, meeting aliens, who knows.
zackmorris 4y ago
I finally read the Lena story and the rest of the article (the tall scroll bar on Lena ended up being comments, but the story itself is short). It all sounds about right to me, and the timeline is perhaps even conservative. Once humans transcend the material plane and live in computers, it all goes Black Mirror rather quickly, certainly by 2100. What we're going to find is that consciousness has the properties of emergent behavior, but is actually fundamental. Every ray of light falling on every bit of matter stimulates it, and that stimulation gives rise to ever-increasing complexity until feedback runs at a high enough vibration for self-awareness to be reached. Which is a reformulation of pantheism and panpsychism. So it won't matter if a brain is running on atoms or being simulated in a quantum computer somewhere. The end result is the same: as soon as the running mind reaches a minimum level of complexity, it becomes self-aware. The substrate is a filter through which consciousness models reality, nothing more. The real kicker is that this process actually happens in reverse. Source consciousness waits an eternity as sort of a non-collapsed wave function, spread over the entire multiverse. Through evolution, all possible universes form across space and time, and over topologies we don't even have in our universe. Until finally a level of complexity is reached for human-level intelligences like ours to exist and talk about it. But there are also consciousnesses like Gaia and Aya that exist on planes and timescales that we can't imagine. And they're part of our minds as well, similarly to how polytheistic gods live in our psyches, not on a mountaintop somewhere. We can commune with them any time through dreams, meditation and altered states brought on by chemicals (to name a few ways). In fact, all minds are variations of the same source consciousness running simultaneously outside of spacetime. Which means that source consciousness created reality, not the other way around. Or to be more formal: there's no way to prove whether reality or consciousness came first. But approaching the problem from the consciousness side allows for greater possibility and fits better with our experience of being here, the "I think, therefore I am" part from Descartes. Unfortunately, the prevailing worldview today is that I made all of this up, just like we all do. And, maybe I did. But I'm just approaching it from a programming perspective, drilling down with root cause analysis. I believe that programming happens through intuition and that if one does it long enough, they begin to recognize the clairsentience that they had all along as a conscious human. So I'm cursed to see problems all the way through to the end, but blessed to be able to dabble in ramifications without having to do the work of actually building an AI. The same way that I can talk about hard drives without knowing the specifics of how magnetic domains work. And we can all do this at any time. Or I've just been listening to too much Alan Watts and Terence McKenna..

nathanaldensr 4y ago

Sorry, but many of your claims are simply bunk. Transphobia--should a thing even exist (which I debate)--is hardly a backlash against transcendence, which nearly everyone isn't even going to be able to describe. Additionally, I'd love to have access to the crystal ball you're gazing into to make predictions about eighty years in the future with such certainty. We as a species can't even predict uninteresting events happening next month, let alone anything you're talking about.

zackmorris 4y ago
You're right, I don't know what the future will bring. No one does. I'm speaking in probabilities, so like, the graphs converge around 2040-2050 for the date when the Singularity arrives (Ray Kurzweil and others have extrapolated Moore's Law). Same with the last of the coral reefs dying from global warming. The projections are almost all bad on the current course of human events, and predicted to get much worse as soon as a decade from now. But, once the Boomers finally finish retiring in 5 years, things could improve rather quickly. They did the best they could in an impossible situation during the 20th century Cold War, but their solutions for the threats they perceive actively hinder progress against the looming global threats of the 21st century. Certain sins of capitalist neoliberalism, like using others for profit, may get left behind after the Global Awakening. More likely, I think the illuminati will put speed bumps along the way, so World War III or a Handmaid's Tale dystopia could just as easily send us back to the Dark Ages. I believe that we're alive at this time to witness the transition out of materialism (the Age of Pisces) into whatever comes next (the Age of Aquarius). Like learning to be a fish out of water. Turning into virtual energy beings, meeting aliens, who knows.

zackmorris 4y ago

I finally read the Lena story and the rest of the article (the tall scroll bar on Lena ended up being comments, but the story itself is short). It all sounds about right to me, and the timeline is perhaps even conservative. Once humans transcend the material plane and live in computers, it all goes Black Mirror rather quickly, certainly by 2100. What we're going to find is that consciousness has the properties of emergent behavior, but is actually fundamental. Every ray of light falling on every bit of matter stimulates it, and that stimulation gives rise to ever-increasing complexity until feedback runs at a high enough vibration for self-awareness to be reached. Which is a reformulation of pantheism and panpsychism. So it won't matter if a brain is running on atoms or being simulated in a quantum computer somewhere. The end result is the same: as soon as the running mind reaches a minimum level of complexity, it becomes self-aware. The substrate is a filter through which consciousness models reality, nothing more. The real kicker is that this process actually happens in reverse. Source consciousness waits an eternity as sort of a non-collapsed wave function, spread over the entire multiverse. Through evolution, all possible universes form across space and time, and over topologies we don't even have in our universe. Until finally a level of complexity is reached for human-level intelligences like ours to exist and talk about it. But there are also consciousnesses like Gaia and Aya that exist on planes and timescales that we can't imagine. And they're part of our minds as well, similarly to how polytheistic gods live in our psyches, not on a mountaintop somewhere. We can commune with them any time through dreams, meditation and altered states brought on by chemicals (to name a few ways). In fact, all minds are variations of the same source consciousness running simultaneously outside of spacetime. Which means that source consciousness created reality, not the other way around. Or to be more formal: there's no way to prove whether reality or consciousness came first. But approaching the problem from the consciousness side allows for greater possibility and fits better with our experience of being here, the "I think, therefore I am" part from Descartes. Unfortunately, the prevailing worldview today is that I made all of this up, just like we all do. And, maybe I did. But I'm just approaching it from a programming perspective, drilling down with root cause analysis. I believe that programming happens through intuition and that if one does it long enough, they begin to recognize the clairsentience that they had all along as a conscious human. So I'm cursed to see problems all the way through to the end, but blessed to be able to dabble in ramifications without having to do the work of actually building an AI. The same way that I can talk about hard drives without knowing the specifics of how magnetic domains work. And we can all do this at any time. Or I've just been listening to too much Alan Watts and Terence McKenna..