4 ms·
To become transhuman or posthuman, you'd first have to understand what it is to be human, and we're not anywhere near that. Some of the enthusiasm about the ho
by photochemsyn 4y ago
To become transhuman or posthuman, you'd first have to understand what it is to be human, and we're not anywhere near that. Some of the enthusiasm about the hopes for such a transition were raised by this:
> "The Human Genome Project finally released a complete human genome sequence in 2003, in a project that took 13 years to complete."
The most remarkable thing about that accomplishment was how little it resulted in. Almost all of the hopes about medical breakthroughs and finally gaining a complete understanding of human biology have not been realized. There are many reasons for this - for example, the genome edits itself as it develops in different cell types, so the genome of your nerve cells is not the genome of your immune cells, heart cells, liver cells etc. Communication between all these cell types is incredibly important and that's hard to get from the genomic sequence. It turns out the 3D structure of the genome is as important as the 3D structure of proteins is, as it is an active dynamic entity in all cell types. There are probably dozens of other reasons on top of those.
As far as the notion of uploading one's consciousness into an artificial substrate while retaining one's sense of self, that seems highly implausible when we don't really understand the basic physical mechanism of consciousness, other than a vague idea that the brain is the most important component (even though nerves saturate the entire body).
Hence the whole subject remains in the science fiction arena and will stay there for a good long while, perhaps a century or more.
- peteradio 4y agoYou could potentially make a thing that acts like you, that's it. The only reason our existence is tolerable is that we agree with the guy that when he goes to bed he is dead and I take over in the morning and I make the same deal tomorrow.
- nickff 4y agoI quite like that phrasing (in your second sentence); did you come up with it yourself, or did you catch it somewhere?
- peteradio 4y agoI think I've read it somewhere but I never keep track of citations. Might have been Michael Keaton in that movie, moral of the story, if you copy yourself then your copy is gonna bang your wife.
- walterbell 4y agoA sub-plot of Travelers on Netflix, created by Brad Wright, creator of Stargate SG-1.
- awayto 4y agoI enjoyed this article posted here recently about the topic. Author goes into some interesting thought experiments on the topic of always waking as a brand new person. https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingnes... Previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049237
- maroonblazer 4y agoWhat, or where, is the "I" in this deal?
- stubish 4y agoSalami tactics (Yes Minister) would work around this. Replace and extend your brain and nervous system small parts at a time. Until one day you are entirely hardware, and thus your consciousness entirely software. Continuity of consciousness remains uninterrupted.
- jholman 4y ago> To become transhuman or posthuman, you'd first have to understand what it is to be human What? Why? I'm post-adolescent (at least biologically, please don't bring up all of my emotional immaturity), and I still don't (and definitely didn't then) understand what it is to be adolescent. I live in a post-feudal society, and while I think we understand a few things about what it means to be feudal, I wouldn't bet on us having a full and complete understanding. There's a plant on my balcony that's post-living, and as far as I know it never understood anything at all, much less understood what it was to be living. Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?
- tomhoward 4y agoYou didn’t have to create a new technology that enabled you to transition to post-adolescent. I think your parent commenter meant “_we_ would have to understand”, as a species, rather than all or any of us individually. In practice just the people creating the technology. But it’s a big leap.
- jholman 4y agoBut we did have to invent the (social) technology that enabled us to transition to a post-feudal society. And we did so without fully understanding feudal society. For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse).
- walterbell 4y ago> we did so without fully understanding feudal society. No human understood feudal society? What about the leaders of those societies?
- myownpetard 4y ago