Cris said:
Yes. Serious theoreticaly work by a serious and well respected physicist who doesn't have a very narrow, clear philosophical agenda behind his work.
And we won’t be able to reproduce that because……?
Learn something about quantum mechanics.
Umm – don’t use an ordinary computer then.
What kind of computer would you suggest I use? Some fantastical nanobot computer? Quantum computers perhaps? Or maybe photonic computers? Oh wait... that's all been researched before and it doesn't afford anything close to what you are looking for.
Nonsense – we have barely begun.
And how do you suppose it will happen, exactly?
Staying in a BIO form has overwhelming serious limitations that I certainly find unacceptable. You haven’t thought it through yet.
Actually, I used to think in exactly the same way. I just realized how rediculous the idea is. If carbon-based, chemical life is so weak, inefficient, and downright primitive, then why is it the only form of life that we know of? If something else was better suited to living on this planet, it would have evolved by now on it's own.
They do? I was thinking the opposite.
As evidenced by the previous point which I just address, transhumanists tend to speak as if human beings have evolved to the pinnacle of carbon-based, chemical life, and that there is nowhere else left to go except to merge with our tools.
You appear to have overlooked the issue that up until now evolution has been undirected and slow. With our currently increasing knowledge we are beginning to change that largely slow and random process into a rapidly moving directed process. That generally means increasing use of bio-technology, genetics, and AI to push us faster towards areas undreamed of before.
Blah! Evolution has been undirected and slow? Evolution has gone just where it has needed to and just as fast as it has needed to. I'm sorry that nature doesn't adapt organisms
before they actually need to. You're certainly a harsh judge of the universe.
Clearly you have misunderstood me. I make no such assumptions.
No, what you are saying is that there is nowhere else for chemical biology to go, so we must merge with our tools.
Destiny? Who cares? The merger of medical science, computing science, and other technologies, is happening. Brain augmentation is occurring. An increased pace seems inevitable.
Oh really? Give me some good examples to work with here. I think that you (and other transhumanists) are making claims off of your hips about such developments. Of course medical science, computing science and other technologies are merging together. That's what happens when certain disciplines have been around for a long time. They begin to compliment each other because you can always find uses for one in the other. Brain agumentation? What are you talking about? Give me a single example of how a normal, healthy human being's brain "capacity" was augmented due to any of the technologies that you are talking about.
Then dump the emotive terms and see it in terms of increased capabilities and unlimited lifetimes. People have been seeking immortality since they could think, that’s why they have religious fantasies. Make it possible through technology and they will likely very quickly overcome their irrational perceptions.
You have a lot to learn about religion. You have reduced something so huge, complex, and philosophically deep into something simple, shallow, and meaningless. I'm not turning this into a religious debate, because I am not a religious person, but I do at least know that it's not even remotely close to that simple, and it certainly isn't irrational. None of the ideas that people have are arbitrary, triply so for ideas that have remained constant throughout human history. Irrational perceptions... bah.
A very unfortunate defeatist attitude before we’ve hardly begun. It’s an engineering problem to be overcome.
Defeatist? Are you kidding? You don't even know if these things are at all possible, and yet instead of trying to find out if they are, you have
decided that they are because the idea is attractive to you.
How,exactly, will it be overcome, if you don't mind?
Then ditch your outdated and antiquated idea of machines. This is a merger of technologies and knowledge to produce something new and unique.
Outdated and antiquated idea of machines? What I described above
is a machine. You're not talking about creating smart machines, you are talking about creating artificial life. Big difference. A machine is a tool to overcome the limitations of the human body, pure and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not require that we become those same machines, because people have always disconnected themselves from their tools and I doubt that everyone on the Earth will want to "become one" with their tools.
To be honest, as a philosophy that reaches toward a goal, I have no problem with transhumanism. I'm not going to try and prove your belief in an ideal wrong, because people don't believe in ideals because they believe in their truth as opposed to their falsehood. No, that's not the reason for my animosity towards transhumanism. It stems from the hubris of transhumanists in their belief that they can acurately predict the future based upon their technocratic ideals when they do not factor in numerous other historical factors, whereas technology is on the bottom of the list of importance when it comes to historical change. Of course it
is important, I'm not disputing that. What I
am saying is that many other factors have to line up in order to allow technology to change society in the way that you expect it to, and you are completely denying it. That's really what bugs me, because my primary interest is history and people's views on history, and the "Singularity" simply will not occur, and you would realize that if you actually took into account other factors that far supercede technological development. But no, your techno-centric mindset has convinced you that "technological advancement will overcome all obstacles to the Singularity, and everyone everywhere will see the wonderful gifts of technological progress which the modern age has afforded us and embrace the merger of man and machine wholeheartedly, ultimately freeing mankind from the bonds of his old, weak, small, limited self." All I ask is that you get off of your idealistic pedestal and take an honest, pragmatic look at this whole concept, and then fine-tune it to the real world, because right now it simple doesn't fit.