A space for open dialog on the possible things coming, the possible things becoming gone. Posthumanity, consciousness, nanotech, uploading, singularity, et al.


@theEtruscan: I swapped this out of the happy box thread cause it seemed I was going to take it OT.

quote:

Originally posted by theEtruscan:

You make a cogent argument TW (the Youtube is a nice elaboration on your post), but I question the part about the disappearance of economics.

Yeah that part is difficult to conceive of, but most basically I think I meant the end of economics as we're knowing it, namely scarcity and zero-sum gaming.

quote:

I guess that's approximately the difference between single-player and multi-player online games - i.e., you can play with yourself forever if you're really that interesting, but sooner or later you encounter a horrifying thing: blankness, vapidity, an all consuming void of possibilities which is all that remains of your repetitive, malnourished imagination. Much more interesting when you know there are other people out there - I think that would be the case even if the people were "at least" post-human.

Certainly so, even playing Life all by yourself can become worse-than-water-torture boring. We're social animals, and apart from our own creations, the environment, other people, and their creations is all we've got, and that's I think generally true for synthetic worlds as well. When humans are uploaded they would definitely be connected. And I should note that the posthumanity I'm talking about is fully synthetic, (possibly computerized depending on how the Hard Problem and computability of phenomenal consciousness pans out) designed consciousnesses no longer existing in ape-space (the physical earth) but in a plethora of designed/grown simulated X-verses. I don't know what they would necessarily be like, but probably similar to previous human earth and human fantasy environments at first, sticking with the familiar in the beginning, but over time realizing/evolving the Vast possibilities of experience without Homo Sapien biological, volitional, or even consciousness limitations. What I imagine is the traditional (evolved) internal models of "person", "individual", "life", "value", "self", sort of vanishing as experience becomes so complex, incomprehensible(to current humans) and massively interconnected that such neurological identity-patterns simply dissipate like appendices.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

I rather think that the ability to paint or project your own surrogate template for reality upon the world through some sort of virtual interface will precede a fully immersive virtual universe in which one subsumes their self/reality in favor of the new model.

Imagine that people are walking about with sunglasses that mapo a new reality (visual) over the actual world, like a desktop theme if you will. Dantesque constructs where the hotdog vendor tries to sell a Bosch-like bird thing inside a salivating vagina bun. That sort of thing.

Anyone else want to get in on this, it was a good thread?

i've seen a few discussions of this nature before and I'm always left a little disappointed, mainly for the reason that no one ever posits clearly defined reasoning as to why humanity would stuff their consciousness into some future hardware box. who is going to maintain that box and what reasons would they have for doing so?

it's kinda like why we have no ubiquitous counterpart of the virtual world Matrix of Neuromancer. in the early 90's there was that sense that computers and networking and VR was where we were heading, but the WWW showed that what people really wanted was interactive adverts, catalogs, magazines. now we have youTube and such which is more a form of interactive television. the more VR like applications are mostly viewed as games or entertainment formats. I don't think there is anything wrong with these directions but it clearly shows that the majority of people are more interested in augmenting reality than in entering into new reality spaces.

what it says to me about humans is we are willing to use technology to support our existing human activities. not many people really want to move into a totally new paradigm. i mean, what is the point, where is the evolutionary advantage to doing so that would make this part of the equation which leads to posthumanism? i don't quite agree that posthumans will be so removed from current humans that we can't imagine or relate to them. why even bother calling them human if that is the case?

My hunch for posthumanism has to do with the increasing transparency of the technologies that we're developing, such that flipping between media becomes more seamless than it already is. And that it's going to be less about "post" and more about "augment"--especially since I think many of the virtual reality technologies that have been successful (MUDs, MUCKs, and MOOs, or even SL and World of Warcraft) are simply new ways of doing very old things: communicating and telling stories.

quote:

Originally posted by electricdragon/ madevilbeats:
i've seen a few discussions of this nature before and I'm always left a little disappointed, mainly for the reason that no one ever posits clearly defined reasoning as to why humanity would stuff their consciousness into some future hardware box. who is going to maintain that box and what reasons would they have for doing so?

it's kinda like why we have no ubiquitous counterpart of the virtual world Matrix of Neuromancer. in the early 90's there was that sense that computers and networking and VR was where we were heading, but the WWW showed that what people really wanted was interactive adverts, catalogs, magazines. now we have youTube and such which is more a form of interactive television. the more VR like applications are mostly viewed as games or entertainment formats. I don't think there is anything wrong with these directions but it clearly shows that the majority of people are more interested in augmenting reality than in entering into new reality spaces.

I do not believe one can say whether of not humans want to jump into a new reality sphere until said sphere is actually presented. We do not have technology that allows one do do that in a fully immersive way. We do have Wow and Second Life which have enough participants to suggest that the option would be welcome. Not to mention all the people taking various substances to alter reality.

As to the future, it might help to see it incrementally. People in 1940 probably would have little understanding or interest in the internet as far as posting, living second lives, etc. Yet here all of us are. The reason is that the change came in stages. As such any human in futurity might be "augmented" as you say. but that augmentation might lead to a different sort of thinking which leads to diffeent descions. By the time the human is edging toward being post human you cannot guess at the motives of such a being anymore than you can about the little grey spacemen coming down to probe your anus.

The fundamental idea behind the singulairty is precisely our inability to understand it. It is shielded in this way, conveniently, from much of the criticism against it. The fundamental argument is that we edge toward a future that is completely divorced from the business we've been on about for the last 50,000 or so years. It seems unlikely that such an event might transpire, but I'm sure f there were intelligent dinosaurs running around they wouldn't have been predicting the end of their species by fire and brimstone either.

It's a point of demarcaton beyond which our language and tools as they stand now become, at the least, antiquated and at the worst meaningless.

My 12-tear old son plays WOW, using his headphone to talk for nearly free to strangers in Kentucky and Manitoba while text-messaging onscreen to others, while he talks on the phone to someone else, while listening to selected music. With the TV on.

Who said immersive/virtual reality had to be entirely of one piece? That it had to be like a womb that enclosed within its own world while blocking the mundane world?

As for consciousness uploading/downloading and all that: sounds way cool but then, so did antigravs fifty years ago.

quote:

Not to mention all the people taking various substances to alter reality.

I explained the boomer generation to my Gen-x niece this way:

We stuck stuff into our brains to alter reality.

You guys stick your brains into stuff.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
My hunch for posthumanism has to do with the increasing transparency of the technologies that we're developing, such that flipping between media becomes more seamless than it already is. And that it's going to be less about "post" and more about "augment"--especially since I think many of the virtual reality technologies that have been successful (MUDs, MUCKs, and MOOs, or even SL and World of Warcraft) are simply new ways of doing very old things: communicating and telling stories.

Certainly, augmentations taking the path of least resistance (least change necessary) and most marketability we can allow as a constant. There was likely minimal, if even the possibility of, masterminding to change the way we eat, dress, interact, structure society, construct our identities, etc. when things like cities, the railroad, television and the internet came along. I'd think besides the relatively inexorable advance of tech, the primary idea was just "we're gonna make things easier/better". "With this amazing new technology, we'll be able to get from here to there faster, win this or that war, make automatic perfect paintings, speak with anyone anywhere instantly, not have our communications be screwed in the event the Russians start nuking us, and this is just like, really freakin' cool!" -Bridge Trilogy, Dialectic Condition et al. The deeper changes don't always happen overnight and futures are of course geo/demographically variable.

Also, at least my notion of posthumans does not require that they do something completely other than communicate and tell stories, but rather that changes in the tech, culture, vessel, and the nature of and relationship to communication and story itself create the parameters of a system from which can emerge entities so different from what we've known as "human" as to be no longer incontrovertibly such, regardless of where you draw the taxonomical line in the continuum.

And as UD mentioned, Second Life, WOW, etc, is in a very peripheral, preliminary "look-that's-neat" Difference Engine stage. Wait till the hyper-mediated kids born in the 90's all turn 50 and all the pre-internet "grown ups ran things" adults die off.

quote:

electricdragon:

i've seen a few discussions of this nature before and I'm always left a little disappointed, mainly for the reason that no one ever posits clearly defined reasoning as to why humanity would stuff their consciousness into some future hardware box. who is going to maintain that box and what reasons would they have for doing so?

(If you were talking about "The Happiness Box", I apologize and you can disregard the following paragraph.)

Well, this assumes that the uploaded would not be able to interact with their substrate (RL). I'd *imagine a self-maintaining, Weak AI-run system of robotics operating on solar power could be constructed, and from there, the uploaded could control said robots internally if necessary. (Trogdor's already helping to construct this) What people call "having a life" would be known as "substrate maintenance", an ever less-frequent annoying chore which seems to be more and more what we're doing with this "job/economics" show. Of course, there would have to be several transitory stages of cultural evolution/engineering before everyone decides to jump-in-the-box. Namely the death/erosion of value systems linked with the physical substrate itself (though not necessarily with other experiencers), which is already occurring.

*Keep in mind I'm not suggesting any time-frames here.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

Well, that and off-site backups.

I guess my post-humanism point is that humans are now essentially outside of evolution, just in that our changes are mostly under our control and occurring almost infinitely faster than evolutionary timescales. The changes in just our physical bodies, minds aside, in the time since Newton are dramatic. We could probably still take ourselves out if we tried really, really hard, but it's tough to imagine any scenario short of an asteroid much bigger than the one that got the dinosaurs that would do in all of us.

Sterling seems to me to have played most interestingly with the idea of post-humanism in the near-mid future.

A glitchy future where our implants occasionally blue-screen is not real alien and dreamlike, but it's pretty plausible to me.

I don't think we're likely to leave the meat behind, but it seems almost inevitable that at some point we'll stop fucking about in sport and just go hard with drugs, surgery, genetics, prosthetics and everything else... and one of the cool things Sterling has done is imagine what happens when we do that for geeks too, in terms of boosting mental abilities.

Shapers and Mechanists... shit, I hope he's right and not Womack (much as I love Jack's books, I wouldn't want to live there).

Jack Womack: Building hells, so you don't have to live there.

And I agree Bravus, there'd always be some meat left around somewhere. As a historical zoo and reminder of wetter origins, if nothing else.

I just came across this on BoingBoing, very interesting observation.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what's simulated and what's real, because this distinction didn't exist in the Stone Age.


Linkage

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
I just came across this on BoingBoing, very interesting observation.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what's simulated and what's real, because this distinction didn't exist in the Stone Age.


Linkage

Yes they can. THe level of fear if being in a war movie is nothing like the level of fear of being in a war. How many times have any of us shit our pants watching Private Ryan.

Our brains can certainly tell the difference. With porn, my brain knows that if my right hand doesn't assist, that beautiful blowjob on my pc screen ain't gonna make ME come, just that dumb jerk the woman is sucking off in never-never land.

Just because we can relate to the drama on screen, doesn't mean we can't tell the difference between it and reality. If not, people would be attacking the screens or fleeing the cinema.

It's an interesting observation. he takes it way too far. He seems to be a bit of a nutter as I read the rest of the interview. Then I looked on another link and found he gets even crazier. I still like the idea that reality and artifice have some nominal indistinguishability back in the limbic core. True or not.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
It's an interesting observation. he takes it way too far. He seems to be a bit of a nutter as I read the rest of the interview. Then I looked on another link and found he gets even crazier. I still like the idea that reality and artifice have some nominal indistinguishability back in the limbic core. True or not.

Of course they do. I love watching my dogs twitch and growl as tyhey dream )presumably) about chasing -- and actually *catching*, for a change -- our backyard squirrels.

quote:

Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
It's an interesting observation. he takes it way too far. He seems to be a bit of a nutter as I read the rest of the interview. Then I looked on another link and found he gets even crazier. I still like the idea that reality and artifice have some nominal indistinguishability back in the limbic core. True or not.

Of course they do. I love watching my dogs twitch and growl as tyhey dream )presumably) about chasing -- and actually *catching*, for a change -- our backyard squirrels.

People don't acknowledge that often. For the most part they seem very well assured of their differentiation betwwen the real and the artificial. Even as they enter cyberspace more and more wholly, they are convinced of the radical segmentation between the two.

I know I'm late to the discussion, but I haven't seen any discussion of the likely backlash against transhumansm. I think we are already beginning to see this sort of thing, as a predictable outgrowth of the pro-life and anti-genemod movements. Even seemingly innocuous modifications such as anti-aging and tissue cloning have their critics, including members of the president's bio-ethics advisory group (big surprise there.) My guess is that the debate will only get more contentious as more "creepy an unnatural" advancements become possible. That isn't to say people won't do it, even if they have to go to another country to do so; but it could get ugly.

You're right and the resistance worked so well for them neaderthals.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
You're right and the resistance worked so well for them neaderthals.

Oh, that's what I would expect, too. But that doesn't mean I want to see the War of the Transhumans. Makes for a great comic, maybe, but reality not so much.

We only call it transhumainsim because we see it from our perspective. For the truly transhuman, the term human may seem entirely irrelevant. Rather like how we don't call ourselves transprimates.