About Transhumanism Again, Not Enough Is Brought To This Subject

A topic that has been brought up before in the past here on ATS that needs more attention. This is science fiction coming to life to a place near you. What will be the ramifications of such insanity? What happens if these transhumans go nutso? Will there be a shut off switch? This is serious technology that can flip everything upside down. And you can bet your behind that the U.S. is not the only one that's been in this game.








www.logosapologia.org...

Transhumanist Despair Of Modern Existence The film lays bare the utter desperation and futility of modern man. Kurzweil is a naturalistic scientist and he does not appear to have any belief in a theistic God. Naturalism and materialism leave the scientist in a cold, hopeless, mechanical universe. I think Richard Dawkins has encapsulated it well, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Atheists necessarily live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. The internal conflict is that no matter how convincingly they might protest, the atheist cannot really live with the universe Dawkins describes. They leap into the infinite. This film Transcendent Man is a shining evidence of that.

www.raidersnewsnetwork.com...

I believe that things like "upload" of human conciousness is inevitable as soon as computers reach the capacity.

Some rich person, faced with immenent death will give it a go & then the flood...

Originally posted by chr0naut
I believe that things like "upload" of human conciousness is inevitable as soon as computers reach the capacity.

Some rich person, faced with immenent death will give it a go & then the flood...

It's not a "Brave New World" it's a "Scary New World" it's all insane, and I want to leave.

Transhumansists On Pattern Survival Versus Gene Survival I decided to write this article after I found that many colleagues and participants whom I spoke with at the recent Humanity+ and Transvision conferences were struggling with personal and strategic decisions when they considered what sort of future to strive for. We are hampered by a historical dearth of attention to the very fundamentals that could support choosing a technological objective, such as cryonics, the elimination of biological aging, artificial general intelligence, or mind uploading to a whole brain emulation or other implementation of substrate-independent minds..

www.kurzweilai.net...

Logos Apologia is my site and I wrote the piece linked above on Transcendent Man. I agree this is an extremely important topic. I see a couple posters have indicated that they believe in consciousness uploading. I think this is a mistake, it is logically incoherent. According to Kurzweil, human immortality can be obtained by uploading your consciousness in the form of an information pattern, to demonstrate why this is incoherent I will offer a thought experiment. Place yourself in this scenario:

The idea is that you are an astronaut going on a mission to a distant planet via a new form of teleportation. To accomplish this, your brain pattern and body type will be uploaded and sent to the planet to be reconstructed from matter precisely engineered from your scan. In the process, your body on earth will be destroyed, but this is not concerning because you will soon be in your new body. Should you go? In Kurzweil’s paradigm it should work but in reality it does not.

It is not so much a matter of metaphysics as logic. The law of non-contradiction will not allow it. Consider a scenario where you are not destroyed on earth yet the upload is successful. Obviously, the person on the other planet is not you. Since this person is clearly not you in this case, it follows that it is also not you if you were destroyed. Hence, the other person is merely your clone not you. So while you could feasibly copy data about yourself -- it will never really be you.

reply to post by Bigwhammy


Would your uploaded self feel like you, think like you & have all your memories up to the upload?

Of course.

It could never be the physical you but in all other aspects (except law) it would be indistiguishable.

reply to post by Bigwhammy


Also if you could capture the essence of conciousness, why couldn't you "drive" this avatar too (the logical way it will start).

you will forfit your soul. jk....but close

reply to post by Brianegan


Yeah but imagine a few billion "souls" communicating closer than speech & since it's all virtual, why not switch on a few pleasure pathways as well?

Billions experience orgasm simultaneously.

Hey guys, lets NEVER turn this off, OK!

reply to post by chr0naut

The one thing they will not be able to do is capture the soul.
Like cloning a human being, I believe that the clone would not have a soul, and that would be very spooky. A body without emotion, train it for the purpose of warfare, and what do you have.

Lets take another view on transhumanism.

reply to post by hawaii50th


I think either you, or I, may be confusing the spirit and the soul.

I see the spirit as a non-corporeal analogue to the physical body, perhaps a body manifest in an alternate dimension.

The soul is like our preferences and desktop settings on a PC, but instead applied to our menal and emotional processes. It is the sum of our experience, beliefs and preferences.

This is the very thing that most of us would describe as uniquely "ourselves".

Originally posted by chr0naut
reply to post by hawaii50th

 

I think either you, or I, may be confusing the spirit and the soul.

I see the spirit as a non-corporeal analogue to the physical body, perhaps a body manifest in an alternate dimension.

The soul is like our preferences and desktop settings on a PC, but instead applied to our menal and emotional processes. It is the sum of our experience, beliefs and preferences.

This is the very thing that most of us would describe as uniquely "ourselves".

Spirit, soul same thing, we're not made out of electrical circuitry, bio-electrical maybe but not in the sense where they will be able to transfer our essence. When we die our soul, spirit will enter a dimension that only the soul, spirit will be able to go, nothing physical can enter. That is why it will be impossible for any science to transport the human spirit. I believe an entity could enter an empty shell of a transhuman, or clone, and that's another scary situation.

reply to post by hawaii50th


If we had a book of, say, lookup tables, that accurately reflected all the neural connection possibilities of Albert Einstein's brain, and we placed a question into it exactly as if it had come from his senses and if we then followed through all of the paths and references exactly as described in the tables and recieved an answer (albeit very much slower than a real brain) wouldn't the answer be exactly as Einstein would have answered it?

You may argue that you were reading it & you are the brain in this, but you are not making the decisions, the encoding in the book is.

And none of this requires a specific machinery.

It is the program & data that is the person's 'soul' (I like it as a description, so I'll continue to use it), not the particular machinery it runs on.

Originally posted by chr0naut
reply to post by hawaii50th

 

If we had a book of, say, lookup tables, that accurately reflected all the neural connection possibilities of Albert Einstein's brain, and we placed a question into it exactly as if it had come from his senses and if we then followed through all of the paths and references exactly as described in the tables and recieved an answer (albeit very much slower than a real brain) wouldn't the answer be exactly as Einstein would have answered it?

You may argue that you were reading it & you are the brain in this, but you are not making the decisions, the encoding in the book is.

And none of this requires a specific machinery.

It is the program & data that is the person's 'soul' (I like it as a description, so I'll continue to use it), not the particular machinery it runs on.

So what part does all the learning, the brain or the soul? And what part retains all the memories, the brain or the soul?

reply to post by hawaii50th


To be true to Einstein's brain (in the analogy I posted), the tables would have to be somewhat self modifying.

So, this would mean that again it is the pattern that learns. The book (the underlying mechanics) would not.

Originally posted by chr0naut
reply to post by Bigwhammy

 

Also if you could capture the essence of conciousness, why couldn't you "drive" this avatar too (the logical way it will start).

edit on 21/3/2011 by chr0naut because: (no reason given)

Herein lies the problem with this premise. Define the essense of counciousness. It's impossible. Is it memory... no because many people have been stricken with amnesia, and yet maintain continuos consiousness.

Is it the mechanism of nervous response to stimuli that defines consciousness... again I would say no, because even unconscious bodies can react to stimuli (pupils constricting in the presense of light... that sort of thing). Where in the neurology of your brain is consciousness contained (hint consciousness isn't in the hardware... it's software).

What's the program, or software that codes for consciousness. Can one even concieve of a program that codes for consciousness. I don't think any human can. (hint artificial intelligence as we know it now does not generate concioiusness, it is merely a algorithm for recognizing patterns, which trigger predesigned strategems. While animal nervous systems do have stimilus response programs that resemble current A.I. they are merely used by consciousness... they are not consciousness itself.)

I don't think we are anywhere near solving this problem. We have come very close to unraveling the mysteries of the human mind, but I think even our scientists will soon realise that our consciousness is something seperate.

reply to post by renegadeloser


Please go back a few posts & have a look at a model I suggested (actually not my invention but borrowed from a book, I think it was called "The Minds I").

... and you are right, there is a long way to go before we have the required technology.

but perhaps it would not be dependent on our technology. If God exists, He could do this (and possibly already is).

reply to post by hawaii50th


I believe in a soul, however, I do not believe that emotions originate in the soul. (I prefer the term spirit). I think that a clone could be endowed with spirit, because we will not have created it. It was already created, we merely planted the seed. The genetic matter is the seed. We insert the seed into the egg, and put it into the womb. All we de is put the right part in the right place at the right time... insert part a into slot b. In the case of cloning we haven't created life any more than you created a table when you buy one of those assemble it yourself kits from walmart.

reply to post by chr0naut

I agree with your distinguishment of Soul and Spirit. And I agree that on a "Soul" level your logical construct would be identical, and indistinguishable (from the outside) from the original person. However, I don't care how perfect your recreation of me is if I"m not conscious of it. What happens when all these minds uploaded onto machines come to the logical conclusion that all bodies which haven't made the switch need to be eliminated... say for efficiency reasons.
I'll tell you what I think happens. I perfect opportunity for conscious experience has been destroyed. Namely Earth.