Virgin Primitivist vs. Chad Transhumanist, by Anatoly …

Transhumanism is not entirely the same thing as adopting other technologies. We are biological beings, and our personalities, decisions, what we are, is totally dependent on us staying biological. A simple example is hormone levels in your blood.

For example if you feel you won an argument online, your serum testosterone level will go up. You will instinctively know that any success, however meager it is (and winning an online argument is, well, not the greatest of successes), will lead to such an increase. On the other hand, losing an argument (or any other kind of failure, however small) will lead to a decrease in your T-levels.

This will actually motivate you to try your best to strive to achieve success and avoid failures. (However small.) By the way, this wont work on females so much: this is one of the reasons males behavior is so different from females.

Now if you upload yourself to a computer right after death (or if half your brain is already a computer before death), you wont have any hormones any more affecting your decisions. This will outright change your personality. Even if hormones could (and would) be totally simulated, you (or at least some of the people uploading themselves) will eventually change yourself in some ways. For example even biologically we use drugs which change our behavior. Why wont we use something (enhancements etc.) which change our behavior once were effectively computer programs? These computer programs will then further change themselves. Then the already changed programs will decide to change themselves even further. At one point it wont resemble the original biological being at all even assuming the simulation and upload were both perfect to begin with, which is a question. (And even assuming the uploaded program will be you in a philosophical sense my instinct says it would only be a copy and not me myself.)

Now you are quite correct probably that those super-enhanced computer software things could easily turn out to be much more efficient at conquering and ruling the world than biological humans. The question is, in what sense could those transhuman beings be considered humans at all? My suggestion is they wont be humans at all. Not only that: they wont have anything in common with biological humans, or any biological beings at all. Please remember that we have a lot in common with apes, so the statement well, the change from human to transhuman will just be the same as ape to human is definitely false.

In other words, transhumans (especially the versions uploaded to a computer to there live forever) will essentially be cyborgs or T-800s or AIs which will be stronger and smarter than us. Endorsing it as well, theyre more efficient is stupid: the same stupid as inviting extraterrestrials to the Earth with the slogan theyre better, so they deserve Earth more than us. We dont know what theyll be up to, but they will have the ability to destroy us, and its foolish to expect these things to be benevolent. Over time, they (some of them, at any rate and probably those will be the strongest and smartest ones) could change beyond anything we can imagine, and might decide to get rid of us.

Why is this in our interest to encourage this? AIs (if possible to create them) might eventually destroy us anyway, why hasten the process?

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Virgin Primitivist vs. Chad Transhumanist, by Anatoly ...

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