Anarcho-Primitivism or Transhumanism?

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Yes, I vote anarcho-transhumanist primitivism. Transhumanist simulated primitivism based on anarchic, non-hierarchical structures.

In a recent issue of Scientific American, there's an interesting article on the state of human-computer interface. Most of it seemed like old news to me; I suspect we are a little further along than the article attests.

[url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/11380999/Sci-Am-Nov-2008-Brain-Jacking]
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[freemason9]

False dichotomy... but if forced to choose between the two, I'd prefer the former to the latter. Ultimately, it may be totally recursive (i.e., we are living in a simulation, a fact that our "primitive" forbears were aware of in their own way) but I don't have any faith that the limited teratoid consciousness of today's human technic can lead to anything approximating nirvana.

Huh? Can you say that in English, please?

Sure: transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.

Better?

Yes, better. But as I see it, then, anarcho-primitivism only existed because transhumanism wasn't available yet. In the long run, it matters little how we tag our race, because humanity is rather inconsequential. Humans, like any biological organism, seek to (1) reproduce, and (2) not die. This is a collective imperative that is expressed among every individual. We are a very long way from transcending that reality.

And, in the end, we will find we are subject after all to the wider biological world we dwell in. That will be another era that will have scant resemblance to this one.

It could actually be that biological entities don't get much more "advanced" than where we are now. We overpopulate, we deplete resources, and we collapse. Maybe that's why we don't hear any aliens out there.

[slomo]

False dichotomy... but if forced to choose between the two, I'd prefer the former to the latter. Ultimately, it may be totally recursive (i.e., we are living in a simulation, a fact that our "primitive" forbears were aware of in their own way) but I don't have any faith that the limited teratoid consciousness of today's human technic can lead to anything approximating nirvana.

Huh? Can you say that in English, please?

Sure: transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.

Better?

Yes, better. But as I see it, then, anarcho-primitivism only existed because transhumanism wasn't available yet. In the long run, it matters little how we tag our race, because humanity is rather inconsequential. Humans, like any biological organism, seek to (1) reproduce, and (2) not die. This is a collective imperative that is expressed among every individual. We are a very long way from transcending that reality.

And, in the end, we will find we are subject after all to the wider biological world we dwell in. That will be another era that will have scant resemblance to this one.

It could actually be that biological entities don't get much more "advanced" than where we are now. We overpopulate, we deplete resources, and we collapse. Maybe that's why we don't hear any aliens out there.

Re: reproducing and dying... exactly. I remain unconvinced that transhumanism can be very helpful in that regard since, after all, it seems utterly to ignore biological complications. But I reject the idea that "organisms" seek only to reproduce and survive because this simple little statement betrays a neo-Darwinian projection of our own social system. In short, if you consider carefully, it is not so easy to define what an "organism" is. Mammals seem to be easy in that regard, except that we carry (at least) two distinct sets of DNA: nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA, the latter of which could be the vestiges of an ancient symbiosis. When you get down to microbes it gets very difficult indeed, because those little buggers share their DNA far more promiscuously than any bathhouse patron. (I say that respectfully as a gay man, by the way.) Whole symbiotic communities form around tree roots, and in fact a forest ecosystem could be thought of as an "organism" if you define the word widely enough.

I also reject the idea of "evolution" in any teleological sense. Things just are. In some ways, bacteria are far more advanced than homo sapiens. John Michael Greer has a relatively recent post (i.e. in the last 3 months) that shreds the common misconception of evolutionary progress.

[bks]

slomo wrote:
I also reject the idea of "evolution" in any teleological sense. Things just are

.

Agreed. The engine for Darwinian evolution is the selection of individuals for their fitness within a present environment (and it's always happening, of course). There is no telos in this. As environments change, so does what counts as fitness, yes?

Transhumanism, from what I can gather, seeks to produce an engineered entity (don't know what the fuck else to call it) that maximizes a kind of human intelligence (computational), irrespective of environmental circumstances. That sounds teleological for sure, and really makes a problem for theories of personal identity.

Re: reproducing and dying... exactly. I remain unconvinced that transhumanism can be very helpful in that regard since, after all, it seems utterly to ignore biological complications.

But wouldn't transhumanism also complicate what dying is, slomo? I too am just floored by the seeming disregard in transhumainsm for the importance of embodied-ness to personal identity. Yet in a transhumanist future, couldn't consciousness evolve in a way that diminished physical embodiment as it related to identity? Contained within an 'uploaded', disembodied consciousness would remain a remnant of the original, organic person (as memory), and if that consciousness could continue to generate/record sensory experience insulated from the ravages of time on a body, then it would seem that that 'life' could persist indefinitely.

Don't ask me how a disembodied consciousness could continue to record/generate sensory experience, of course .

[Penguin]

In my humble imagination, evolution is not linear at all. Nothing like it.

Evolution is fractal. Spanning, spinning, careening, splitting, evolving into myriad new shapes and contours along the possible landscape of potential existences.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah, what Penguin said.

[Neither]

Neither. The system is rotten and needs amputation.

[slomo]

But wouldn't transhumanism also complicate what dying is, slomo? I too am just floored by the seeming disregard in transhumainsm for the importance of embodied-ness to personal identity. Yet in a transhumanist future, couldn't consciousness evolve in a way that diminished physical embodiment as it related to identity? Contained within an 'uploaded', disembodied consciousness would remain a remnant of the original, organic person (as memory), and if that consciousness could continue to generate/record sensory experience insulated from the ravages of time on a body, then it would seem that that 'life' could persist indefinitely.

Don't ask me how a disembodied consciousness could continue to record/generate sensory experience, of course .

Well, that's the point, really. Dying is part of life. If you seek to circumvent death, then you are inadvertently subverting life as well. All consciousness is embodied -- transhuman consciousness would be embodied in silicon and plastic, and angelic consciousness (in which I basically believe, if suitably defined) is embodied in composites of matter and energy we don't necessarily understand. And it is the failure of transhuman philosophy to admit this simple, inescapable fact that bothers me the most. If transhumanism becomes a reality (and that's a very big if), who controls the central processor? Do we have any reason to believe they'd be any more benevolent than the current masters of state?

[bks]

I hear you. I'm not counting on benevolence in a fully TH future.

May I ask: what precisely do you mean by 'angelic consciousness'? Is this a reference to pre-confessional human consciousness, before there was a 'walling off' of the internal self? Or something else?

[beeline]

But wouldn't transhumanism also complicate what dying is, slomo? I too am just floored by the seeming disregard in transhumainsm for the importance of embodied-ness to personal identity. Yet in a transhumanist future, couldn't consciousness evolve in a way that diminished physical embodiment as it related to identity? Contained within an 'uploaded', disembodied consciousness would remain a remnant of the original, organic person (as memory), and if that consciousness could continue to generate/record sensory experience insulated from the ravages of time on a body, then it would seem that that 'life' could persist indefinitely.

Don't ask me how a disembodied consciousness could continue to record/generate sensory experience, of course .

Read William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.

[slomo]

I hear you. I'm not counting on benevolence in a fully TH future.

May I ask: what precisely do you mean by 'angelic consciousness'? Is this a reference to pre-confessional human consciousness, before there was a 'walling off' of the internal self? Or something else?

In truth, I'm not really working with a completely thought-out operational definition of 'angelic consciousness'... which is unlike me (or at least unlike what I think I project). Whatever it is, it interfaces (in part) with the internal self, but it is also larger than the internal self. My best explanation for it is as follows: have you ever had the so-called privilege of computing a Fourier transform? These come up in electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, among other places. More generally, they are known as "spectral decompositions". In short, you can characterize a process either by its properties in ordinary space-time, or, through the magic of mathematics, you can characterize it instead in terms of its component frequencies. These are "dual representations", in the lingo. In one representation, a process possesses structure that is not particularly evident in the other representation, and vice-versa. I'm playing fast and loose here, but without writing down equations (fun for everybody) I can't do the subject justice. What I think is going on is that our finite human brains are tuned to the "space-time" representation, and in some sense our bodies obey certain structural properties of space-time. "Angelic entities" would instead obey structural properties of the frequency domain representation. From our perspective, they would appear to be everywhere and nowhere, but from the right meta-viewpoint they have their own organization and structure.

Does this help? It's a difficult subject.

One thing I will say: they absolutely do exist, whatever they are. I have seen absolute, incontrovertible personal evidence, time after time. The more you pay attention to it (especially if you also do regular meditation), the more it happens, and I'm reasonably savvy about confirmation bias. I can cite one personal recent example.

[bks]

What I think is going on is that our finite human brains are tuned to the "space-time" representation, and in some sense our bodies obey certain structural properties of space-time. "Angelic entities" would instead obey structural properties of the frequency domain representation. From our perspective, they would appear to be everywhere and nowhere, but from the right meta-viewpoint they have their own organization and structure.

unfortunately, slomo, I'm up against a knowledge limit here - my own. Trying to conceive of imperfect analogues for this, I'm reminded of the particle-wave duality demonstrated by quantum mechanics and the scale invariance and self-similarity of objects with a fractal structure in nature. Take the wrong perspective, and you radically misunderstand what's going on.

If I ever get a better handle on it, I'll get back to you.

[slomo]

What I think is going on is that our finite human brains are tuned to the "space-time" representation, and in some sense our bodies obey certain structural properties of space-time. "Angelic entities" would instead obey structural properties of the frequency domain representation. From our perspective, they would appear to be everywhere and nowhere, but from the right meta-viewpoint they have their own organization and structure.

unfortunately, slomo, I'm up against a knowledge limit here - my own. Trying to conceive of imperfect analogues for this, I'm reminded of the particle-wave duality demonstrated by quantum mechanics and the scale invariance and self-similarity of objects with a fractal structure in nature. Take the wrong perspective, and you radically misunderstand what's going on.

If I ever get a better handle on it, I'll get back to you.

Those aren't necessarily bad analogies. The wave/particle duality directly relates to the spectral decomposition. I am, in fact, reasoning by analogy here. Any NSF-funded physicist would recoil in horror at what I'm proposing.

[JackRiddler]

bks, just to revive this:

The frequent failure of transhumanism to formulate the question of identity and embodiedness reveals how poorly conceived TH constructs are. Upload "yourself" to a computer - it's fantasy. In realistic terms, it's on a par with the vulgar christian idea of living on after your death as an angel in your own form.

[Simulist]

If people don't even know what "consciousness" is, how in the hell are they going to upload it into a computer?