> Our intuitions about crimes against people (and humanity) are based on a set of assumptions about the parameters of personhood that are going to be completely destroyed if mind uploading turns out to be possible.
There are human 'proof of work' activities that unless you can literally transplant the muscle memory, there is no way to replicate them without putting in the time, and I am saying without that effect of muscle memory, anything you transmit is just an artifact of language and narrative, and therefore not material.
The advantages of augmented transhuman life aren't material, they're only symbolic in narrative. Imo, the example of a parliament trying and executing a formerly divinely appointed King was just the effect of the victory of a narrative and linguistic definition of self over a physical/spiritual orientation of self. It was just the rejection of theism. It wasn't world ending to be able to depose a king, it was just the conseqeunce of becoming unmoored from a relationship to something divine, and being left in the hall of mirrors that is ego and language.
The transhumanist ideology is predicated on the basic bullshit idea that our physical experience is a subset, and subordinate to knowledge and belief - and not that knowledge and belief are necessarily only artifacts of physical perception and expereince first. It seems like an irrelevant distinction until you iterate their idea of truth is just what you believe, and suddenly you have people declaring themselves cats. It's a hypnotic and zombifying ideology.
We can do thought experiments about whether an android or an AI is "real," if, and only if we redefine "real" and "life" by disqualifying the axiom that life is created by supernatural divine intent. Even if we agree it's rational to actively disbelieve in supernatural beings, this rationality also demands that we disqualify super-logical axioms that originate from outside of a logical system. Arguably, that logical system may have internal consistency - but it's also defined as necessarily inconsistent with the reality that exists outside of it. We've agreed to accept an inconsistency with reality, which lets us experiement with counterfactuals as a way to discover new things, and it is very collegial of us, but it's not fucking real.
All the transhumanist stuff I've read seems like a bunch of self referential nonsense designed to recruit people into alternative lifestyle communities. The more interesting question than whether an AI is alive or intelligent and what the ethical consequences of it for us may be is this: what can something we create know about us, and what do the boundaries of the limits of its knowledge provide evidence of for our own experience?
Even if an AI could subordinate us somehow, we still have its off switch, and if we don't, it's just other people who do. Transhumanism is entertaining, but it has crossed over into a kind of nihilist propaganda that I think deserves our scorn.
>Even if an AI could subordinate us somehow, we still have its off switch
That only works until the AI gets smarter than us. Imagine your cat trying to make sure you can’t leave the house. It won’t even realize how did you work around it. Same way we won’t even realize why the off switch doesn’t work.
Of course that’s a pretty big “if”, let alone the assumption that the AI would be the first case of super intelligence, which tbh I’m not sure about.
I often explain transhumanism to others as "The elevation of the ego above all else. If one can imagine it, it's real or plausibly could be made real." It's a rejection that there is anything outside our understanding (e.g., God). That's why this entire thread is filled with science fiction quotes which are, I guess, supposed to convey some kind of deep meaning or prediction-making ability but which are nothing more than the imaginings of their authors.
Sorry, folks, we're still stuck with binary computers, needing food to survive, and a planet absolutely chock full of people who practice theistic religions.
There are human 'proof of work' activities that unless you can literally transplant the muscle memory, there is no way to replicate them without putting in the time, and I am saying without that effect of muscle memory, anything you transmit is just an artifact of language and narrative, and therefore not material.
The advantages of augmented transhuman life aren't material, they're only symbolic in narrative. Imo, the example of a parliament trying and executing a formerly divinely appointed King was just the effect of the victory of a narrative and linguistic definition of self over a physical/spiritual orientation of self. It was just the rejection of theism. It wasn't world ending to be able to depose a king, it was just the conseqeunce of becoming unmoored from a relationship to something divine, and being left in the hall of mirrors that is ego and language.
The transhumanist ideology is predicated on the basic bullshit idea that our physical experience is a subset, and subordinate to knowledge and belief - and not that knowledge and belief are necessarily only artifacts of physical perception and expereince first. It seems like an irrelevant distinction until you iterate their idea of truth is just what you believe, and suddenly you have people declaring themselves cats. It's a hypnotic and zombifying ideology.
We can do thought experiments about whether an android or an AI is "real," if, and only if we redefine "real" and "life" by disqualifying the axiom that life is created by supernatural divine intent. Even if we agree it's rational to actively disbelieve in supernatural beings, this rationality also demands that we disqualify super-logical axioms that originate from outside of a logical system. Arguably, that logical system may have internal consistency - but it's also defined as necessarily inconsistent with the reality that exists outside of it. We've agreed to accept an inconsistency with reality, which lets us experiement with counterfactuals as a way to discover new things, and it is very collegial of us, but it's not fucking real.
All the transhumanist stuff I've read seems like a bunch of self referential nonsense designed to recruit people into alternative lifestyle communities. The more interesting question than whether an AI is alive or intelligent and what the ethical consequences of it for us may be is this: what can something we create know about us, and what do the boundaries of the limits of its knowledge provide evidence of for our own experience?
Even if an AI could subordinate us somehow, we still have its off switch, and if we don't, it's just other people who do. Transhumanism is entertaining, but it has crossed over into a kind of nihilist propaganda that I think deserves our scorn.