[p2p-research] Fwd: trashing transhumanism

Mon May 4 16:44:23 CEST 2009

I am deeply interested in the transhumanist dialogue for a number of
reasons.  I respect the criticism and acknowledge the tendency to hyperbole,
but I would also note it amongst all ideological groups.  Superlatives are a
rhetorical device.  Those taking difficult positions rely on them to create
heat.  Heat leads to debate, and debate moves us forward...inevitably.  (And
I do believe there is a forward.)  Without that moral underpinning, I would
probably be nihilist enough to be a Gaia theorist.

I spent a couple of years in an AI laboratory and remain deeply skeptical of
what can and cannot be done.  I remember many discussions I've had with the
now deeply controversial Jorn Barger on the topic in the late 1980s when we
worked in the same lab.
My own view is that people like Michael Anissimov are asking great
questions, and posing great and interesting answers--though admittedly
sometimes laced with superlatives.

I also read Dale Carrico, understand his arguments, and deeply disagree with
most of them and would offer Michel Anissimov as my proxy in the debate; I
rarely disagree with his writings.  Dale is a smart guy and he's worth
listening to.  Right now, I don't find his complaints compelling.

That said, I believe the world of P2P is giving rise to spontaneous pockets
of learning capacity that are not well understood, and that may have
significant implications.  I am a "geek."  I like futurism, and I think
planning is worth doing.  I do not believe planning is pre-ordaning a
future.

I believe systems like Wolfram's Alpha (as much as I understand it) have the
capacity to greatly enhance human more action.  I also believe that the web
is already a deeply transhumanist tool...anyone who believes that they are
not transformed and extended by the use of Wiki's, search engines, etc. is
not very old.

Ray Kurzweil received 1500 applications to his Singularity University.
I wrote a recommendation for someone who applied.  The person I recommended
was formible, and he didn't even get to the second level.  That means a lot
of good minds are headed in that direction.  I also follow the world of
nutrition and supplementation closely.  I am diabetic.  Like Kurzweil, I
hope that technology can help my health, and I believe it has.  I see the
moral need to do more in developing worlds, etc., but I am selfish about my
hopes to live and see my children grow up.  Transhumanism to me represents a
far more exciting vision of prospects than anything I've ever heard from
physicians or medical professionals and ethicists in general.  Do I believe
it is true?  No.  But I do believe that futurism and visioning based on
scientific fact and prospect is essential.

If P2P were not deeply tied to technology I think it would be just another
pie-in-the-sky idealism with little hope of authentic transformation.  I'm
all for changing the world however we can.  But I'm mostly for clear
visions, experiments, trials and tough assessments.  I see little evidence
that such standards are not emerging.  And I do think de Grey is likeable
too.

I left the study of Government because I heard the same ideological babbling
I could read in books 150 years old.  Perhaps my great moral failing is that
I believe in action and momentum.  I despise armchair theorizing that goes
nowhere almost as much as I despise hurting peoples lives in the name of
some theoretical right.  We are approaching times when technology can
transform and help transform us.  We ought to remain open to that...while
still being skeptical and critical.

Ryan Lanham

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:12 AM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since I was banned from the Open Manufacturing list, which has at least one
> very vocal 19 year old who is a self-proclaimed transhumanists, I would hope
> someone forwards this to them.
>
> Not that it would change anything, but maybe prevent the easily
> impressionable from drinking their coolaid.
>
>
>   On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 3:50 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: <samfar at gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 5:01 PM
>> Subject: Do not ask and ye shall receive...
>>
>>  Amor Mundi trashing Transhumanists (not mere transhumanism). This is
>> great stuff!  Reminds me of my own lost writings<http://www.openintegral.net/blog/?p=135>
>> :
>>
>>
>> http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/04/superlativity-and-its-bigger-picture.html
>>
>> (ALL emphasis added)
>>
>> "That shared superlative futurological identification tends to come at the
>> cost in the present of an ambivalent dis-identification with their worldly
>> peers -- *hence all the glib talk of "post"-humanity -- but this cost
>> typically seems to them negligible if not actively desirable given that the
>> Robot Cultist's desire for transcendence via superlative imaginarytechnodevelopments
>> * (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance) expresses the
>> ambivalence, or even loathing hostility, here and now, of the Robot Cultists
>> with the frustrations of an error-prone passionate thoroughly social
>> embodied *intelligence*, with the frustrations of a disease-prone
>> demanding vulnerable socially legible embodied mortal *life*, with the
>> frustrations of the stakeholder *politics* of reconciling the
>> ineradicable diversity of aspirations of peers with whom we share the world
>> and the fragility of the *freedom* bodied forth through that interminable
>> reconciliation.
>>
>> "Quite apart from the "technical" implausibility of the imagined outcomes
>> and developmental timelines proposed by superlative futurologists -- hence
>> their utter marginality from scientific consensus in the actual fields they
>> superficially, selectively, and opportunistically graze for "signs" that
>> their wishes might finally come true for them -- *the Robot Cultists
>> divest the concepts of intelligence, life, progress, and freedom of their
>> social/embodied substance and then invest them in a compensatory
>> amplification of blind, brute instrumental force, first rendering them
>> meaningless and then adding insult to injury and confusing this with
>> "emancipation."* This in my view is what Superlativity's "wider picture"
>> finally amounts to, really, an obliteration here and now through dumb
>> robotic insensitivity of the open futurity inhering in the collaboration and
>> contestation of the diversity of worldly peers with whom we share the world
>> and history, all in the name of transcendence via the One True Way -- an
>> arrival at "The Future" -- in which Robot Gods clash meaninglessly and
>> inhumanly through the eternal dead night."
>>
>> *BONUS! (THE WHOLE FRONT PAGE IS SCROLLING WITH GREAT ANTI-EXTROPIA
>> SENTIMENT):*
>>
>> "I hate to break it to you but these figures Kurzweil, Drexler, Moravek,
>> even enormously likable fellows like de Grey (and don't even get me started
>> on that atrocity exhibition Yudkowsky) and so on you like to cite as your
>> authorities are quite simply not taken seriously outside the small circle of
>> superlative futurology itself -- at least not for the claims you are
>> investing with superlative-endorsing significance."
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
>> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
>> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>>
>> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>>
>> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
>> http://www.shiftn.com/
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
>
> Marc Fawzi
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Marc-Fawzi/605919256
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcfawzi
>
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