Good article and I totally agree. Besides when we look at all our intrepid tech-bro "pioneers" that embrace transhumanism, it begs the obvious question. Would you want to spend eternity with them? I, for one, welcome the sweet release of death. It can't possibly be worse.
Or you could just not interact with the people you don't want to interact with.
I don't think any transhuman has a vision of transhumanity where you are physically impossible to suicide or are forced to interact with certain people.
Who else would you be interacting with? You would only exist through our own technology. You would solely exist in a predetermined state of "existence" created by us. How would that be "transhuman"? It's just a lateral form of the experience we create for ourselves now, just without the inconvenience of objective reality and immediate consequence. We don't even understand the state of our own existence. How can we move forward when we don't even know where we are?
Transhumanism is a fairy tale, but I do appreciate the pointed critique of materialism. I always found it odd that the majority of mainstream philosophers are materialists (apart from a few standouts like Chalmers).
Even if I wasn't a Christian, I'd find materialism to be absurdly reductive.
I would contest "materialism being absurdly reductive" with a quote from Feynman:
> I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
I think that even if science can reduce processes to simple understandable components, this doesn't take away from everyday life.
The fact that a book consists of characters doesn't make it worse.
The fact that you're simply a specific configuration of atoms* doesn't devalue you as a human being.
* or evolution of this configuration in time, but that's a story for another time
The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.
> The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.
I think you're attacking a straw man here. I agree that the mind is fascinating whether or not dualism is true. But at the same time, I think that the kind of hand-waving materialists do when faced with qualia, intentionality, and (what appears to be) objective morality is not very convincing.
"For millennia the majority of the human population has believed that the mind is more than a biological machine, that it extends in some inexplicable way beyond the individual body both in space (ESP) and in time (continued consciousness after death). The scientific evidence for the former can be denied only by those with closed minds;..."
I'm not one to dispute that transhumanism is an unspectacular idea, but....
Ok, fine. I have a closed mind. If you can consistently do something clear and visibile that cannot otherwise be done, I'll take you seriously. Until then, I won't. Sorry. Pick me some Powerball numbers or something. Tell me where the hell my old copies of The Fantasy Trip stuff is hiding. Fling Randi James into an ocean. Something.
> Transhumanism is based on a wholly materialistic conception of reality. In effect it says, “What we now understand about the mind and consciousness is all there is to it; there’s nothing left but to fill in the details of how the brain works.”
Woops, I detect a straw man being set up! The view in opposition of "we already know everything" is not "woo must be true", but merely "evidence rules".
> For millennia the majority of the human population has believed...
...that the sun was pushed across the sky by a great scarab beetle. Oh wait...that isn't what you were going to say? Oh. So maybe believing things doesn't make them true.
At least as far as I managed to stomach, this reeks of "woo". It uses vague wording and suggestion to avoid making concrete supernatural claims, but supernatural premises seem to be the only real arguments it poses against the idea of transhumanism.
I always failed to understand what the "consciousness isn't local" can predict. I mean, come on. You either take the egocentric view that you're the only conscious being in the universe, or you realize other humans are similar enough to you that the only conclusion is that they are all similarly conscious.
From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.
Even if you take the most egocentric worldview, you can still drink alcohol and watch and realize how your internal logic and consistency and personality is changed by an external chemical. I can't see any possible conclusion from that other than the fact that this brain really is all you are.
Suggesting there's anything non-materialistic in consciousness means there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions, under drugs, under different education, under different environment, under different circumstances. I've yet to find a single counterexample.
> From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.
We observe many correlations between the neurological and the mental, and it seems likely that in the years and decades to come we will learn many more. Materialists argue that this is evidence that the mental is a product of the neurological. But what about the idealist alternative, that the neurological is a product of the mental? An observed correlation between two phenomena cannot, by itself, tell us which of the two is more fundamental.
Each of the provided examples from the parent comment are causal perturbations to the system that establish necessity (although perhaps not sufficiency) beyond a pure correlation. If you lesion a part of the brain, you lose associated "mental" faculties. If you perturb the system via disease or chemicals, you observe a corresponding change in the mental state. This is evidence of a one way interaction beyond correlation.
> This is evidence of a one way interaction beyond correlation.
You appear to be saying that non-mental event A temporally precedes mental event B, therefore the non-mental must be the cause of the mental, rather than the mental being the cause of the non-mental.
However, "you perturb the system via disease or chemicals" is not non-mental. There is a mental act of will to do perform such a perturbation, and a mental awareness of such perturbation being performed.
How can anything "immutable" exist in a living being? Just because everything dies doesn't mean there isn't a reality beyond what we experience with the brain. The possibility that we are living in a multidimensional universe is becoming more likely all the time with the current discoveries in quantum physics.
> From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is.
By and large, we agree. But to be a little pedantic... the brain isn't the whole story. "Muscle memory" is what happens when your peripheral nervous system learns -- without practice, most people can't throw a ball with equal skill in both hands. The nervous system in our gut is vast, complex, and poorly understood. It seems like this shouldn't be significant in cognition and memory... but the enteric nervous system may play a critical role in mental health.
You can resolve the apparent conflict between remote contagiousness and the brains susceptibility to chemical changes, damage, and internal failure by taking the view that the brain is the conduit by which our consciousness is realized.
So if we want to use computers as a metaphor your consciousness is the software, and your brain and body is the hardware. If your HDD is corrupted you lose your memories, if your CPU is damaged your logic is faulty, etc.. Where the metaphor breaks might break down is that your OS, that intangible something that makes you -- you is remote, somewhere else. Or maybe you just have a copy.
Maybe there's a conflict in the idea that a consciousness requires a vessel of some form to exist in our universe but I don't see it.
I do admit that this presents a very very weak form of consciousness since it's immutable, static, and almost all of much of what informs your identity is local but that seems to mirror the human experience, right?
> there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions ...
Since we only get to access consciousness through these malfunctioning peripherals, how would you know if there was?
> I always failed to understand what the "consciousness isn't local" can predict
It predicts that a human equipped with a non-local, non-materialistic mind (let’s call it "soul" for short) will behave differently from the same human without such a mind. He will, for example, write "I think therefore I am" where a soul-less (but otherwise materially equivalent human body) wouldn’t.
Now if you trace back the chain of events of this deviation, you will trace the movements of the hand (that wrote that sentence) to muscle movements. Muscle movements can be traced back to neural impulses, which can be traced back to the brain.
So, ultimately, non-materialism states that the brain of a soul-ful humain behaves differently from a soul-less human one.
In practice, it means that sometimes, neurons that should have fired (according to the laws of physics) don’t, and neurons that should have stayed at rest (according to the laws of physics) will fire. Those mismatches are first measurable manifestations of the immaterial mind ("soul") in the physical universe.
tl;dr: non-materialism predicts that there will be significant (greater in magnitude that thermal noise, at the very least) violations of the laws of physics (such as thermodynamics, chemistry and electromagnetism) in the brain.
I think the transhumanism that she talks about is very specific in the way that it is one that believes in the capacity to upload consciousness in some sort of computer hardware which wholly differentiate itself from transhumanism that sees more simple improvements like say eyesight repairs through hardware augmentations which is the more realistic one.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 70.3 ms ] threadI don't think any transhuman has a vision of transhumanity where you are physically impossible to suicide or are forced to interact with certain people.
Even if I wasn't a Christian, I'd find materialism to be absurdly reductive.
> I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
I think that even if science can reduce processes to simple understandable components, this doesn't take away from everyday life.
The fact that a book consists of characters doesn't make it worse.
The fact that you're simply a specific configuration of atoms* doesn't devalue you as a human being.
* or evolution of this configuration in time, but that's a story for another time
The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.
I think you're attacking a straw man here. I agree that the mind is fascinating whether or not dualism is true. But at the same time, I think that the kind of hand-waving materialists do when faced with qualia, intentionality, and (what appears to be) objective morality is not very convincing.
Well, as a person who wears glasses, I can assure you to the contrary.
I'm not one to dispute that transhumanism is an unspectacular idea, but....
Ok, fine. I have a closed mind. If you can consistently do something clear and visibile that cannot otherwise be done, I'll take you seriously. Until then, I won't. Sorry. Pick me some Powerball numbers or something. Tell me where the hell my old copies of The Fantasy Trip stuff is hiding. Fling Randi James into an ocean. Something.
Woops, I detect a straw man being set up! The view in opposition of "we already know everything" is not "woo must be true", but merely "evidence rules".
> For millennia the majority of the human population has believed...
...that the sun was pushed across the sky by a great scarab beetle. Oh wait...that isn't what you were going to say? Oh. So maybe believing things doesn't make them true.
argument from antiquity.
See: the will and representations
From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.
Even if you take the most egocentric worldview, you can still drink alcohol and watch and realize how your internal logic and consistency and personality is changed by an external chemical. I can't see any possible conclusion from that other than the fact that this brain really is all you are.
Suggesting there's anything non-materialistic in consciousness means there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions, under drugs, under different education, under different environment, under different circumstances. I've yet to find a single counterexample.
We observe many correlations between the neurological and the mental, and it seems likely that in the years and decades to come we will learn many more. Materialists argue that this is evidence that the mental is a product of the neurological. But what about the idealist alternative, that the neurological is a product of the mental? An observed correlation between two phenomena cannot, by itself, tell us which of the two is more fundamental.
Each of the provided examples from the parent comment are causal perturbations to the system that establish necessity (although perhaps not sufficiency) beyond a pure correlation. If you lesion a part of the brain, you lose associated "mental" faculties. If you perturb the system via disease or chemicals, you observe a corresponding change in the mental state. This is evidence of a one way interaction beyond correlation.
You appear to be saying that non-mental event A temporally precedes mental event B, therefore the non-mental must be the cause of the mental, rather than the mental being the cause of the non-mental.
However, "you perturb the system via disease or chemicals" is not non-mental. There is a mental act of will to do perform such a perturbation, and a mental awareness of such perturbation being performed.
By and large, we agree. But to be a little pedantic... the brain isn't the whole story. "Muscle memory" is what happens when your peripheral nervous system learns -- without practice, most people can't throw a ball with equal skill in both hands. The nervous system in our gut is vast, complex, and poorly understood. It seems like this shouldn't be significant in cognition and memory... but the enteric nervous system may play a critical role in mental health.
So if we want to use computers as a metaphor your consciousness is the software, and your brain and body is the hardware. If your HDD is corrupted you lose your memories, if your CPU is damaged your logic is faulty, etc.. Where the metaphor breaks might break down is that your OS, that intangible something that makes you -- you is remote, somewhere else. Or maybe you just have a copy.
Maybe there's a conflict in the idea that a consciousness requires a vessel of some form to exist in our universe but I don't see it.
I do admit that this presents a very very weak form of consciousness since it's immutable, static, and almost all of much of what informs your identity is local but that seems to mirror the human experience, right?
> there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions ...
Since we only get to access consciousness through these malfunctioning peripherals, how would you know if there was?
It predicts that a human equipped with a non-local, non-materialistic mind (let’s call it "soul" for short) will behave differently from the same human without such a mind. He will, for example, write "I think therefore I am" where a soul-less (but otherwise materially equivalent human body) wouldn’t.
Now if you trace back the chain of events of this deviation, you will trace the movements of the hand (that wrote that sentence) to muscle movements. Muscle movements can be traced back to neural impulses, which can be traced back to the brain.
So, ultimately, non-materialism states that the brain of a soul-ful humain behaves differently from a soul-less human one.
In practice, it means that sometimes, neurons that should have fired (according to the laws of physics) don’t, and neurons that should have stayed at rest (according to the laws of physics) will fire. Those mismatches are first measurable manifestations of the immaterial mind ("soul") in the physical universe.
tl;dr: non-materialism predicts that there will be significant (greater in magnitude that thermal noise, at the very least) violations of the laws of physics (such as thermodynamics, chemistry and electromagnetism) in the brain.