[extropy-chat] A brief transhuman life, anyone?

[Damien Broderick]

>>>I think that in the end I would choose the ten years of transhuman
>>>life, for that I cannot imagine I would choose forty years at average
>>>  intelligence over twenty years continued as myself.

[Paraphrase: Eliezer currently stands halfway between average human and 
transhuman and would prefer it that way even at a cost of abbreviated life 
span]

>>You missed my point: I was saying that in the real world there are
>>always options C->infinity ... because you can always move the
>>goalposts. By constraining yourself to visualizing dilemmas based on a
>>given set of constraints, you deny your (transhumanist) ability to
>>engineer a better set of constraints to live within.

[Paraphrase: Reason thinks part of the definition of being transhuman is 
the capacity to alter human-scale constraints such as life span]

[Eliezer again:]
>"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to 
>have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, while the great ocean 
>of truth lay all undiscovered before me."  So Newton said, and he was 
>right; he knew how little he knew.  And then he died, and worms ate his 
>brain, and he never learned the answers to his questions.
>
>Tell me how he could have moved the goalposts.

By becoming (mysteriously, somehow) an accelerated transhuman with the 
ability to move the goalposts--the initial posit in this rather daffy thread.

Back in the real world: by choosing not to work with mercury which ate his 
brain before the worms did.

Damien Broderick