[ExI] Beating the "meat" (was Re: "meat")

[Emlyn]

2009/5/25 Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/5/24 Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>:
>>> Most of the people posting here seem to have no notion how depraved it is to
>>> speak of human bodies as "meat".
>>>
>>> I wish you'd all get over this nerdish affectation.
>>
>> I know it turns off "outsiders", but equally it's a signal to those
>> who "get" the transhuman meme. I think that at the core of the impulse
>> to techno-utopianism, transhumanism, technophilia, is an immense
>> frustration with the particular form our embodiment takes. While in
>> many ways it's marvellous (self repairing, self regulating, complex
>> beyond our current understanding), it's also an inappropriate form for
>> a general intelligence. It's not readily upgradeable, you can't easily
>> do repairs, it has no administration interface. It's not modular, it's
>> not compatible with anything, it's not extendable. There's no manual.
>> You can't get out of it, you can't get a new embodiment. You can't
>> point your higher reasoning skills at it and find ways to improve your
>> condition, beyond the minimal and banal (exercise and eat right). And
>> of course it eventually breaks down and stops.
>
> What? If you truly believe that only "exercise and eat right" are the
> actions that you can take, then why are you interested in
> transhumanism at all? There are far more things that you can be doing
> than "exercise and eat right". The whole point of transhumanism is
> that you *can* point your higher reasoning skills at the problem to
> solve it. I'm so completely confused, Emlyn.
>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507

You're taking me too literally.

In fact there are all kinds of things we can do, and there is the
prospect of having ever more control over our biology, of course. But
that's new to the recent past. For most of our history as intelligent
creatures, it's been as I state above. To the extent that we have more
options now, it is because people have worked really, really hard to
figure out how this mostly intractable mechanism works.

Let me put it this way: if you had to design an embodied intelligent
being from scratch, would you design something like a human?

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site