[ExI] YES! Hard-core transhumanist splinter groups yearning for cyber-heaven

[Gregory Jones]

>...I always have considered transhumanism to be sophisticated, keening intelligent, great sense of humor, deeply caring about humanity and awake.  Certainly there are some transhumanists who are difficult or naïve, or who wear "H+" without understanding its values, but for me it is home...I shine and so do you...Natasha
 
 
Well said, Natasha thanks.  I agree.  The central point of transhumanism is the notion that it is physically possible to upload sentience into another substrate.  I sure cannot figure out why not.  We know that there are plenty of examples in nature of a form of sentience in beasts, behaviors that demonstrate natural evolved intelligence, even if not exactly analogous to human thought.  We have seen videos of ants being attacked by predators for instance, and demonstrating what looks to me exactly like human fear, all taking place in a central nervous system that could scarcely be called analogous to a mammalian brain.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiJgsPUYahs
 
The ant's brain is an object that most of us would agree could in theory be simulated on a computer, and if so, why not a grasshopper's brain, and if that, why not a mouse brain, etc.  Those who say in principle humans cannot upload sound too much like the well-meaning armchair philosophers who argued in 1900 that humans can never go to the moon.
 
I recognize that there are identity paradoxes, old questions to which I see no progress being made or having been made ever, but regardless of that we forge on toward the goal of uploading, for we know all too well the alternative.
 
spike


--- On Wed, 6/16/10, natasha at natasha.cc <natasha at natasha.cc> wrote:


From: natasha at natasha.cc <natasha at natasha.cc>
Subject: Re: [ExI] YES! Hard-core transhumanist splinter groups yearning for cyber-heaven
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 1:36 PM


I must have been born with a confidence gene because I never considered myself as part of a fringe, or what one speaker at the Humanity+ Summit  called freaks weird, or what RU Sirius dismissed as not being hip like the cyberpunk folks, or what anti-transhumanists like Mark Gubrub or Dale Carrico write, of even some of Mike Treder’s strange comments.

I always have considered transhumanism to be sophisticated, keening intelligent, great sense of humor, deeply caring about humanity and awake.  Certainly there are some transhumanists who are difficult or naïve, or who wear "H+" without understanding its values, but for me it is home.

I shine and so do you.

Natasha




Quoting Holly Gray <animeotaku at btinternet.com>:

> I find myself wishing that we could, but, in the current democracy,  we need some form of shiny front organization or we'll be relegated  to being the lunatic fringe that quite a bit of the public still see  us as.
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, 16 June, 2010 10:29:40
> Subject: Re: [ExI] YES! Hard-core transhumanist splinter groups  yearning for cyber-heaven
> 
> Let's have one, figurative or not. Let's form a real transhumanist org
> pushing for real transhumanist outcomes. Too bad the Extropy Institute
> was closed.
> 
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 11:20 AM, AlgaeNymph <algaenymph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Giulio Prisco wrote:
>>> 
>>> FYC: Some comments to an anti-transhumanist, anti-uploading rant on
>>> the New Atlantis blog, and a call to arms.
>>> 
>> 
>> Why don't we ever have a (figurative) call to arms?
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