[ExI] revive thread with new and improved content

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2010-12-28 20:08, Darren Greer wrote:
> John wrote:
>
>  >Spike, I think there is a need for a book titled "The Transhumanist's
> Guide to Picking Up Women!" <
>
> Must I be a voice for gender and sexual orientation equality? Either it
> be The Transhumanist's Guide for Picking Up" with a section for men, one
> for women and one with same-sex advice in that area. Or three separate
> books. Tracts or pamphlets might do actually.

Maybe the guide should be "The Transhumanist's Guide to Picking Up 
(Trans)Humans". Beyond some hormonal differences, local tissue 
differentiation and the preoptic nuclei of the hypothalamus we are after 
all pretty similar... so far.


> I don't know one other gay transhumanist, though there
> must be others.

I guess I could use this opportunity to come out of the closet.

[ It was this year I realized that I did have a boyfriend and wasn't 
asexual... I was likely the last one to notice! :-) ]


> Sexuality is for me a very big issue in a transhumanist context.

I think sexuality is a great testbed (no pun intended) of transhumanist 
thinking. It is one of the areas were we as a species are most openly 
challenging and modifying our evolutionary "commands" - we have 
separated sex from reproduction, we have constructed all sorts of 
intriguing social structures to handle our drives, we are not just 
experiencing sexualities but actually inventing and deliberately trying 
to modify them. It is also extremely emotional and linked to deep social 
structures. That means that if we can change things in this domain and 
not burn ourselves too much, then we have learned things that will be 
useful for other equally heavy domains such as life extension and 
modulating our motivational systems. It is also a fun domain to consider 
just how far we can modify the current condition without losing whatever 
it is that makes it valuable.


(In one of my rpg games a player played a high-tech courtesan who tried 
to seduce a suspect, adapting his/her/its body to suit the situation. 
Unfortunately he/she/it *still* had the wrong gender, since the suspect 
was technosexual and prefered eroticism in high-dimensional virtual 
manifolds with AI software. We had a fun discussion in the gaming group 
whether the guy was even having sex, or was just running an 
unconventional user interface making use of legacy wetware...)


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University