[ExI] Dealing with transhumanism bashing

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Mon Jun 24 16:27:20 UTC 2013


On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 9:04 PM,  Alan Grimes <ALONZOTG at verizon.net> wrote:

> My contention is that 96% of the existing human population would prefer
> to live the way they are now, with only modest upgrades.
>
> The only way to change that number is to apply force.
> The uploaders claim that adoption of uploading will be 100%, any
> hold-outs being sacrificed.
> Therefore I presume that the uploaders intend to apply force.

How much force was used to get people to accept cell phones?  To my
knowledge, none.

> That's what happens in chapter 1 of part 2 of my story. The bulk of the
> story will be a catalog of the nightmares which follow, in each case
> explaining every choice I make as an author using in-line footnotes.

I wrote a story, The Clinic Seed, about the singularity coming to a
tiny African village.  If you want the population to upload, as a way
of improving human welfare, then making it reversible and increasing
better on the uploaded side seems like the best marketing strategy.
The automobile industry would have had a harder time selling cars if
you were irreversibly glued into one of them.  Cell phones may become
implants, they are headed that way with bluetooth gadgets plugged into
your ear.  But if buying a cell phone included irreversibly gluing it
to your ear, they would have seen a lot slower acceptance.

> As I have said before, I want to identify the latest, best vision of
> uploading in order to ensure that I'm actually tilting at the dragon
> instead of the scarecrow that could be claimed to be obsolete. (the
> SL4-noids do that... They claim their only published works are obsolete
> and not worth arguing over...)

An early version of The Clinic Seed was posted to SL-4 in installments
back in 2006. From subsequent in person conversations, the people on
that list read it and remember it to this day, though it generated no
comments at the time.

> Furthermore, there is something extremely wrong here. Why have all of
> the uploaders shut up?

They ran out of new things to talk about would be my estimation.

> Where are all the brave visions? Where is the
> discussion of what comes after? I remember there being a great deal more
> documentation ten years ago. Where did it all go? Could it be that the
> uploaders have started to meet push-back and have gone to ground? Could
> it be that the uploaders have finally felt the shame of going to their
> parents and telling them the good news that they will be replaced my a
> digital version of themselves?
>
> Seriously. we need to Talk about this. This situation of of you telling
> me that I'm going to be dead and uploaded is not a dialog.

If you can upload to hardware, there is no reason I can think of that
you could not be downloaded back into a body with full memory of what
you did while in the uploaded state.  There is no reason you should
even lose consciousness during the transmission either direction.  Can
you explain to me how a person who spent the weekend in an unloaded
state and is back in his body on Monday is dead?

Keith



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