haha, you are completely free to do so. My greatest joy is knowing that my words somehow inspired someone else creatively.
But like i said, transcendence will not overturn the cycle (at least not in the immediately forseeable future). It will just be another step taken towards beating death. We will still be able to die and be terminated, transcendence will simply make our bodies more durable,
less mortal. Perfect immortality is out of our reach, so 'functional' immortality through synthetic upgrading is itself just another form life will take as it does the only thing it knows how to do, run away from death. Synthetic life will still be life. It will still be will and movement as ordained by desire, separate from the stillness and oblivion of death, driven by the need to not become death and stillness. and synthetic life will still be able to produce new life and keep evolving. The only difference is that with our much more energy efficient synthetic bodies, our resource consumption will drop to such a staggeringly low level compared to what we are used to that there will no longer be a need for previous lifeforms to expire, only to make room for new ones.
No no no my friend. Societal trends are themselves the product of evolutionary design, and have been an absolute staple of human life since long before we could be considered 'humans' (as in, before even the age of homo sapiens, before the age of homo erectus even). You can see it even in our primate cousins, they are all, just like us, social animals who live in groups with their specific internal dynamics. We have been social animals since the days of our chimpanzee-like ancestors so to remove the consideration of social influences from the observation of human evolution is to ignore the single biggest constant that has been present thrughout our evolution. Think about it. evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years to really make any noticeable changes. We used to think that we were so smart because of our tools, but evolitionary theorists dismissed this recently. Our tools may allow us to interact in the world ain a more complex way, but once uone member of the tribe invents a tool, the rest of teh tribe just learns how to use it properly and that's where it ends. How many people today know how to build a smartphone from scratch? how many even have teh first clue of how to
learn to build a smartphone? So tools are out of the equation, they are a product of our inteligence, not the cause. So what is the other constant that we have experienced that could have encouraged us to become smarter and smarter?
Us, human dickery, before humans were even a thing. There was a study i read some years ago (I have been fruitlessly trying to find the cracked article that first pointed me towards it for the last hour, so apologies for the lack of references) in which biologists observed the social dynamics of a tribe of chimpanzees. I foget the names they had given to the chimps, but basically chimp A had been the leader of the pack for a few years now and was starting to piss everyone off. Chimp B wanted to become the new leader, but he knew that the older and bigger chimp would overpower him and command the authority of the group against him. So chimp B conspires with another, younger chimp c, getting chimp C to distract the group and give chimp B a better fighting chance. Chimp B unltimately wins in his bid for domination, beating out the old chimp A but leaving the fight worn and ragged. Chimp c then turned around and contested chimp B's new rule, easily beating him and establishing himself as teh new 'alpha' because of how ragged chimp B already was. And you know, a human being would have seen that betrayal coming from a mile away. That's what has made us smart. Because we have always been social creatures, we have always had to out-perform one-another because the member of the tribe who was best at politics, manipulating others and circumstances to get what they wanted, was the one who ended up with the most social power and authority, and that would stay true until someone smarter and craftier came along and thwarted HIS plans. Human social structure and human physoclogical structure are completely intertwined, so you can't observe human evolutionary development without taking society into account.
Also, as you said, monkeys and apes are our closest relatives, and while they aren't
quite as smart as us, you can still see an incredible amount of teh same social dynamics at play. In fact, lower primate cultures are SO similar to humans' (but in a very helpfully simpler and more point-to-point form) that evolutionary theorists use them as a primary source of reference material to decode our own strange social and psychological tendencies. Chimpanzees go to war and Monkeys have prostitution, economy, and labour strikes (this time WITH reference ^_^
http://www.cracked.com/article_18766_5-creepy-ways-animal-societies-are-organizing.html). A monkey is fast and agile, but it is not as fast as a cheetah, or as agile as a rodent, because it still put a fair amount of its evolutionary 'points' into intelligence and an understanding of social dynamics. Same with a gorilla being mighty by our standards, but rather physically weak by the standards of, say, a rhinoceros.
we had just the right circumstances around us for us to become as intelligent as we were. There were other homonids like the neanderthals around who were smart and strong, so they were our competitors. But the neanderthals reached full maturity by 15 years old, meaning that they spent less time socializing with one another and developing complex social cultures. We responded, evolutionary, by having kids who took
fucking forever to mature, but in return this allowed them to learn more, adapt better, organize better, and the result was us killing off 80% of their population in the last
literal race wars that humanity ever fought (and then assimilating the last remaining population via indiscriminate boning. Point 3 on this article touches on this to a degree
http://www.cracked.com/article_20078_5-weird-directions-human-evolution-could-have-taken.html).
it would take me writing an entire thesis to explain every single thing that came along in our known evolutionary history to nudge us in the direction of becoming the super-geniuses we are today, but trust me that human intelligence was by no way a fluke or a a still unexplained accident of evolution. We learn more and more about how we became the way we are every day.
the mind
is chemical reactions (and of course electromagnetic impulses through an insanely complex system of nerves, but those are themselves created by chemical reactions so it comes down to the same in the end). There is no other part to it, it's just that this system is far less crude than one would think. Think of computers as an analogy. software is created by software development programs, which itself was created by a software development program development program, but where does it all go back to a root? Mechanical systems. Now this is a
very esoteric subject that I only know the basics about thanks to my best friend being a software developer himself, but basically the earliest software devlopment machines were constructed out of a set of paths and gastes, with each gate being attributed a value of 'if', 'not', or 'or', and depending on how those gates were set, running an electrical current through the machine would burn coded pathways onto a sheet of metal, which coul then be inserted into a simple computer, which had the ability to read that engraved code and display the information that its values had decided upon so create the first software applications, which were then of course used to create more and more refined future software as the hardware evolved to be able to decode more information from different sources (cutting out the need for an original physical copy of the base code entirely in most modern systems). Our cerebral chemistry is the same thing. Systems that start out very, very basically, with simple values that state things like "If x then Y", and over thousands of generations have evolved to be "If x then Y or Z" in their children, then "If X but not A then only Z" in their descendants after that, and so on and so forth. All until the difference between our chemically based software's complexity now and the complexity of the software our ancestors had 2 million years ago is the difference between the processing power of the laptop I am writing on right now, and the processing power of the strongest computer in the world when i was born in 1992. Organic evolution though is all about blind trail and error, which is why we can bridge the gap between computing system competency in decades what took evolution millions of years to do in us, but ultimately it's all the same thing, systems designing slightly better systems with each new iteration.
as for where those initial values that our programming was built on originally came from? Well, to answer that question to its deepest roots would require us to have a definitive answer of how life actually began. But ultimately it comes down to 'throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks' just like teh rest of evolution. Organic life has the ability to mutate randomly, which is the key to evolution. Mutations affect us just as much psychologically as they do physically, so if one protohuman had a mutation that made them phsycologically more prone to go jump off a cliff for the thrill of the fall, the death of the landing would ensure that he would not have the chance to pass on that mutation to any children. Humans who had mutations that made them useful to the human societies they lived in at the time were humans who had an easier time finding a partner and passing on that mutation to future generations. And as I've stated above, due to other circumstances making living alone very dangerous for humans, having a bit more intelligence than the last generation was nearly always a social advantage, leading to those mutations being encouraged in the genetic line (whereas the people who could hear sounds about 20 times more loudly than the rest of us all died out some half-million years ago). We know that loneliness is bad because we had ancestors who had a mutation at some point down the line that made their brains release unpleasant chemicals in their brains that cause fear and worry (who have evolved now into the more refined emotions of depression) whenever they were isolated from their group, and those mutations allowed those ancestors to stay with the group more, which helped their survival, which let them breed, which passed on that proto-loneliness mutation to their offspring, etc etc etc. It's all a big reward/punishment system that our bodies and brains have developed in order to let us know what gives us the most chances of surviving as per previous experience has demonstrated. Here's an interesting article on how we believe some odd behaviours left over in us today (like crying out of sadness, which no other animal does) were actually incredibly useful evolutionary tools when they first came about
http://www.cracked.com/article_19224_6-wuss-behaviors-that-were-once-badass-survival-instincts.html
[note i feel i should put up a disclaimer here with the links i've provided so far. Cracked (up until 2014) was a great site that had lots of unny, entertaining and informative articles on little-known facts of life and the world around us. However I strongly encourage you to take the claims in their writing with a grain of salt. Firstly because science is continuously evolving and what was a bleeding-edge theory in 2012 will most likely have undergone alterations and refinement in that time. Also because they are still a comedy site, not an actual scientific journal, so sometimes they tend to gloss over the finer details in their reporting in order to make a more entertaining article (though they only started writing utter bullshit around late 2013). I encourage you to browse teh comments in their articles since the fans are amazing about pointing out any inaccuracies the columnists may have missed themselves.]
Also, you're right, our heightened sense of self and our incredible awareness of our surroundings and the patterns that are involved in them are the greatest things that separate us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. But if we are proving anything with our rapidly advancing robotics and, more directly, AI research is that if a basic, unaware data processing system can be improved enough, little by little, it will eventually become self-aware as it can process the data of its own existence. The same thing has happened with us in our awareness, it just took 3.8 billion years for the first single celled organisms (our equivalent to that early software programming machine i spoke about earlier) to get to this point of awareness with our specific genetic line. I woudl argue that the vast majority of animals don't 'see' themselves as anything because they lack the cerebral capacity to ponder the concept of some 'greater ecological machine'. They are a smaller, more basic intelligence that reacts to direct stimuli and changes to its environment but does not possess the capacity to fantasize. they know only themselves. It is a trait of human intellectual greatness that we can see MORE than the singular, more than our self and our own desires, needs and environment. We can observe the system on a greater scale and recognize that WE are part of IT, an animal does not know teh system, does not know its ecosystem. It lives as it can and as its genetic programming tells it to, and dies if that programming causes it to create an environment where it can no longer live (like, for example, great beasts like the megalodon that required too much food to survive and went extinct when their hunting instincts became fruitless with the lack of prey in the seas. They did not have the ability to understand what role other beings played in their ecosystem and how other beings needed to be present for their survival. had they been able to understand these systematic concepts, they would have taken up farming and herding to try and artifically manipulate their environment to provide enough food for them). that sense of self, of singularity and that all our universe revolves around what we see and hear and feel and think is just a remnant of our animal roots. But you;re right, just like the megalodon went extinct because it failed to properly conceptualize its own place within a greater ecosystem, we ourselves will fail as a species as long as we continue to have an 'everyone out for themselves' mindset in which the singular is more important than the whole. But science by no means pushes humans towards greater isolation. Science is the very method through which we become aware of the working of that greater system, how it affects us, and hat we can do to make sure that a suden, uncontrollable change in that system does not result in the destruction of our species.
'right and wrong' are entirely subjective, and there is nothing inherently wrong with the killing of another human. It is circumstance of the act that dictates what morality can be attributed to it. We, as a social species, have figured out that as a general rule the more of us there are, the better it is for us. Because of that, we had to come up with a bunch of agreed upon rules that formed a 'social contract' as opposed to the natural order. one of the most consistent parts of that social contract is 'if you don't kill me I won't kill you, and we'll be able to keep benefiting from each other's presence, even if only indirectly'. The reason is simple, generally speaking it is not favourable for a human's own disposition to kill another. Less humans in the tribe means less productivity, one less potential meat shield to save you if predators or enemies attack, and most of all other humans don't want to die so if the know you killed another, they will ostracize you from their community to protect themselves (and as we've already discussed, a human alone in the wild is basically a dead human in most cases). Our instincts and base emotions push us towards violence when angered or vexed, but it is our highly analytical brains that have come to realize that it is NOT beneficial (in the long run) to kill every human that pisses us off. and out of that conclusion that came from our great pattern recognition skills as mammals and later humans, that is how we came to have this idea of 'right and wrong' based on what other humans do and don't do. But right and wrong mean nothing by themselves. We all agree today that Hitler was a monster, but to Hitler's perspective the jews were the monsters and he was saving the world. No one ever sees themselves as teh bad guy but we let ourselves be romanced by these insubstantial ideas of righteousness. At the end of the day though, the only REAL things we have to rely on are 'beneficial' and 'unbeneficial'. something is not 'right' because everyone says it is, in spite of all the people who tell you that the 'right' thing to do is to only have sex with people you are married to (unless you want to get married to someoen of the same sex, in which case you;re just evil all the time no matter what), despite all the americans who believe the 'right' thing to do in order to 'protect' their country is to hate all immigrants and yell slurs at them to try and get them to 'go back to their own country'. Ultimately, the only thing that is 'right' is what helps A: the most humans in B: the most ways C: over the longest period of time and D: within the shortest period of time. what is wrong is the opposite of that, what hurts the most humans, in the most ways, over the longest period of time, within the shortest period of time.
feeding 1 person is good, feeding 10 peopel is better , feeding 10 peopel for a day is good, feeding AND clothing 10 people is better. Feeding 1 person is good, unless you are feeding that 1 person so that they can have the strength to go and rob the valuables of 4, then it is bad. hitler thought he was good because he was more concerned with thoughts of nationalism and outdated ideals of racial superiority than he was with simple metrics and scientific analysis (the nazis shot themselves in the foot by refusing to adopt Einstein's works into their own research on nuclear physics because they did not want to sully themselves with 'jew science', no rational analysis of the situation wold have let them come to that conclusion). He, as so many of us, failed to see his own evils because he was relying on what he had been taught and what he himself fatnasized to direct his moral compass, not what he himself had tried to learn through tested observation and documentation accompanied by willingness to abandon all ideals if the empirical data proves that they are false presumptions.
And we are no better in principle. After all, how many clothes have you worn in your life (and this applies just as much to myself, I'm no hypocrite) that were sown by the hands of a child in some asian or african sweatshop? How many have you continued to wear after discovering that these sweatshops are a thing that exist? Do you look at every article of clothing you buy to make sure that it was produced in humane and ethical environments? Or do you, like so many of us, just want to go to the mall, buy that slick pair of jeans 50% off, and leave with your new article of clothing (that you need to impress that date of yours tonight) without thinking too much about where it came from? We all do it, and we are all evil for it, benefiting off the sorrows of others. But we all tell each other that it's okay, that it doesn't make us 'bad' people, because 'hey, everyone else is doing it right'?
that's why i don't put much weight on thoughts of 'right and wrong'. they are ever changing and hardly rooted in rationality. I speak of beneficial and non beneficial, useful or useless. Metrics, observation, data. Not culturally inherited ideals and hearsay.
and of course kindness is a thing, but all sane relationships are based on an exchange of services. If someone in your life does not 'give' you anything, if you do not obtain anything from the relationship, it is toxic. and by 'things' i do not mean material possession, i mean simply improve your environment in some way. If a person does not make you laugh, does not feed or care for you, does not support and defend you when you are being attacked (in any sense of the word), we call them strangers at best, parasites at worse. All healthy relationships are based on two people doing things for each other that will improve their physical, social, or psychological status. So yes, kindness and compassion exist, but just like loneliness is an emotional state programmed into us by years of evolution to make us move away from situations in which we are isolated and vulnerable, those positive and beneficial emotions are just further programming that we have adopted in order to create social environments that are objectively more beneficial to us and our continued genetic brand. They are not truly altruistic, but that does not devalue them by any means. It is the height of logic and reasoning for humanity to cooperate in a positive, supportive environment. The fact that our different nations, religions and creeds still fail to do this just goes to show how still very illogical humanity is on a general scale.
*chuckles* and yes, I knwo what you mean to say, but words do matter. Words are the method through which we encode thought into writing or sound and then telepathically communicate those ideals to someone else who has learned the descriptor for that code, which sounds and scribbles translate to which thoughts and concepts. You were using 'unnatural' for its connotative meaning, but there is error in that connotation, and there is greater error in attributing importance to that connotation. It is important to realize when we make those errors because our words are translations of our thoughts and if we use the words in error, usually that signifies an error in our reasoning as well.
transcendence will not break the laws of energy movement and entropy (that itself would break the universe). It will just give us bodies that are much more easily fixed and maintained when they
do deteriorate. the form is temporary, as with everything. what is important is the mind, that awareness you spoke of earlier that, for now, separates us from other animal life forms. As long as that awareness continues, the essence of life continues. That is what functional immortality means. Not permanence of the form, permanence of will. (and even then it;s not intended to trully be 'permanent' but rather, it is simply there to remove that arbitrary clock hanging above our heads, counting down to the time where the damage incurred by our bodies outpaces the technologies we have developped to heal it. We are simply moving our minds to bodies that are harder to damage and much easier to fix, letting us continuously reset the clock, if not remove it entirely just yet.)
and once again, i state that death is NOT unnatural, in any way. it is fully natural, but its status as natural does not mean it should be allowed to continue to exist in our species. and no, you are confusing 'unnatural' with 'broken'. Natural is only what happens in nature, nothing else. no ideal of what should or should not exist. no 'semantics' as you call it. just 'does it exist in a natural state undisturbed by human intervention?'
if the answer is yes, it is natural, if the answer id no, it is unnatural. There is nothing 'good' or 'bad', 'broken or 'fixed' about something being unnatural. this is what i mean by saying that your erroneous usage of the word reflects an error in your rational judgement. you are equating 'natural' to 'how things
should be' when in fact 'natural' only means 'how thing
are". You don;t fix something when it is unnatural, ou fix it when it is broken
that's it. something broken is not necessarily unnatural, (though i will say, it is abnormal. but again, abnormal has no bearing on whether it is god or bad. It is statistically abnormal to be a human male like you and I because 52% of our population is female. But there is no shame in that abnormality) Something is not 'good' and 'right' just because it is natural. Natural is completely neutral to questions of morality, it is simply a state of being, a qualifier with no greater meaning than yo help us describe an object or concept. the ONLY thing natural means is 'not altered by human intervention' and death FULLY exists without any intervention on humanity's part. death is
natural. completely natural. What i'm saying is that it being
natural does
not mean that it is 'right' or that we should not fight against it.
yes, death is completely natural. But it's still unnatural.
you are literally trying to use cultural connotation to somehow make natural and unnatural mean the same thing. Realize that this is an error in cognitive processing. unnatural is the absense of nature the same way cold is the absence of heat. something cannot be both at the same time. it shows that you are looking for another word besides 'unnatural', but you are sticking to that word because of the connotative power behind it, how people have been conditioned to associate it with negative themes. It is a fallacy. Infant mortality rates are 100% natural. It is not because they were unnatural that we fixed them, it is because they were unpleasant and detrimental to us, that is all.
It does not. The majority of churches still slut shame and vilify prostitution. Jesus was staunchly against this. His legacy was corrupted and his name used as a political weapon by greedy men who saw the power that blind faith had. How all you had to say to people was "it's what jesus would want" to have people listen to what you had to say without questioning. His vision was terribly corrupted and you can;t say that the one christian with genuine love for their fellow man for every 10 westboro types who hates gays or jews or muslims based only on someone telling him 'the bible tells you to hate these people, so do it." there is no way Jesus would be proud of what Christianity has become as a whole, and the fact that some fragments of his original teachings of love have survives to the modern age does not justify the horrid actions taken time and again by the church as an institution of global power in our history.
I'd very much like to hear how 'all the good things' of religion somehow outweigh centuries of war (and the sacking, raping, and of course murder that comes with it) that have been justified solely through religion. What good things outweighs Westboro picketing and egging the marriages/funerals of others? what good things outweighs the KKK's treatment of blacks? What good things outweighs 9/11? What good things outweighs the holocaust which, I will remind you, happened because a christian man decided he didn't like a bunch of people of another religion? What good things compare to these desructive, literally world-changing events all carried out in the name of religion? can you name me one single event that was done entirely in the name of religion that helped A: as many peopel as 9/11 harmed B: in as many ways C: over an equal or greater period of time and D: within as short or shorter a period of time? I can't think of any singular positive event of that magnitude.
Back to the issue of legacy though. What worth is legacy if not through memory? also, not a single one of my great grandparents male or female have lived within 100 KM of where I am now. nothing of them remains. none of their values, none of their desires or dreams or memories or events. it has all been wiped away by the flow of time and I have received none of their identity in who I am, only their rough genetic makeup (and I do not consider my physical body to be part of my identity, only a vessel for my identity, my mind). I have nothing of theirs to pass on to my own children, so what of their legacy exactly remains? If a man throws a rock and then you come across that rock on the ground, do you think of who may have thrown it for it to get there? No, you simply see another rock on teh ground, indistinguishable from the dozen others surrounding it. The man's action, that throw
did happen, but as no one was around to witness it, since no one remembers it or knows it happened, it might as well not have happened at all. That is the fleeting nature of legacy. (basically, 'if a tree falls in a forest with no one around does it still make a sound'? It's like quantum theory says, if we cannot observe something we cannot be sure it exists. if we can no longer observe a human's existence even through memory, then that human may as well never have exited to begin with)
also:
immutable
adjective im·mu·ta·ble \(ˌ)i(m)-ˈmyü-tə-bəl\
: unable to be changed
The very fact that, as we have discussed, legacies fade or, in the best case scenarios, are warped and changed to serve the purposes of peoepl who live after you die, shows that they are completely mutable.
and as nice as being the world to one person is, that is a subjective quality, not an objective one. Objective quality is decided by mass consensus, and no matter how much your parents love you, if the rest of the world decides you;re unimportant, that is what you are. The mother of a criminal may still love him and remember his capacity for kindness, but the mother of the person he raped to get into jail to begin with doesn't care about that, nor will anyone else who hears of his crime. by world consensus he is a criminal and a bad person and whatever shadow of his existence remains in the annals of history when he is dead will reflect that. Anyone looking up his name will find only a rapist who went to jail, no matter how much his mother remembers him at 12 years old, smiling happily when he rode his first bike. Rapist has become his objective identity. Just like 'monster' has become Hitler's objective identity in spite of plenty of people thinking he was a swell guy at various points in his life.
ultimately though the universe exists only within our own minds, because our own existence is the only thing we can be sure of. everything else is subjective to sensory input.
also, I fucking love this discussion ^_^
