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Would you become transhuman?

UniqueMixture

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they don't have our ability to engage in moral reasoning. Also, human thinking may involve cognitive errors but unlike computers, we are alive.

Why would computers/transhumans necessarily not be capable of moral reasoning? I think one day moral machines may be much more ethical than human beings have the capacity to be. Also, I'm really curious as to what kind of morality would originate under alternative biochemistries. I'm curious as to whether the feelings we have under the influence of oxytocin and serotonin could be reproduced/approximated under alternative chemistries. In computers I would imagine it'd just be a matter of reproducing the mathematical relationships (if possible).
 

rhinosaur

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For this question to really make sense you have to define exactly what "transhuman" means. The line is very very blurry.

Does wearing glasses make you transhuman?
What about a hearing aid?
A bluetooth headset?
An automobile console that can access GPS, systems information, the internet, etc.?
Artificial limbs?
Pacemakers?
Hormones (e.g. birth control, androgens)?
Surgical corrections to hearing, vision, etc. including Cochlear implants and LASIK?
Surgical enhancements to hearing, vision, etc. that improve your abilities beyond what is normal?
Brain-enhancing drugs (e.g. memory supplements, mood-altering drugs, sleep enhancers)?

To answer the question, I don't think I would hesitate to use any trans-human devices. The only areas of concern I can think of are 1) efficacy and 2) price.
 
S

Society

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the soul-search experiment

If I could swap my current physical self for an exact biological copy that included the neurons and neuronal connections containing all of my current memories and knowledge I might go for that. However, the change would have to include retaining my soul in the new body. If you're talking about an artificial body that mimics these functions, I have doubts that a man-made copy would be a flawless replica of the real thing.

Interesting... what if one could actually use this technology to answer the question of a soul - or freewill in general for that matter... using this kind of technology? This might sound off but bare with me:

Let's say we find a none-destructive way to do it - an FMRI resolution so deep it gets every piece of the network. we then use a real life augmentation to scan everything coming into your brain - every biochemical release, every hormone and protein, every nerve and every piece of sensory information, from the moment you wake up from the scanning table... and we then transmit all that data to the uploaded you, to experience the exact same thing.

After a few months, perhaps years, we scan you again and compare it:

since as far as she perceived the world her body was doing what you were doing, if she experienced doing things that she didn't want to do or not doing things that she wanted to do, she would almost certainly would have internal reactions to it, she would felt and thought things that you didn't - both in the reaction to her inability to control her actions and in what lead her to choose differently from you in the first place, and it would leave its fingerprint and show up in the scan.

but if she didn't, if your brain scans where still identical, that would mean you still made all the same choices and internal experiences along the way, and that whatever where the possible metaphysical differences between you two, they didn't actually matter.
 
S

Society

Guest
Why would computers/transhumans necessarily not be capable of moral reasoning? I think one day moral machines may be much more ethical than human beings have the capacity to be. Also, I'm really curious as to what kind of morality would originate under alternative biochemistries. I'm curious as to whether the feelings we have under the influence of oxytocin and serotonin could be reproduced/approximated under alternative chemistries. In computers I would imagine it'd just be a matter of reproducing the mathematical relationships (if possible).

well, one could argue that without indevidual mortality, when everything of value can be reproduced as many times as needed or at the very least find a recent backup, the only harm that would be concieved is lost time and memories... pretty much develop a morality where the only crime is vandalism.
 

Engineer

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No difference.

..how is that different from real life?

Everyone else would think that the person running around in my body is me. And for all intents and purposes, it would be me. Except for the fact that Me Prime is dead. And only Me 1, who thinks he's alive, is still alive. So I'm dead, and a facsimile of me lives on, a facsimile that I cannot interact with or receive data from at all. I am dead.

ok, but in this case you'd still be uploaded to a computer and then downloaded into a new body, so, wat if we take out the "new adult body in 10 minutes" factor out of sci-fi, and replace it with the kind of cloning we have in real life - the one where it actually takes 30 years to grow your 30 year old body - would you then choose to just stay inactive for a couple of decades or would you choose to function as an "uploaded mind" to whatever extent you can?

I still probably wouldn't do the whole upload thing, personally. I'd be too used to having a corporeal form that I'd go bonkers just hanging around in a server for 30 years. I enjoy the sensations of being alive, mortal, and incarnated. If I was forced to upload, maybe I'd just go on standby. But imagine the consequences of that... everyone you ever knew and loved would be dead once you got your new clone body. ...or maybe not, if they uploaded too... Damn, this thread is really interesting.
But that "uploaded mind" concept has really given me an interesting idea for something I was writing... so thanks!
 

JocktheMotie

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Everyone else would think that the person running around in my body is me. And for all intents and purposes, it would be me. Except for the fact that Me Prime is dead. And only Me 1, who thinks he's alive, is still alive. So I'm dead, and a facsimile of me lives on, a facsimile that I cannot interact with or receive data from at all. I am dead.

You've had conversations with Legion, I'm sure. What would he say? The platform is irrelevant, what you "are" is the pattern, the program.
 
S

Society

Guest
Everyone else would think that the person running around in my body is me. And for all intents and purposes, it would be me. Except for the fact that Me Prime is dead. And only Me 1, who thinks he's alive, is still alive.
see, its already is the case, little by little every day, and its called...
[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxrq6AX45bo"]the circle of poop[/YOUTUBE]

But that "uploaded mind" concept has really given me an interesting idea for something I was writing... so thanks!
you welcome.
 

sculpting

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if we have the scanning technology to put those on a new robotic body, why not just have it displayed on.. well, glasses or anything else for that matter?

Hman bodies (especially mine) tend to have flaws and break down in strange ways. I would be delighted to be rid of the silly flesh and goo that transports my brain around and trade it out for something a bit more reliable.
 

Engineer

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You've had conversations with Legion, I'm sure. What would he say? The platform is irrelevant, what you "are" is the pattern, the program.

But Legion was digital to begin with... He was synthetic, he was created to operate over multiple platforms. I'm just unsure of how that would work with a human being.
 
S

Society

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Hman bodies (especially mine) tend to have flaws and break down in strange ways. I would be delighted to be rid of the silly flesh and goo that transports my brain around and trade it out for something a bit more reliable.

rule of thumbs - if a product of sufficent complexity survives the warrenty period, someone in the factory screwed up. get what i'm saying?
 

sculpting

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rule of thumbs - if a product of sufficent complexity survives the warrenty period, someone in the factory screwed up. get what i'm saying?

are you talking bout my mom? *cracks knuckles*

seriously though, biological engineering works very slowly through millions of repeted cycles and chance optimizations. mechanical engineering takes much less time
 
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Why would computers/transhumans necessarily not be capable of moral reasoning? I think one day moral machines may be much more ethical than human beings have the capacity to be. Also, I'm really curious as to what kind of morality would originate under alternative biochemistries. I'm curious as to whether the feelings we have under the influence of oxytocin and serotonin could be reproduced/approximated under alternative chemistries. In computers I would imagine it'd just be a matter of reproducing the mathematical relationships (if possible).

Moral reasoning requires using a combination of both emotions and reasoning. Computers don't have emotions so they can't truly engage in moral reasoning. Who knows what types of emotions a transhuman would have. Also, I expect that the generation and expression of human feelings is more complex than can be described by only considering the actions of oxytocin and serotonin.
 
S

Society

Guest
are you talking bout my mom? *cracks knuckles*

yes actually: i'm telling you that your iphone is going to need chip replacement long before your mom needs hip replacement.

the only reason we really tend to think of technological stuff as more durable is because we rarely get to see it when its old - because unlike people, it usually stops working when its old, and the rare exceptions - like collector cars - had a lot more work on them then a surviving cancer patients, and are often more rare then surviving cancer patients (that what makes them into collector items). and the more advance and complicated it becomes, the faster it breaks down. and really, what is the incentive to sell someone a product they don't need to replace in a couple of years? what is the incentive in developing it?

your organic body will feel like it betrays you from time to time, but if your still there to feel that it betrays you, then it already has a huge head start over what an artificial body has to offer. could that change? perhaps, but who says it will change faster then medicine? stemcell grown bladders have already overtaken decades of development in artificial 'robotic' bladders in terms of the health and quality of life they provide.

so yes, i'm talking about your mother - she gave you your body, and as fragile as it might seem, its not as fragile as the technology your idealizing, so go say thank you.
 

UniqueMixture

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Moral reasoning requires using a combination of both emotions and reasoning. Computers don't have emotions so they can't truly engage in moral reasoning. Who knows what types of emotions a transhuman would have. Also, I expect that the generation and expression of human feelings is more complex than can be described by only considering the actions of oxytocin and serotonin.

True, but if morality has a physical basis and we can model any physical process then morality can be modelled as well
 
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True, but if morality has a physical basis and we can model any physical process then morality can be modelled as well

If you assume (based on advances in neuroscience) that we will be able to model the brain in the future, how do you take into account the learned aspect of human emotions? Also, if you see moral reasoning as something that develops and changes over time as children grow up and achieve more sophisticated cognitive abilities, how would you infuse that learned reasoning into an artificiallly created brain?
 

UniqueMixture

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Model the society as well and use individual persons at different stages of ethical development as baselines

I believe IBM is on track to model the human neocortex (or brain I forget which) by 2019
 
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Interesting... what if one could actually use this technology to answer the question of a soul - or freewill in general for that matter... using this kind of technology? This might sound off but bare with me:

Let's say we find a none-destructive way to do it - an FMRI resolution so deep it gets every piece of the network. we then use a real life augmentation to scan everything coming into your brain - every biochemical release, every hormone and protein, every nerve and every piece of sensory information, from the moment you wake up from the scanning table... and we then transmit all that data to the uploaded you, to experience the exact same thing.

After a few months, perhaps years, we scan you again and compare it:

since as far as she perceived the world her body was doing what you were doing, if she experienced doing things that she didn't want to do or not doing things that she wanted to do, she would almost certainly would have internal reactions to it, she would felt and thought things that you didn't - both in the reaction to her inability to control her actions and in what lead her to choose differently from you in the first place, and it would leave its fingerprint and show up in the scan.

but if she didn't, if your brain scans where still identical, that would mean you still made all the same choices and internal experiences along the way, and that whatever where the possible metaphysical differences between you two, they didn't actually matter.

In this scenario, are you saying there's a disembodied, uploaded version of my brain that's experiencing life in real-time at the same time that the real me is? If so, I would think the uploaded version would go insane from frustration over being a passive observer of sensations and events with no control over them. That frustration, in itself, would change the uploaded brain in ways that the real brain would not experience, so the two should diverge.
 
S

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In this scenario, are you saying there's a disembodied, uploaded version of my brain that's experiencing life in real-time at the same time that the real me is? If so, I would think the uploaded version would go insane from frustration over being a passive observer of sensations and events with no control over them. That frustration, in itself, would change the uploaded brain in ways that the real brain would not experience, so the two should diverge.

exactly - but if the uploaded you would make the same choices you do, if when you choose to raise a cup to drink they do so, and then they expeirence all the nerve feedback of raising a cup to drink, then uploaded you would never notice.
 
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exactly - but if the uploaded you would make the same choices you do, if when you choose to raise a cup to drink they do so, and then they expeirence all the nerve feedback of raising a cup to drink, then uploaded you would never notice.

Our brains are affected by more than nerve feedback, though. They respond to hormones. There's more to life than neural circuits.
 
H

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I can't say. Are we to understand that transhuman is defined as humans that integrate (advanced) tools into their biological self?

As far as contemporary usage of the term, that would be the general idea.

For this question to really make sense you have to define exactly what "transhuman" means. The line is very very blurry.

It's a broad term, but I figured the magazine cover I posted would imply what level of transhumanism I was referring to.

Does wearing glasses make you transhuman?
What about a hearing aid?
A bluetooth headset?
An automobile console that can access GPS, systems information, the internet, etc.?
Artificial limbs?
Pacemakers?
Hormones (e.g. birth control, androgens)?

I actually considered these things when starting the thread, but disregarded them as too pedantic to address.

Hman bodies (especially mine) tend to have flaws and break down in strange ways. I would be delighted to be rid of the silly flesh and goo that transports my brain around and trade it out for something a bit more reliable.

I wouldn't mind swapping out my frame for an adamantium skeleton like Wolverine's.

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