11-06-2018, 10:39 AM
(11-05-2018, 12:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-05-2018, 09:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(11-01-2018, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?
I know you sort of wrote me off, but...
What are those "inherent life abilities" which cannot be expanded using biotech?
Everything we know, just about. Not applying technology to expand our range, but expanding our potential of our given bodies and souls. And the word "soul" is important, even if you don't think the individualized consciousness survives death and possibly returns for another go-round.
For starters, our physical athletic ability. Sure, athletes might convert to prosthetics, but it is also possible to increase our abilities without them. A lot of this goes back to job one, learning to develop our mental and consciousness abilities. This has been developed for centuries in Oriental countries, but is largely ignored in the West, as monasteries have been limited to Christian devotion, whereas Buddhist and other monasteries in the East have trained peoples' minds to focus.
You may have heard of speed reading. If people were taught to read without talking to themselves, instead of talking to themselves or say words out-loud as they read, our reading abilities would increase, and so would our focusing ability. Job one is to learn to think without talking to ourselves. That would increase human abilities many times over. But it's too hard for the average person to learn now. Supports for meditation is an expanding frontier of human ability.
Sometimes we must talk to ourselves. We must reflect on the consequences of accepting what we see in print or hear in spoken media.
Quote:Our personal relationships are really screwed up. People offend others, and are also too easily offended. The ability to put ourselves in others' shoes and observe the golden rule remains a learning curve on the path of developing our inherent life abilities. When will we be able to have intimate relationships with more than one person, and thus have a society with more love, without the feelings of jealousy and abandonment ruining them? How about a freer sex life, but without abuse and harassment? What about our tendency to remain slaves to our past hurts, which screws up so many of our relationships? How about our abysmal family structures, with all the abuse and the lack of respect for young people or elders?
Some people are particularly uninviting as people into whose shoes we might walk. I certainly do not want to think like a criminal, a lunatic, or someone intellectually impaired. Poor? I have been there, and it is awful. The only thing good about poverty is food stamps, and they compel me to focus on food for its virtues instead of convenience.
Quote:And our social and political life is even more screwed up. So many reforms, and the ability of our systems to enact them, remain undone. Most of our societies on Earth are oligarchical, authoritarian or even genocidal. Even Buddhists in places like Myanmar cannot necessarily observe their spiritual principles in the way they treat other religions. We are barely out of the cave in developing our inherent life ability to communicate and respect others' rights and fulfill our responsibilities to others in society. Another tech network like Facebook will not help us at all. We can see this here with people like Galen and other libertarians who don't even have a concept of social responsibility. And people on other extremes like the tyrants in fascist and communist lands and their supporters who have not developed respect for human rights, and people like Trump and his followers who cannot empathize with people of other nationalities, races and genders. And this does not even mention our relationships with other species and with Earth, which are the most screwed up and tyrannical relationships of all. But our very lives also depend on improving this.
Commerce and spirituality do not go well together. Commerce compromises everything (including politics, religion, art, science, education, recreation, the environment, health, and human welfare) for profit. Nobody says that we do not need grocery stores, iron ore mines, and automobile repair shops; aside from a healthy private sector we also need a healthy public sector and keep the two separate. Life is nothing more than compromise for the poor, which one can understand due to the insecurities that poverty imposes. For others, people need to know what to do with their bounty.
We need to learn what we can do with what we have. Surely we have heard of the pathetic character known as the hoarder, someone who buys and keeps stuff and ultimately finds the stuff dominating his life. There often is some emotional trauma involved... and the stuff compromises mobility, destroys the possibility of a social life, and may even pose a risk to personal health and safety.
Quote:This does not even mention the path of spiritual enlightenment, which has been pursued by a small minority before the new age, but is now open to all, and yet still traveled by relatively few. It comes down to what we can do and perceive, not what a machine can do for us, even if tech and pharmacy can help open the doors. Our psychic abilities and our ability to contact the dead and know our past lives and history, is a frontier that would transform us enormously if pursued. Our metaphysical, spiritual and philosophical knowledge and our experience of God is neglected, while scientific knowledge expands, although there's still much to learn along all the paths of knowledge.
We can contact the dead by reading their biographies and their personal writings, listening to their compositions, experiencing their art, and watching their movies. In a way, such people as Lincoln, Einstein, Bach, Matisse, and Kurosawa are very much alive. Attempts to contact Uncle Ed or Aunt Edna from the 'spirit world' are more showmanship, often a fraud, better at separating people from their money than at connecting anyone to the dead. Past lives? Was I a Jew slaughtered in the Holocaust or was I a Nazi official who did the slaughtering but who died at the end of a rope as judgment of the Allies? Was I a plantation slave or a slave dealer? Even if past-life regression is real, what accountability or sense of victimhood would I have? No thanks on that one! I have no desire to be part of any enmity between Romans and Carthaginians!
I can make a case for God -- but that requires limitation of the concept of God to reality. The laws of mathematics and physics are what they are, and so are both the binding curve of energy and the stricture of electron shells. That 4+7 can be whatever one wants creates mathematical anarchy. The binding curve of energy has iron (Z=26) at the low point after exhaustion of energy from nuclear synthesis in stars, and if that point were in a lighter element (let us say calcium, Z=20), then iron would be too rare to allow an Earth-like planet to have a magnetic field and for hemoglobin to form. Copper (Z=29) necessary for technologies from battle axes to electrical wiring would be really rare. Maybe supernovas would be more common and astronomy would be even more chaotic. If the binding point were at a heavier element (let us say zirconium at Z=40), then iron meteors would be far more common than they are now, and such a highly-toxic element as arsenic would be more of a peril to life. There would be much more inert krypton (Z=36) which seems innocuous -- until one recognizes that it would flood planetary atmospheres and suffocate any chance for the formation of life. Even something so subtle as that beryllium-8, which could supposedly form from the meeting of two alpha particles (commonplace helium-4 from hydrogen fusion), is so unstable that its ephemeral existence is possible long enough only in extremely hot, dense cores of stars that it can meet a third alpha particle to form stable carbon-12. Were beryllium-8 more stable it would force the synthesis of carbon-12 in the Sun's core already with even more intense production of energy, and the Sun would already be a red giant that would have put life at an end on Earth.
A change in structure of electron shells -- and most significantly the first one, might allow four electrons instead of two. Hydrogen and helium would be less volatile, and they would more easily amass in stars -- bigger stars that go supernova. Planetary bodies would also form of hydrogen and helium in warmer locations. There would also be more planetary collisions. Hydrogen and helium would be very different in their chemistries, with hydrogen perhaps as an alkali metal -- and we have enough of those already. The sixth element, carbon, would be a magnesium-like alkali-earth metal instead of having the extensive chemistry that carbon has in reality. Next would be a substance intermediate between boron and aluminum in chemistry where nitrogen is. Because this is an alternative universe, it need make no sense.
The Universe makes sense, and we humans can contemplate it? Thus God? God -- but no guardian angels or other such malarkey.
Quote:And our arts and music are neglected, resulting in a crass popular culture that surely could be improved if we took some interest in developing our sensitivity and creative abilities, and in supporting them and freeing them from corporate market commercial domination. No people have ever had the knowledge of other cultures past and present, the potential of our new media, and ability to access inspiration, as we have today, and yet our potential to create an artistic renaissance remains untapped. Creativity is not a technological ability; it's an inherent soul ability. Even technological invention itself depends on human inspiration and perspiration.
STEM is wonderful, but it is not enough. Unless people become homo oeconomicus in the extreme, people will need to learn how to live after far fewer hours of work than most now endure. As someone with Asperger's, an employer might not want me around for office politics, which seems to fill time not spent in genuine work in bureaucratic organizations. Economic reality will have to adjust for technological reality. Enrichment of human existence will do far more for us than the enrichment of economic elites.
To be sure, creativity often reflects technological ability. What could have been more 'technological' than the pipe organs that Bach used? I used to disparage movies that rely heavily upon special effects, but there have been some movies that, despite having excellent scripts, would have been impossible without computer-generated imaging. Elderly creative people might have their creative careers extended due to medical technologies. By the standards of his time, J S Bach lived to a ripe old age -- but just imagine him creating music until he reached a lifespan commonplace among recent members of the GI generation. Antibiotics are standard treatment for the syphilis that killed Franz Schubert at 31 or made Robert Schumann mad and unproductive, or the rheumatic fever that compromised the heart of Gustav Mahler and killed him off at the peak of his innovative productivity. Antibiotics were not around then. An antibiotic such as penicillin seems like a primitive technology today, but it was not so primitive when it was new.
Quote:There's just a sample. I have no hope at all that tech can fix these things. On the contrary, over-reliance on tech progress, and neglect of human life progress, is the biggest problem we face today. These are considerations not to write off.
Just don't let the money-grubbing plutocrats take command of it all.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.