Comments on: Quote note (#125)

By: blogospheroid

blogospheroid — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 17:36:30 +0000

Damn! I fall ill over one weekend and miss one of the best discussions in XS comments, ever.

Excellent comments, everyone. Nyan, glad that you are holding up the successor-to-FAI-thought flag.

Accelerationists, in the words of King Aragorn “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”

A day may come when the negentropy of the accessible universe is not enough to hold the histories, the lives and values of humanity. When everything soft and tender has to give way to more scales, spikes and eyes. But it is not in our time when that has to be done. We have an enormous amount of energy going to waste today, energy that we can channel into creating a better world for us and our descendants.

By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 02:39:19 +0000

Aeroguy,
you don’t know what the potentiality space looks like, or what the relative sizes are, or what the probabilities of the relative sizes are.
The unknown is unknown, full stop.

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 23:08:29 +0000

Isn’t the substantial difference that in one case, our egos are preserved in transhuman form, while in the other our egos are devoured by a being that supplants us?

It looks about as different as an egg becoming a chicken and an egg becoming an omelette to me.

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:54:57 +0000

@Wen Shuang

“Totalitarian eternal stasis is boring doom.”

I can’t be the only one who, when reading Orwell’s line about the future being a boot stamping on a face forever, pulled out his to-do list and wrote, “buy boots”.

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:52:59 +0000

Not seeing it. The future is either Borg or a burnt-out husk. When we’re done, there ain’t gonna be nothing left to hunt or gather from.

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:50:26 +0000

China is building their way towards the robocalpyse; while they’re not quite moving at nightmare speed, their march is inexorable, and almost every young Chinese I know takes the conceits of transhumanism as a matter of course (think about it- everyone in that country under 40 has known a life of nothing but breakneck technological advance. They’ve gone from peasant agriculture in dirt-floor shacks without running water to high rise apartments, Baidu and jaw-dropping industrial might in… my (32 year) lifetime. Their ruling ideology is the technocratic-transhumanist-sounding Scientific Development Concept. Everybody goes to engineering school. All that stuff of high technocracy that we dreamed up in the postwar years? THEY. ARE. BUILDING. IT.

Yeah, I’d say they’re interested. They’re more than happy to raise Gnon/Moloch to the heavens, if only to spite the rest of the world. They’ve shoved 300 million babies in his gaping maw already… Why stop now?

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:44:27 +0000

If it’s transhuman, is it still man?

By: nydwracu

nydwracu — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 12:45:15 +0000

Not gonna happen. Not within the lifespan of our civilization. So the utility you should assign to thinking about it depends on how much attention you think future civilizations will pay.

My guess: not much. Eurasia is the only game in town; so if not Europe, then Asia. Have they ever been interested?

By: admin

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 01:04:12 +0000

It’s simpler than that: First-order commitments are the mind-killer.

By: Izak

Izak — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:40:57 +0000

I associate hedonism with whatever gives you physical and mental/emotional pleasure.

I’m a Western-European-derived white man with all of the characteristic traits of inborn pathological altruism, so I feel a great sense of accomplishment by helping others. It makes me feel wonderful afterwards, and I have a clear conscience.

So I try to spend my life being as (momentarily) selfless as I can and helping people out who need it, smiling all the while, even in situations where tough love would be the best medicine.

It’s pure and total hedonism.