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I bet I already have.
If not, I'll answer your rhetorical quasi-question:
Transhumanism seeks to liberate us from the existing limits of the human flesh. The exact goal can vary, be it practical immortality, becoming superintelligent or immune to disease. The only common thread is looking at the Human Condition, deeming it deeply suboptimal, and aspiring to do better through technology.
Transgenderism? That could mean anything from affirming that a desire to change sex is Valid™, that it is desirable to do so, or claims that we can do so. Some might say that people who have made efforts to emulate the opposite sex should be extended the polite courtesy/social fiction of being treated like them. Hardliners might say that they are the opposite sex, and any efforts to distinguish them from those natally blessed is bigotry.
They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.
If you're happy that I'm conceding some kind of point you've made, then I will helpfully point out that if you consider them equal and indistinguishable:
Are all sterling examples of transhumanism! The evidence is clear for all to behold, are they not all examples of overcoming human limitations through technology?
Look at this featherless biped, is he not a fine specimen of Man?
If your wife were to dye her hair blonde, would you divorce her as a reckless transhumanist obsessed with undermining the sanctity of the human form she was blessed with? Probably not.
Ahem.
I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.
If you want to restrict yourself to the kind of trans-activism that demands people who disagree make concessions beyond minor ones like going along with a new name or remembering new pronouns, then they're usually making some kind of metaphysical claim that a trans-woman is as female as a born woman.
Which I think is nonsense. At the very least it's not possible to pull off today, no matter how much surgery or gene therapy they can afford or survive.
When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.
I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.
This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?
Self identification only equals identity if I asked you about which football club you're a fan of. I haven't actually met someone with who asked me to use different pronouns in real life, if they did, I'd probably oblige them because I'm a polite person with better hills to die on. If they saw me in a treatment room, I'd put their birth sex in the charts and helpfully append "trans" or "identifies as X" alongside it.
I doubt you wouldn't be able to get into Mensa legitimately, the IQ bar is not that high. Save your bribing for some other exclusive club!
Good, 9 inch heels and a urgent medical care when I trip and break something is expensive enough as is!
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I get that you don't care for all the talk about identities and validity, but I don't think the similarity is superficial, and I think transhumanism tends to go far beyond remedying the lack of satisfaction one has with one's body. With the examples you gave, you've expanded transhumanism to include all humans, and at this point I have to ask what's so "trans" about it? I mean, hell, arguably you even included several non-human species. Are crows fashioning a wire into a hook to get to a snack trapped in a bottle transcrowists? Are beavers building dams transbeaverists, and ants building anthills transantists?
If we insist that all these things are trans*ism, what do we call people who are ok with using tools and body modification to restore original function, but are against modifications that go beyond that? That seems to be the major similarity between between transhumanists and transgenderists. Are you just trying to redefine the word that describes you, so that it includes everyone, in order to claim that this means everyone must agree with you? (That might be another similarity to the transgender movement)
My examples like brushing teeth or wearing clothes were intended as a reductio ad absurdum against the knee jerk reaction that any modification or augmentation of the "natural" human state is inherently suspect or falls under some grand, unified theory of "trans*ism". If we define transhumanism simply as "using technology to overcome a limitation," then yes, by that absurdly broad definition, a crow with a wire hook is a transcrowist, and anyone who wears shoes is a transhumanist. That wasn't my serious definition, but rather a way to point out that the boundary between "natural human" and "technologically augmented human" is not some bright, sacred line. Humans have always used tools and modified their environment and even their bodies.
If you are able to note that entirely normal behaviors that most humans, and even some smarter non-human animals engage in can be distinguished from transhumanism despite lying on a clear continuum, then please consider the obvious differences between it and transgenderism.
After all, I'm not the one who asked:
If you can't appreciate the rather minimal and nuanced differences between getting a haircut and uploading a brain into a computer, then I suppose that's a reasonable question to ask.
There's no bright line between "fixing issues" and "making things better than they were, and on average, are". If you went to an ophthalmologist for LASIK when you developed myopia, you wouldn't get a refund if your complaint was that he'd ended up giving you better than 20/20 vision.
The fact that I don't go about saying how desperately I wish to be the opposite sex and how I could achieve that with modern technology makes me rather different from the average trans ideologue.
There you go. Majority similarities aren't the same as equivalence, and implies major differences. Communism isn't Fascism even if they're both authoritarian in practice. White ethnonationalism isn't the Nation of Islam.
The majority of trans advocates believe that the changes we can make at present, through makeup, surgery, hormones and asking other people nicely, are enough to justify treating a transperson just like a natal individual of the same identified sex. This has next to nothing to do with transhumanism.
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Since I wrote it in another comment and I consider it unfair to "write behind someones back": Classifying "brushing teeth" as transhumanism and equating it with major changes to your own biology is quite silly. Firstly because brushing teeth isn't even necessary in the natural state, it's merely a solution to a problem of modernity, namely excessive sugar. And second, because it's just a variation of the very natural behaviour of cleaning yourself. Similar arguments go for most of the examples; Riding a bike changes nothing about your nature, and clothes have been, evolutionary speaking, long part of our natural state. A genuine example of transhumanism is imo only the pacemaker.
And the pacemaker is designed to make sure that a natural part of the body does its job in the natural way.
Yeah. But it itself is a genuine piece of non-natural object added to your body that improves its function. So for me it's good enough to count, even if it's with some caveats.
I appreciate that I’m being a pedant here but it seems relevant that a pacemaker doesn’t and AFAIK can’t improve a naturally functioning heart. We use it to turn a malfunctioning (unnatural?) heart into a functional ‘naturally’ healthy heart. A trans human alternative would be actually improving the function through hyperoxygenation or something. (But all the methods we know of to do this have long term issues, fitting your original point).
Same with glasses - they correct my deformed eyeballs to give me natural human vision. Transhumanism would be something like a telescope and again lens physics doesn’t really allow for massively expanding the kinds of things you’re able to see. Being able to infrared or something would be neat though.
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Dont your body, your brain chemistry, your experiences and limitations make you "you"? Matrioshka Brain Self_Made_Human wouldn't be you. It would be something entirely different, akin to a Praying Mantis Self_Made_Human or a Spider Self_Made_Human. To me, it sounds like you are okay with killing yourself and replacing yourself with something that was created from you but is not fundamentally you.
I don't know if that makes sense, this statement just sounded utterly alien to me.
I'm the dancer, not the dance. I'm the waves, not the water.
To be a little more concrete:
Every part of your body is endlessly recycled while you're alive. This is true for every structure more complicated than fundamental particles. If two electrons have the same mass, spin, charge and other quantum numbers, then it's impossible to distinguish between them.
The majority of the atoms in my body have swapped around since I was born. I have a consistent self-identity that is conserved even if I have a banana for breakfast or take a big dump, or if I go to bed and wake up tomorrow. I'm never the exact same, any more than a river is. Yet a river and a self_made_human are consistent entities about which it possible to make broad statements.
So it can't be pure and perfect identity. It can't be truly continuous consciousness, unless one wishes to believe that sleep is lethal.
What remains are the patterns of information and the algorithms that act on them. If I copy a png of a flower and share it with you, there is nothing lost or gained in the process, assuming standard error correction.
Right now, these algorithms and their data are instantiated in meat machinery: neurons.
Yet the neurons churn. And eventually, without advanced technological intervention, will die and take me with them.
If you can perform addition using both an abacus, a TI-84 and a supercomputer, in a very real sense they're all doing the same thing. It doesn't make much sense to say that your CPU can't actually add numbers.
(Ignore details such as how the floating point arithmetic would work, that's beside the point)
I think there's no fundamental barrier to extracting the algorithms and information in my neurons and creating a replica in-silico. It is a ridiculously difficult engineering challenge, but not something forbidden by the laws of physics.
I can dig up a link, but we already know that that artifical neural networks can near perfectly replicate the behavior of their biological counterparts (usually in a 1000:1 ratio). You can make them arbitrarily more precise, to the point where the original brain is noisier.
Hence, I want my mind to be uploaded into a computer. It's more robust than flesh, and unlocks far more scope for improvement. Going from a dumb baby to a reasonably intelligent adult didn't kill me, so I don't think becoming more intelligent will.
I'm also fine with multiple copies of myself running around. All that matters is that they begin as indistinguishable in terms of behavior to a blinded observer. If there's a "copy" of myself sitting in a black box, which says the exact same things, acts like me in simulation, and so on, then I accept that as me.
Consciousness isn't computation - it's fundamentally embedded into the biological processes. It also doesn't emerge from neural networks regardless of how well they mimic behaviours of real humans. Neural networks are statistical models, while you are your un-statistical emotions, you are your hormonal systems, microbiomes, other physical systems within your body. If you just extract the consciousness + the memories, just the raw contents of your brain and put them into the machine, you lose everything else, which is arguably the most important part. You get alien consciousness. Your consciousness is your consciousness BECAUSE of all of those icky yucky things attached to your brain, not DESPITE. If your replace them, why do you assume continuity?
All of this irreducible complexity can't be reimplemented by assuming that everything is an algorithm. Emotions aren't algorithmic abstract patterns, they are complex interactions between neurons and other biological systems and they are a fundamental part of the biological reality that makes you "you". Omitting them makes you a spider, an alien.
Hang on. Please note that you're just saying these things.
Why isn't consciousness computational? I mean, I can't prove that it is either, but that's just assuming the opposite side. The correct stance is agnosticism, albeit I think it'll turn out to have a mechanistic explanation eventually.
How do you know with, any confidence at all, that something like an LLM isn't conscious? It might not be conscious in the same manner as humans, but the same might be true for birds or octopi. They demonstrate all the hallmarks of intelligence, even if it's not the human kind.
The human body operates on biology. Which is abstracted chemistry. Which is abstracted physics. Which can be mathematically modeled. There's nothing in the human body or brain that violates the laws of physics, you need supernovae or massive particle collides to produce behavior the Standard Model can't explain (leaving aside dark matter and energy, which aren't relevant to human biology).
That physics, while intractable to compute at the quantum level or even the microscopic scale, still holds true. A lot of it can be usefully described and wrangled with statistics.
Well, emulate the body too! The neurons are electro-chemical, and surprisingly binary, in the sense that they're either firing or they aren't. This behavior can be well approximated.
If a disconnected brain emulation goes nuts, then if you have that kind of tech, you can trivially design a virtual body with the usual sensory modalities.
The brain is also very noisy. You can probably get away with saving a lot of computation by approximating events at the chemical scale. Not every random jiggle of proteins matters, it simply can't at scale.
I am not convinced that this complexity is irreducible at all. A single neuron, or even a thousand, misfiring: Happens all the time. Doesn't matter. An emulation can withstand a lot of noise, because the object it's representing is also noisy.
Emotions can be both algorithmic patterns and the product of a complex interplay between systems. All that really changes is that the algorithms in question become more complex.
This is already accounted for. Estimates for the amount of compute needed for a brain emulation vary multiple orders of magnitude. I never said this would be easy. It just isn't impossible, look, something evolution cobbled up manages. We even have our own alien artifical intelligences that can run on your phone.
If that was really the outcome, I'd take it over death when my fragile biological form fails me. I don't think this is likely at all, beyond the first imperfect uploads.
Thank you for the discussion! I think it heavily veers into sci-fi territory, but it's fun to think about.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GKnAWcWnJJc
It turned out I must have already watched that video as YouTube shows that I liked it haha.
Of course, everything I've said is speculative, but it's modestly informed speculation. All future advances are sci-fi until they're not, we'll have to strap in for the ride and see where it takes us.
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