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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16088 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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This idea that consciousness and body are somehow separable is sort of mainstream especially around here, but it deserves more scrutiny. You are your body and vice versa.

Yes. But for that one scenario just say it is a brain transplant. They had that in a Ghost in the Shell episode. Some guy would put his cybernetic brain into female artificial bodies and have sex with men.

Which series was this, specifically? I don't remember it in SAC.

Season 1 episode 1 of Stand Alone Complex. "SA: Public Security Section 9 – SECTION-9"

Major: This next footage is of the Minister and a geisha going into the bathroom.

Aramaki: With a geisha?

Major: Apparently, he sometimes likes to swap bodies with geishas when he gets drunk.

First episode of SAC season 1, the foreign minister is "into body swapping" with geisha androids and given the context some sexual activity is implied. That's the background for the opening hostage scenario and provides the window for a foreign intelligence agent to put the foreign ministers brain in a suitcase and his own in the minister's body. Maybe crosswired with the SAC season 2 episode 3 CASHEYE where the VIP has some sort of fetish of having sex with androids (or full cyborgs) and the major offers to up the ante by letting him experience it from her perspective at the same time. The foreign minister from S1E1 gets a minor call back in that episode as well. Haven't seen the Hollywood movie but it borrows a lot from SAC including a geisha robot hostage situation so it might have featured there as well.

Or a literally gender fluid person? That character in the show was a masculine male politician and on the side had (staight?) sex with men as a woman. Some future person enjoying their favorite parts of publicly socially being a man and privately sexually being a woman.

They are people who have their brains surgically removed, cybernetically enhanced and placed in armored shells. They install their brains into artificial partially-robotic partially-biological bodies. With a few minutes and a bit of help someone could swap to a new body.

At that point I suppose that counts as real of a woman as any. Given that the real-real women are similarly artificial. But I know not everyone would be cool with that. I certainly wouldn't fuck my male friend if he swapped into a female body for a bit, like in that episode of that show. That's too weird for me.

I agree in part (i.e. that your body is part of your consciousness), but that doesn't imply that separation causes a new consciousness or identity. On a small scale, transplanting a kidney or losing an arm doesn't destroy a consciousness but at most transforms it (by changing the I/O patterns the consciousness experiences). If my magical technology actually existed, you could have a locker of bodies identical to your own and, in the case of a serious accident, have your consciousness switched to a new one and leave the destroyed body behind. Has your consciousness somehow suffered in the process?

That is a wider debate around transhumanism which would be fun if we could make it happen.

Seems to me that transhumanism is for those who are ashamed of their bodies.

There's a flavour of reddit type person who is smart, so of course believes that people's status should be derived from that alone. They are often ugly and have poor social skills. This person loves transhumanism.

Seems to me that transhumanism is for those who are ashamed of their bodies.

You don't need to be ashamed of your body to recognize that you can improve upon it.

We've spent much of our evolution path as a human society denying the legitimacy of the jungle hierarchy.

What's your take on walking canes and reading glasses?

There are the full-on brain upload robot body people, of course. And it’s hard to defend people like Yud who speak of immortality while ignoring their physical health.

But I always saw transhumanism as a broader thing; using medicine or tech to supplement/augment/replace/fix failings of the body. So glasses and walking canes are low-tech examples of it.

I have a high hereditary risk of developing macular degeneration. I do what I can with diet and supplements to minimize the chance of this, but if my eyes start dying in my 40s I’m just SOL. Right now it’s something I have to accept, but there’s no reason that has to always be the case.

Your body breaks down over time, regardless of how well you treat it. Would you accept going blind if you could not go blind? Would you accept a bald crown if you could have a full head of hair?

That’s the essence of it for me.

Improve upon it by getting some sort of robotic implant, magic smart pill: you're trying to escape the normal hierarchy, denying its legitimacy

That's not the same as being ashamed of it though. My heart will at some point give out, wanting a mechanical replacement is entirely within the normal hierarchy because it will be made by humans, created by our brains and our hands. Might as well complain about antibiotics and surgery surely? Eating properly requires your mind actualizing change into the world. Same with surgery and prosthetic limbs and replacement heart valves and beyond. Almost by definition anything we do is part of the normal hierarchy of the world. It cannot be otherwise.

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