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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   28563 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I'm not as polite as @TheDag and not as interested in getting people to agree with me, so don't take this as a definitive response.

What differentiates the human being from other creatures is our teleological and philosophical capacity; if we're going to base our societies on whatever people's last-ditch preferences are when they're terrified of death rather than carefully-laid philosophical understandings of value, I'll take my chances in space Korea same as you.

Needless to say, I consider your perspective ridiculous, not informed but entirely molded by the ancestral terror of death and accompanying learned helplessness in the face of it; everything about your post, from your disgust reactions to your philosophical notions of value, and the idea of appropriateness of decay, and the very concept of «normal», only add up to eddies at the edges of a mindless screaming void, facets of deeply ingrained and perhaps indeed evolved coping with the status quo that's at odds with our very teleological capacity you speak so highly of. Children, though – even children of Christian backgrounds, encouragingly – know what's up before they are taught to lie to themselves and others: they know that death is bad the instant they first pause their playing with life and see it for what it is, and this recognition implies a very plain telos under any decision theory that acknowledges goodness and badness, not just utilitarianism.

Together with your musings on evolution as adaptation to particular environments, where a man and a lamprey are put on the same pedestal of accomplishment, what you propose is a perversion and denial of all that's uniquely interesting about humans by metrics intuitively available to us. Moreover it's technically wrong: we are no longer adapted to a particular environment. We have conquered every environment and purposefully created entire new ones, and have evolved under their pressures (ultimately producing people as diverse as you and I), because we have broken through the limit of adaptation via natural selection. This is what we are, and there is no real philosophical limit to this process that can be grounded in what any of us is at a given point in time.

I take the perhaps unusual perspective of a Platonic approach to the human being, from which much of my gut-level reactions emerge; there is an ideal form against which human beings are evaluated, and deviations from this form are defects, whether they end up enhancing or reducing one's capacity. I actually think this is how the human brain actually interprets and understands humanness, even for itself, as demonstrated by everything from body dysmorphia to phantom limb pain to the uncanny valley to body horror.

That's funny because I often post a link to «What Does a “Normal” Human Genome Look Like?» essay by Maynard Olson, which has influenced my thinking on transhumanism:

Nonetheless, questions about the genetic basis of variability among generally healthy humans will not go away. Public fascination alone will keep it alive, as will the realization that genetics is unlikely to revolutionize medicine until we develop a better understanding of normal phenotypic variation. So, what have our first glimpses of variation in the genomes of generally healthy people taught us? First, balancing selection, the evolutionary process that favors genetic diversification rather than the fixation of a single “best” variant, appears to play a minor role outside the immune system. Local adaptation, which accounts for variation in traits such as pigmentation, dietary specialization, and susceptibility to particular pathogens is also a second-tier player. What is on the top tier? Increasingly, the answer appears to be mutations that are “deleterious” by biochemical or standard evolutionary criteria. These mutations, as has long been appreciated, overwhelmingly make up the most abundant form of nonneutral variation in all genomes. A model for human genetic individuality is emerging in which there actually is a “wild-type” human genome—one in which most genes exist in an evolutionarily optimized form. There just are no “wild-type” humans: We each fall short of this Platonic ideal in our own distinctive ways.

I can recognize that this Platonic form can be a justifiable end of the journey – or, in a sense, the return, for while some might see how God had preordained stray cosmic rays and mutagenic toxins to do their job in heritably crippling us, that's a bit too carefully-laid a philosophical understanding for me to wrap my mind around. For me it's the most humble transhumanist ideal, the Aleph-null of human destinies. It's quite far from where we are today, certainly beyond all of our natural champions and our feeble attempts at augmentation, simultaneously in all ways worthwhile to excel at. It's still just a mortal ape, of course, but an extraordinary one, and hopefully able to develop some superhumanly good opinions on such matters.

What I stuggle to recognize is the apologia for anything less.

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