A Transhumanist Primer..in my world view
So, first we need to redefine one term...
Cyborg: this word has been misused by The Terminator franchise. 'Terminators' are NOT Cyborgs, they are Androids, aka Humanoid Robots. It's something of a pet peev of mine.
A real Cyborg [Cybernetic Organism] is a human who has been augmented with Cybernetic elements. They walk among us already. Someone with a pace-maker and/or Cochlear implants is technically already a Cyborg, albeit more with a small 'c'. When we talk about brain controlled artificial limbs - something that is also already happening - then one is moving into capital 'C' Cyborg territory.
The Transhumanist Cyborg will be a far more extensively modified human. This would include an on-board computer to monitor and maintain all the systems said human contains. It would probably be about the size of a credit card and be placed just under the skin.
Ultimately these systems would include, though not be limited to;
~a carbon fiber reinforced bone structure to maximize strength and protect from impacts,
~cerebral implants [Neural Nanonics] to maximize cognition and perception, download information directly and communicate via 'cyber-telepathy',
~micro-electronic contact lenses that allow the eyes to see the entire light spectrum and which contain both macro and micro focusing elements, information screens and measuring elements,
~a subcutaneous microfiber mesh to prevent puncture woulds, maintain level body temperature in extreme environments and promote rapid healing,
~millions of nanobots, microscopic robots that permeate all of the body's tissues and fluids and constantly monitor and repair all tissues and organs using a regular infusing of raw stem cells.
For certain situations, limbs could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis, but those would be special cases, such as loss of a limb, but eventually organic limbs could be regrown. In other special cases, various organs, such as eyes and lungs, could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis in order to operate in highly extreme environments, with the possibility of having them replaced with organics [wetware] when the individual returns to a human friendly locale.
Obviously, that crosses over into Genetic Engineering, which is in some ways the 'other half' of Transhumanist development and, in my view, the more important one. Cybernetics are really just “Enhancements” of the Baseline Human form. Genetics are how we begin to move beyond the fundamentals of Baseline Humanity.
This is where people start getting frightened because we will in fact be designing and breeding the species that is going to replace us. That brings up all manner of existential terror, visions of remorseless Supermen on a crusade to exterminate the Baseline Humans. But the truth is they are our descendants, our Children...and do we not always want our Children to do better than us, to BE better than us?
The human genome has been fully mapped, though there is much we do not yet understand. But we are learning more everyday, even in the face of the above terrified opposition. Though many Baselines scream, “We cannot play God!” that is what we have always done. It is hardwired into out basic nature. [I will address the Metaphysics of this later]
One of the things we have learned is how mutable our DNA actually is. It seems that powerful events in early childhood can cause chemical and hormonal surges that can quite literally change the structure of our DNA, changes that we can pass on to our children. Most of that work has focused on trauma for obvious reasons; it is the easiest to track. But it is also highly probably that an intensely positive childhood can do the same.
However, this process can also be effected by direct manipulation of our DNA, removing negative inhibiting traits, disease causing genes and adding/augmenting genetic inclinations. Raise such Enhanced children in a positive and supportive environment - we require both Nature and Nurture - and the possibilities are endless.
Genetic Engineering can be used to increase muscle and bone density to create greater strength and endurance, to improve organ function...including brain function, to retard and reverse aging - one day even prevent it all together once a certain state of being has been achieved - to strengthen the entire human organism across the board so that we can survive and prosper in almost any environment.
On a less esoteric level, we need to do this. The Race needs to become spacefaring because the surface of a planet is a dangerous place to live and all the evidence shows that Baseline Humans do not do well in space. So this is a matter of the long term Survival of the Race.
As one looks deeper into the Transhumanist Community, you will find that it is largely dominated by White Beta Males, a significant number of them twenty/thirty-somethings who are atheist, Libertarian, personally awkward and who cannot wait to upload their minds into a box to escape that awkwardness. I have no time for them as they are an evolutionary dead end. Mind uploading should be a Final Option, not a primary one.
For a whole set of reasons, both practical/mundane and esoteric/Metaphysical, I am firmly convinced that the Future of The Race lays with Enhanced Females, in effect Cyborg Amazons. Their enhancements would allow them to reproduce with each other - which would produce only daughters - and so leave Baseline Males, and all of their inherent instability, far behind. And said enhancements would also make carrying a child to term and childbirth itself a far easier and safer process that it is naturally.
Some advocate that we totally transfer human reproduction to entirely artificial means, e.g. Uterine Replicators. But that is heading in the same direction as Mind Uploading and is the path to becoming non-humans instead of Superior Humans. With the pain and difficulty of bearing children removed, what is left is the Primal Bond and that is what will keep us Human no matter how advanced we become.
Those are the basic tenets of Transhumanism I see them. There are however many other aspects, a whole world remodeled to support these Superior Humans, what we presently call The Internet of Things, all the myriad machinery of Modern Civilization networked together and at the beck and call of each human's on-board cybernetics.
And then there is Homo Servitus, which is also the title of the following short essay;
“The need for a reliable Labor Force is one of the oldest and most difficult issues of human civilization.
The harsh truth is that we Baseline Humans are too varied, too impulsive, too inconsistent and always dissatisfied with something. To create order among us eventually requires lies and coercion and as such leads to Tyranny, which damages the Oppressor as much as the Oppressed by brutalizing both.
Better then to turn the Means of Production to the production of Workers themselves, a genetically engineered Servitor Class, beings who are happy with their lot and take pleasure from performing their duties. Such beings would have simple needs, requiring only humane treatment and modest comfort beyond their Purpose as Workers to make their lives pleasurable.
Many of you will react with horror at this entire line of thinking. Yet consider this; the device upon which you are reading these words requires a number of Rare Earths to function. Many of those elements are mined in the Congo by people who are essentially slaves, most of them war refugees and quite a few survivors of War Rape. Their lives are a daily regime of brutality and for most their only escape is death. I'm sure you're horrified by that as well, but you're not going give up your device, are you?
The technologies necessary to create Homo Servitus are already under development. The parsing of genes that guide certain behavioral tendencies. Cloning from ordinary human cells. Uterine Replicators. Cerebral implants to guide and control behavior.
Many of the various members of this Servitor Class would be designed and grown with their specific tasks in mind. A small number would be more generalized servants. But they would all be grown, which is their major advantage over robots. Robots require complex engineering and lots of raw materials. This type of biological Servitor Class also avoids the existential danger of creating independent and mobile AIs.
On the other end of the scale, we need to evolve a type of Homo Superior..but that's a tale for another time. Either way, we Baseline Humans will soon need to move off the stage before we wreck the whole place.”
Given that I envision the idea Homo Superior as Cyborg Amazons, the DNA to be used for Homo Servitus would be that of Baseline Males. And there will even be some Baseline Males who will happily volunteer to undergo transformation into some types of Servitors, much in the fashion of submissive Males who wish to be Collared by Female Dominants today.
This then is my view of the optimal form of Transhumanism, a Transhumanist Matriarchy.
Cyborg: this word has been misused by The Terminator franchise. 'Terminators' are NOT Cyborgs, they are Androids, aka Humanoid Robots. It's something of a pet peev of mine.
A real Cyborg [Cybernetic Organism] is a human who has been augmented with Cybernetic elements. They walk among us already. Someone with a pace-maker and/or Cochlear implants is technically already a Cyborg, albeit more with a small 'c'. When we talk about brain controlled artificial limbs - something that is also already happening - then one is moving into capital 'C' Cyborg territory.
The Transhumanist Cyborg will be a far more extensively modified human. This would include an on-board computer to monitor and maintain all the systems said human contains. It would probably be about the size of a credit card and be placed just under the skin.
Ultimately these systems would include, though not be limited to;
~a carbon fiber reinforced bone structure to maximize strength and protect from impacts,
~cerebral implants [Neural Nanonics] to maximize cognition and perception, download information directly and communicate via 'cyber-telepathy',
~micro-electronic contact lenses that allow the eyes to see the entire light spectrum and which contain both macro and micro focusing elements, information screens and measuring elements,
~a subcutaneous microfiber mesh to prevent puncture woulds, maintain level body temperature in extreme environments and promote rapid healing,
~millions of nanobots, microscopic robots that permeate all of the body's tissues and fluids and constantly monitor and repair all tissues and organs using a regular infusing of raw stem cells.
For certain situations, limbs could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis, but those would be special cases, such as loss of a limb, but eventually organic limbs could be regrown. In other special cases, various organs, such as eyes and lungs, could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis in order to operate in highly extreme environments, with the possibility of having them replaced with organics [wetware] when the individual returns to a human friendly locale.
Obviously, that crosses over into Genetic Engineering, which is in some ways the 'other half' of Transhumanist development and, in my view, the more important one. Cybernetics are really just “Enhancements” of the Baseline Human form. Genetics are how we begin to move beyond the fundamentals of Baseline Humanity.
This is where people start getting frightened because we will in fact be designing and breeding the species that is going to replace us. That brings up all manner of existential terror, visions of remorseless Supermen on a crusade to exterminate the Baseline Humans. But the truth is they are our descendants, our Children...and do we not always want our Children to do better than us, to BE better than us?
The human genome has been fully mapped, though there is much we do not yet understand. But we are learning more everyday, even in the face of the above terrified opposition. Though many Baselines scream, “We cannot play God!” that is what we have always done. It is hardwired into out basic nature. [I will address the Metaphysics of this later]
One of the things we have learned is how mutable our DNA actually is. It seems that powerful events in early childhood can cause chemical and hormonal surges that can quite literally change the structure of our DNA, changes that we can pass on to our children. Most of that work has focused on trauma for obvious reasons; it is the easiest to track. But it is also highly probably that an intensely positive childhood can do the same.
However, this process can also be effected by direct manipulation of our DNA, removing negative inhibiting traits, disease causing genes and adding/augmenting genetic inclinations. Raise such Enhanced children in a positive and supportive environment - we require both Nature and Nurture - and the possibilities are endless.
Genetic Engineering can be used to increase muscle and bone density to create greater strength and endurance, to improve organ function...including brain function, to retard and reverse aging - one day even prevent it all together once a certain state of being has been achieved - to strengthen the entire human organism across the board so that we can survive and prosper in almost any environment.
On a less esoteric level, we need to do this. The Race needs to become spacefaring because the surface of a planet is a dangerous place to live and all the evidence shows that Baseline Humans do not do well in space. So this is a matter of the long term Survival of the Race.
As one looks deeper into the Transhumanist Community, you will find that it is largely dominated by White Beta Males, a significant number of them twenty/thirty-somethings who are atheist, Libertarian, personally awkward and who cannot wait to upload their minds into a box to escape that awkwardness. I have no time for them as they are an evolutionary dead end. Mind uploading should be a Final Option, not a primary one.
For a whole set of reasons, both practical/mundane and esoteric/Metaphysical, I am firmly convinced that the Future of The Race lays with Enhanced Females, in effect Cyborg Amazons. Their enhancements would allow them to reproduce with each other - which would produce only daughters - and so leave Baseline Males, and all of their inherent instability, far behind. And said enhancements would also make carrying a child to term and childbirth itself a far easier and safer process that it is naturally.
Some advocate that we totally transfer human reproduction to entirely artificial means, e.g. Uterine Replicators. But that is heading in the same direction as Mind Uploading and is the path to becoming non-humans instead of Superior Humans. With the pain and difficulty of bearing children removed, what is left is the Primal Bond and that is what will keep us Human no matter how advanced we become.
Those are the basic tenets of Transhumanism I see them. There are however many other aspects, a whole world remodeled to support these Superior Humans, what we presently call The Internet of Things, all the myriad machinery of Modern Civilization networked together and at the beck and call of each human's on-board cybernetics.
And then there is Homo Servitus, which is also the title of the following short essay;
“The need for a reliable Labor Force is one of the oldest and most difficult issues of human civilization.
The harsh truth is that we Baseline Humans are too varied, too impulsive, too inconsistent and always dissatisfied with something. To create order among us eventually requires lies and coercion and as such leads to Tyranny, which damages the Oppressor as much as the Oppressed by brutalizing both.
Better then to turn the Means of Production to the production of Workers themselves, a genetically engineered Servitor Class, beings who are happy with their lot and take pleasure from performing their duties. Such beings would have simple needs, requiring only humane treatment and modest comfort beyond their Purpose as Workers to make their lives pleasurable.
Many of you will react with horror at this entire line of thinking. Yet consider this; the device upon which you are reading these words requires a number of Rare Earths to function. Many of those elements are mined in the Congo by people who are essentially slaves, most of them war refugees and quite a few survivors of War Rape. Their lives are a daily regime of brutality and for most their only escape is death. I'm sure you're horrified by that as well, but you're not going give up your device, are you?
The technologies necessary to create Homo Servitus are already under development. The parsing of genes that guide certain behavioral tendencies. Cloning from ordinary human cells. Uterine Replicators. Cerebral implants to guide and control behavior.
Many of the various members of this Servitor Class would be designed and grown with their specific tasks in mind. A small number would be more generalized servants. But they would all be grown, which is their major advantage over robots. Robots require complex engineering and lots of raw materials. This type of biological Servitor Class also avoids the existential danger of creating independent and mobile AIs.
On the other end of the scale, we need to evolve a type of Homo Superior..but that's a tale for another time. Either way, we Baseline Humans will soon need to move off the stage before we wreck the whole place.”
Given that I envision the idea Homo Superior as Cyborg Amazons, the DNA to be used for Homo Servitus would be that of Baseline Males. And there will even be some Baseline Males who will happily volunteer to undergo transformation into some types of Servitors, much in the fashion of submissive Males who wish to be Collared by Female Dominants today.
This then is my view of the optimal form of Transhumanism, a Transhumanist Matriarchy.