The Transhumanism Agenda

[henry quirk]

Transhumanism is nuthin' but another name for commodification. Make man better by first makin' him less.

[promethean75]

It's not some 'agenda', tho. It's just what happens when mortal biological hedonistic creatures are faced with our particular circumstances; needing to maximize material production to experience more pleasure, and wanting to merge with nonbiological organisms in an attempt to increase longevity (finding the fountain of youf).

I get a chuckle out of watching conspiracy theorizing right wingers claim that some malevolent entity is tryna turn the world into the matrix and/or make everyone robots. Naw man, AI and robots and all that shit is the logical next step for a species such as ours. What u need to worry about is who controls the robots 'n shit.

[Iwannaplato]

It's not some 'agenda', tho. It's just what happens when mortal biological hedonistic creatures are faced with our particular circumstances; needing to maximize material production to experience more pleasure, and wanting to merge with nonbiological organisms in an attempt to increase longevity (finding the fountain of youf).

I get a chuckle out of watching conspiracy theorizing right wingers claim that some malevolent entity is tryna turn the world into the matrix and/or make everyone robots. Naw man, AI and robots and all that shit is the logical next step for a species such as ours. What u need to worry about is who controls the robots 'n shit.

It's interesting as you see it as a mere obvious consequence that hedonistic creatures (of course, many of us are not just hedonistic) will seek to maximize pleasure and long life, but wouldn't then also gravitate to wanting to control others, for their pleasure and desires also.

One consequence is just obvious, the other makes you chuckle, despite us having a history of rich and powerful people having similar agendas. As if hedonistic creatures - who lack, say empathy - might have an agenda to use transhumanist tech to extend their lives and increase their pleasure AND to control the masses. They don't do that with media technology, for example, no. It would bit laughable to think that.

The malevolence you chuckle at the idea of is what happens when you have hedonism in individuals without empathy and love, etc. You know sort of partial humans. We don't have to have some idea of abstract evil to have a serious problem from such partial humans. And, really, it's not a stretch to label such partial imbalance people malevolent. Further for some reason this is seen as a right wing idea. I get a chuckle when people have such short memories and understanding that they don't know the Left has had precisely those concerns since their beginning. They might not have wanted to see the bureaucratic proto transhumanisms in the Stasi and secret police in China and Russia, back when they were sort of Communist, not really, states. But they sure have had concerns about the malevolence of the combination of state and government on the fascist end of things.

Both the right and left these days seem to have a kind of political dementia.

Fortunately, there are people in both of the supposed two sides who don't have dementia. Some Leftists to look into who see malevolence in transhumanist agendas.....Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, David Harvey, Silvia Federici and Benjamin Bratton are a few that come to mind. They're fairly mainstream. There are others more towards the fringe, of course, as there are on the right. Positing conspiracies of those in power has and always has had its left-wing adherents.

It is simply stunning that anyone could think that concerns about centralized power in secret doing terrible things based on an agenda is a right wing idea.

and it's really helpful to those in power if any time such an issue comes up, it is seen as partisan and connected to the irrationality of one group. Then you have instance polarization, and people on 'the other team' are afraid to look at the issue/facts, since this would mean they might be either commie, perverse, family destroyers or racist, homophobic, classist nazis - depending on the perspetive of the supposedly only two camps. Talk about someone getting a chuckle about convenitent irrationality. And who is that who is having the best chuckle?

[promethean75]

"It's interesting as you see it as a mere obvious consequence that hedonistic creatures (of course, many of us are not just hedonistic) will seek to maximize pleasure and long life, but wouldn't then also gravitate to wanting to control others, for their pleasure and desires also."

You're in luck, plato, becuz i just got a sack of da chronic and am therefore now able to do some philosophy.

Imma tryda flesh out what i mean by 'hedonistic', and then explain how that 'hedonism' is the driving force behind transhumanism.

I mean by 'hedonistic' that we are solely motivated by the desire to experience pleasure... either physical bodily pleasure or 'mental' pleasure. By mental pleasure i mean something like stasis or the avoidance of a dissonance of ideas. The absence of the experienced state of confusion. Instances are when someone 'feels right' about what they are believing at that moment. The feeling of certainty.

For some mysterious reason, we want these things. Physical pleasure and certainty of thought. 'Course u could explain this dynamic in evolutionary terms as an evolved characteristic of humans (other animals too to the extent that they may 'think'... dolphins and apes come to mind), but then I'd just call evolution mysterious, so.) Evolution describes what has happened, not why it has happened.

Anyway so I'm saying every living thing is a hedonist in a full Epicurean sense. Physical pleasure and a 'stoic' state of thinking... which i count that mental pleasure, feeling of certainty, etc., as.

Moving to this:

"The malevolence you chuckle at the idea of is what happens when you have hedonism in individuals without empathy and love, etc."

I count empathy and love as one or both of the forms of pleasure. I'm certainly not saying that hedonism and these things are mutually exclusive.

But i get it; normally when a philosopher utters the word 'hedonism' in the company of his pipe-smoking vienna-circle- going neatly-trimmed-moustache- having contemporaries he's immediately ostracized and suspect of being French or a nihilist or both.

[promethean75]

Transhumanism has to be what we mean when we say 'that thing where humans making and merging with machines, happens'. And if it does happen, it happens becuz it advantages humans at their pleasure seeking. Techne itself is the means by which an organism expresses its power and drive for some kind of pleasure.

[Iwannaplato]

Transhumanism has to be what we mean when we say 'that thing where humans making and merging with machines, happens'. And if it does happen, it happens becuz it advantages humans at their pleasure seeking. Techne itself is the means by which an organism expresses its power and drive for some kind of pleasure.

Or, they think it will advantage them in their pleasure seeking, but it doesn't. Or, like heroin it increases pleasure, but has side effects, long term and occasionally short-term, that make it a bad idea. Or, like technologies that currently replace walking and biking under one's own power, what is pleasurable or reduces effort in any case, increases problems, atrophies the person.

There are short term pleasures that undermine the pleasure of the organism.
There are pleasures that are partial. The give pleasure to one facet of the organism, while being shallow in relation to the whole organism.

Both of these can lead to all sorts of reductions in pleasure.

So, even within hedonism many of these mergings might be terrible ideas.
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Then there are all the marketing/pr/ control the thinking of the public or a product that actually gives those in power more power aspects to this.

And then there are criticisms from outside of hedonism

[promethean75]

Those are excellent points and i purposely overlooked mentioning them for propaganda reasons.

The only way out of that magnificent grey area u just threw me into is to claim that there is an ultimate 'pleasure' composed of a continually evolving internal MO of the social species 'man' that includes the very observations and critical examinations u produce, in some kind of teleological forwardness toward a kinda hegelian omega point or some shit. U are literally 'making real' the dangers of those pleasures u mention, how some interfer with others, etc., in the hegelian sense of producing a synthesis (really it's Fichte) to resolve those very grey areas in such a way that it makes it objectively bad for a person to do heroin... it creates the idea of this badness, and in the heroin addict evolves a new drive toward a new pleasure; not being bad, not being broke, not being unhealthy, etc., becuz when he is, he.... wait for it... feels a sense of certainty in his thinking that he shouldn't be doing heroin for reasons x, y and z.

Do u realize how profound what you've done here is, plato? U are a text book example of the platonic good developing through the dialectical process of the resolution of irrationalities in the real. U are most certainly a philosopher in Hegel's sense. The human spirit strives not only for profane physical pleasure but also for some kind of virtue. Behaviorism just can't account for the complexity of human emotion so reductionalism is out of the question.

I dare say there very well may be some platonic realm of the good, or else your criticisms, your grey areas, would make no sense. And they very much do, sir.

But alas the good may be impossible. Only if everyone in the world was Spinoza, B. would universal blessedness be possible on erf, and that sure as logical shit isn't possible. And yet, relative as our values are (at no fault of our own), we all have that sensedness of what we 'should do' and the feeling of certainty we enjoy when we convince ourselves we are right.

Its the form, not the substance, that is interesting. The way ideas and the body run in a kind of parallel, interdeterminate way that shapes what 'man' is becoming. They always work toward some individual or mass of individuals thinking what they are doing is 'good', justified to the best of ability. That's not just an engineering side effect becuz it's too consistent. Nietzsche liked to say that consciousness was a perfectly unnecessary aspect of the will to power in the form of the human being. Almost called it an accident. Or maybe did, can't remember. I dunno man. But what fun would talking about consciousness be without ascribing to it a very important purpose in some kind of teleological process... not necessarily toward an 'end', but toward betterment. Always toward betterment. And the grey area of what is good and pleasurable, benefical, etc., is where the real evolves and becomes more rational.

We need to invent neo-platonic historical materialism or something with a revised version of hegels' phenomenology of the spirit so that we get a spinozean non-teleological determinstic system of hedonism striving toward the good and the rational that will reach its stage of transhumanism when it merges its body (of effects) with synthetic materials.

To describe any impetus here i would have to start using even more obscure metaphors like eros or elan vital. I don't even know how to describe it other than something as vague as a will to power (without all the evil Nietzschean undertones that er'body likes to attribute to the idea).

On 'control' of the transhuman world, i nominate the working class soviets, who will decide for themselves, democratically, what is to be done with this new techne.

[promethean75]

Note to novatorean aristocrats and anarchists, who exception must be made for. What I propose does not prohibit the expression of your unruly and creative spirit, your insatiable desire to test boundaries and what is forbidden, to laugh and scorn at bourgeois and plebian values. Who I speak to are the working classes with whom we share the erf. There is room enough for us all becuz... there are so very few novatorean spirits!

[Walker]

Transhumanism is nuthin' but another name for commodification. Make man better by first makin' him less.

Even joy is a commodity ploy, e.g., Kamalala.

[henry quirk]

Even joy is a commodity ploy, e.g., Kamalala.

Just lookin'...

393CB0FD-4125-4089-B296-28A23D190EC1.jpeg

...for a little joy.

[promethean75]

"Even joy is a commodity ploy, e.g., Kamalala."

Bro like that's so crazy how u would perceive this thing as a leftist phenomena when capitalism is founded on and flourishes by this very commodification of goods and services.

Capitalism has commodified and sold u the idea that leftists have sold u some idea becuz their tryna commodify u.

[promethean75]

Everything looks like a trap to u, Quirk. Your whole life has been like one long scene from The Free State Of Jones sans musket loaders.

[promethean75]

Great movie, btw, if u haven't seen it. One you'd dig. Matthew McConaughey's in it.

[Iwannaplato]

Everything looks like a trap to u, Quirk. Your whole life has been like one long scene from The Free State Of Jones sans musket loaders.

It's interesting that reading the beginning of the post one might think you were being critical of HQ, but then you compared his life to a movie that's about a real guy and considered a pretty accurate rendition of his life. And that guy definitely had traps to avoid. Bundles.

I also liked that movie.

[Walker]

"Even joy is a commodity ploy, e.g., Kamalala."

Bro like that's so crazy how u would perceive this thing as a leftist phenomena when capitalism is founded on and flourishes by this very commodification of goods and services.

Capitalism has commodified and sold u the idea that leftists have sold u some idea becuz their tryna commodify u.

This is what the Left tells us to perceive. The emotion of JOY is being used as a commodity.