As I don't believe that our brains are Turing machines, I don't believe that their plan is possible. As a result, I'm perfectly happy to have them waste their time on this frolic, as opposed to the various mischiefs they'd otherwise get up to.

I dunno. In the next century or so we'll probably be customising our bodies at whim. Maybe the future is post-human.

In any case I think oj's probably a sentient computer himself since no human could post this much stuff on a daily basis.

David: precisely.

But I'll bet some of these folk view themselves as the sappers.

It won't be long before humanity as we know it today is termed 'proto-humanity', to make way for what follows. That is when the real battles will start, perhaps even with violence. People who talk of chips as higher beings certainly are capable of mass slaughter in the name of silicon.

Jim:
People who think two-dimensional, digital, chips can rival the human brain have a very, very, long wait in store.

This technology will be overwelmingly good, removing human desease, prolonging life etc. But robots replacing humans is nonsense, we're not going to design our own replacements and people who do try to do that will, as you say, be recognised as ememies of humanity and delt with.

"Enemies of the species" are those who developed bows and arrows. The beginning of the iron age placed us well down the slippery slope.

Please cease this bitch session, in the form of a sob story(what's become of us??) Go take a spin in a Masserati or Lamborghini. Anybody got a few million bucks, to orbit the Earth on a lark? I wonder what the latest news has been, for that mechanical heart at the University of Louisville Medical School.

Larry:

You think your car makes you the superior of your ancestors?

"You think your car makes you the superior of your ancestors?"

oj,

I've backpacked 50 miles. It took me five days. Then I've driven in a car back along those 50 miles to get home. It took me an hour.

Let me tell you something: my ancestors would be absolutely cross-eyed with envy if they could see just how little of my life I have to waste doing grunt labor with my own body, because I'm in a technological society that lets me do things like drive my own private automobile. Never mind the vaccinations I got in childhood that freed my parents from worrying whether I'd die of any of half a dozen killer diseases that once routinely emptied nurseries at a 30% death rate. Or the sterile, anesthetized surgery I got at age 36 that saved me from a medical emergency that not too many decades ago would have been absolutely lethal. I'm alive, in good health, and free to do things that would have been fantasy in any other century -- fly across the world in days, argue with people all over the planet at the speed of light, read any book, pursue any profession for which I'm at all qualified.

It doesn't make me the "superior" of my ancestors in every possible way, but it sure as heck makes me their superior in terms of the practical options and powers open to me.

It also makes me, in a serious sense, already "transhuman" as "human" would have been understood by somebody like Plato.

There may indeed come a time when a separate species diverges from humans, and they may or may not make war upon humans, but that's a long, long way off.

For one thing, why do we have to wait for another species to make war ? Humans have been killing other humans since before they were humans.

The coming advances, in the short to medium term, are the mechanical, electronic, and biological descendants of technologies and techniques that we already commonly employ. Humans will still be made primarily of meat, and mortality will not be overcome. Souls will remain the same.

The only way that 21st century metahumans could be considered a separate species is if one also considers the Amish to be a separate species.

Since everyone conversing in this forum has ipso facto decided to indulge in 20th century advances, the entire anti-technological argument falls flat.

Michael:

But why should we tolerate those who are trying to hasten the new species? Why not persecute them the same way we would any other subversives who oppose our way of life?

Mr. Schwarz:

With all due regard, the belief that you're Plato's superior is mere arrogance. Plato could be taught to drive in an hour--how long would it take you to write the equivalent of The Republic?

If any of us were dropped on the Serengeti, with no tools, no water, no technology whatsoever, death would be inevitable. But many of our ancestors would have survived quite nicely, knowing what they did about the outdoors and making tools from scratch and finding food and water.

There is nothing superior about driving a Ferrari or flying around the world in a 747 - all these modern conveniences just blind us to our own fragility, such as it has always been. And the most fragile spot, as always, is the ego.

OJ, Jim:
You badly misread Mr. Schwarz, try again.

"... it sure as heck makes me their superior in terms of the practical options and powers open to me."

Italics added.

Jeff,

Thank you for demonstrating that the effete conveniences of so-called modern "progress" have not robbed you of your robust, sturdy, pre-postmodern ability to actually READ THE FINE MANUAL. Ahem.

oj,

As Jeff has pointed out, I am not arguing that Plato was genetically unable to drive a car. I'm pointing out that -- blasphemous as this may be to write -- I do in fact get to do a great many things with my life, both physical and intellectual, that Plato simply never had the opportunity to do. That isn't fair. It isn't politically correct. It's merely true: I actually know far more about physical science, mathematics, world history, and half a dozen other topics than Plato ever could know, and I can experience vastly more of the physical world first-hand than he could.

More to the point, unlike Plato, whose entire life was lived at the top of a very small aristocracy of Greeks who could actually afford literacy and education, I'm *normal*. Plato belonged to perhaps the top 1% of the economic distribution of a society that was about the population of modern Montana. I live squarely in the median of income distribution for the United States, which has roughly one third of a billion human beings. Not all of those 300 million people are going to make equally good use of the opportunities available to those in the middle class, but vastly more *can* do so than would have had even Plato's limited opportunities in 400 B.C. That means that I'm not just an isolated rich man living in a society of illiterate laborers and slaves (as Plato was) but a highly non-isolated middle-class man living in a huge society of people who have opportunities that no human being on earth had a century ago. That in turn allows me the option for collaborative physical and mental enterprises that would have been absolutely impossible even 20 years ago.

Are my practical options and powers greater than that of any human being in the Greek golden age? Damn straight they are.

To go back to the point that sparked the argument:

Is human nature fixed in scope? Only if you think that mass literacy, mass modern medical care, mass production of appliances that greatly lower the burden of maintaining a household, mass birth control, mass opening of the workplace to women on an equal footing with men, mass instantaneous telecommunications, etc., make no difference whatsoever in terms of what is possible in human life. As you might guess, I'm skeptical that this is the case.

It was pointed out long ago that the Reformation would have been impossible without the printing press and the American Revolution impossible without firearms, and the fall of the Soviet Union was arguably at least partially due to the American advantage in post-WWII technology. We live in a very different world than what our ancestors would have believed possible precisely because we can afford and sustain modern U.S. society, which could not have been sustained with the technology and economics of (say) classical Greece. So I'm seriously dubious about whether it makes sense to say that we've had an unchanging human nature for 2500 years, which will *only* start changing if those evil transhumanists get their way...

Mr. Schwarz:

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but put Plato in America right now and he'd still be top 1%, while transfer you to Athens and you'd still be among the dross.

OJ:
Mr. Schwarz makes a thoughtful observation and the best you can do is that obnoxious--and thoughtless--reply?

Perhaps you should read "The Triumph of Western Civilization." It is worthwhile book, extolling the roles of Greece and Christianity in the development of The West. My guess is you would like it, and agree with virtually all its main points.

Erich happened also to write an excellent synopsis of it.

Jeff:

If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.--Newton

The belief that you are superior to your ancestors because you built upon their achievements is arrogant nonsense.

OJ:
How could you so badly misread what he said?

He simply states that the range of opportunities and accumulated knowledge available to him is superior to the range Plato enjoyed.

I looked hard for where said he personally, or we generally, are superior to Plato.

Sorry, couldn't find it.

I suspect he is reacting to the gravitational force of what is unsaid - which is perhaps not fair, but use of the word superior (even in terms of options) will trigger that sort of response.

Plato would probably not consider us 'trans-human', but sub-human, given the differences between his thinking and ours (both in terms of quality and quantity). A Maserati might scare him, but the rest of modernity would probably just depress him.

Finally, people may look to the Brave New World for the 'development' of a new kind of man, but remember that we have already been warned, and not just by Huxley.

Jim:

"I suspect [oj] is reacting to the gravitational force of what is unsaid - which is perhaps not fair ..."

Gee, you think?

Look, if somebody has something that they want to write that refutes WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE, let's have it. But directing an argument about something I didn't in fact write proves nothing, other than that the self-designated 'defenders of religion and civilization' are a bit ... confused. :^P

oj,

Actually, you're probably right that I'd be in the dross in ancient Greece; until very recently, most of my (Irish) ancestors were effectively slaves of the British, so it's true that I'd probably have been a slave in Greece too. Instead, because I am in a society economically and technologically far more advanced than Plato's, I'm a free citizen of a free republic who's privileged to work on scientific research.

That is not, however, a point in favor of Plato's time, but of our own.

And the fact that our society can support hundreds of millions of human beings at a level of freedom and prosperity that they could not possibly have had in ancient Greece makes our experience of human life qualitatively superior to the experience Plato could have had.

Pointing that out isn't meant as an insult of Plato, or an assertion of moral relativism. It's meant as an illustration of why I think "human nature" is difficult to define in a genuinely static way. Our life today is simply not one that people of ancient times would have found credible, because far more is possible for us than they would have considered feasible. That is not a new phenomenon only starting now in the 21st century; it's been going on since Gutenberg at least.

I don't see why my pointing this out is driving you to ad-hominem. And I can't help thinking that you should ask yourself whether such a response is one that your own role models in western civilization would have approved of.

Mr. Schwarz:

Sorry. What I wrote was intemperate.

oj:

That's precisely the point: The coming enhancements are ALREADY "our way of life", just new and improved.

The metahumans of the 21st century will be just as human as the stone-age tribes of New Guinea.

jim:

Plato could only consider the bulk of modern humanity to be "sub-human" if he also had considered the bulk of his contemporaries to be "sub-human".
(Which he may well have).

In any case, Plato would, I think, be amazed that the American experiment has been as successful as it has, as he considered most people to be incapable of self-rule.

Mostly, these cybernetic boosters are a few wafers short of a chip. We don't even understand how our brains produce consciousness, and they think that they can program a computer chip to reproduce it? Why exactly would any normal, socially adjusted person want to be half machine anyhow? What problem are they trying to solve? There seems a somewhat suicidal tendency to many of these pronouncements of humankind's demise.

As Jeff mentioned, silicon will not even get close to being within earshot of a stones' throw to the capabilities of a rat's brain anytime soon.

The problem with human progress is that the human psyche is a homeostatic device, carefully managing to a stable level of discontent between the boundary conditions of despair and bliss. Any advancement in material well-being will inevitably trigger an increase in material appetite to maintain this condition. We are the Red Queen. It is the legacy of being the descendants of a particularly successful survival machine.

Plato certainly would be amazed by Eric's Maserati, but wouldn't envy Eric's need to worry about bad breath or body odor.