Transhumanism as a theme

Depend if (you) as a person.

What makes it Pathfinder-tier?

>you will never live to shed your frail human body for sick ass robot one

Depends on how you feel about inviting a spirit (say, a ghost, a nature spirit, or a demon) to live inside your soul and share your flesh. It's kind of like getting married, except for the added supernatural powers and weaknesses and the possible bizarre mutations.

>Is humanity something worth holding onto
Depends on if you look at it from a narrow or a wide viewpoint. The narrow viewpoint, that is your own personal viewpoint, would say no. Obviously because you enjoy being your own individual with your own desires and your own will. Giving up your individuality to become a higher lifeform would be tantamount for death. Why would anyone want to become a cog in the machine? You'd exist for a long time as a cyborg but does anyone want to just exist?

From a wider point of view it might be worth it for the species. Transhumanism opens a lot of doors. The ability to live in hostile environments like the sea or even on other planets.

Fiction generally nails the divide. There might be some people looking with a view to the long term who think transhumanism is in the best long term interests of humanity, and there would probably be a lot of people who are concerned to appalled by the idea of giving up who you are, your individual essence, to become a drone.

Theseus' Ship. How can we be sure that a transfered mind is indeed transfered or simply copied and the original (you) killed?

And religion. The body is made by God to hold our souls, modifying it is not cool. The Bible condemns even tatoos.

Civilization: Beyond Earth did this well. The evolution options are pure human, cyber enhancement or melding with Nature.

Bump, cause interested.

>pathfinder-tier

Elf-san you are terminally retarded.

Isn't Transhumanism the main theme of Eclipse Phase?

>Theseus' Ship. How can we be sure that a transfered mind is indeed transfered or simply copied and the original (you) killed?
There is no "ship," though, just components that are themselves made of molecules that we label a "ship" for convenience. Deciding when it stops being "the same ship" is just quibbling over semantics. Likewise, humanity is a human construct, we stop being human when we say we do. Consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon arising from our mental processes, not a thing unto itself. The question isn't whether it's the same "mind" that got transferred, it's whether the two can be meaningfully distinguished in the first place

Wouldn't any transhuman country rocket ahead of any 'pure' country in economy and technology? I imagine you would be pretty much forced to adopt such things unless you want to be third world.

This is a false dichotomy. You can't explore the limits of what humanity is capable of if you're afraid of getting lost along the way. Maybe we'll lose our humanity, and maybe we won't. The fact of the matter is that humanity will eventually end. The only choice is whether we end as worms crawling blindly through a ball of rotting mud, or by seizing the courage to imagine what greatness lies just beyond.

dude i just want the variant feat which outbeats any of these other race bonus except maybe half orcs

Depends on when the technology for it starts to really hit and what the population's like at the time. I hope to God it's late enough that all the old boomer fucks die off before it comes around for us—I don't even care if it leaves me behind.

I'm not condoning tattoos, but the part of the Bible where tattoos were commanded against was the part where it also told the Israelites were told not to eat common carriers of parasites they couldn't clean/cook properly and a big list of things jewish people are commonly allergic to even now (shelfish).
So it could very well have been hygiene, even before getting into it as a "set yourself apart culturally" thing.

I can't wait for science fiction to move on from transhumanism.

I can't wait for transhumanism to move on from science fiction

Humanity is worth preserving, but also worth perfecting.
Transhumanism leads to posthumanism, which is naut but descended inhumanism.
Those truly learned do not become posthuman, they become superhuman.

That is great! Now transfer all of your funds to the AI godhead, get your brain filled with resin and wait for the glorious day when the preserved resin block is dissected and scanned and you will be reincarnated in steel.

SENS have the right idea. Aubrey might be a little crazy but I trust him more than Kurzweil.

>all these fags thinking youll be the same person after being unfrozen/reconstituted
Gotta preserve continuity, bruv, ego bridges.

Same could be said of waking up.

Subconscious thought does not break continuity.

>Becoming a Lich involves damning your soul to Hell.
>Vampires cannot pass on to Heaven or Hell, only oblivion awaits them.
>Being an unbreathing (someone who was raised by magic) means you cannot eat, drink, or sleep, but your body acts as though it still needs it, it's nothing but suffering
>Becoming a fiend or celestial strips you of a tremendous amount of your free will and self control.
>Lycanthropes are under absolute control of the progenitor.
>Mummies, ghosts, and other lesser undead aren't worth the effort of becoming.

Honestly, becoming a mummy is your best bet, assuming you actually become one after death.

If you use a method which prevents you from dying, or at least lessens the eventuality, then it doesn't matter what happens when you die.

Which is what lycanthropy and divinity would do, one constantly regenerates your body provided you can sustain it and the other gives you a body that is not subject to the laws of biology and thus does not age or die.

Well your chances of dying in the long run are pretty close to 100% even if you don't age. So it really depends on whether the afterlife is eternal because even if you manage to stave off death for 1 million years, it's going to seem like a pretty bad deal after the first trillion years in hell.

I've got a character trying to become an elemental.
Being human is overrated.

On the other hand, if you would already go to hell it doesn't matter if you condemn yourself to eternal damnation.

Yeah, like circuncision being made to identify and possibly kill people with coagulation diseases, and prevent BENIS XDDD diseases.

But some people still are religious, and moving away from God's body into a machine may trigger them.

oh yes thats why all those corpses are so very talkative what with being made of exactly the same things as they where before.

>How can we be sure that a transfered mind is indeed transfered or simply copied and the original (you) killed?
You could do the Ghost in the Shell thing and, instead of transferring a mind into a new body, just transfer the entire brain. You'd have issues with body dysmorphia to work out, but you'd at least be sure it's 'you' inside of the murderbot.

If you were already going to hell, you should've tried a little harder to be good instead of getting yourself killed by being evil.

In Basic and Advanced D&D, lichdom is a meme option only seriously considered by people who failed to attain godhood and don't have enough time left to try again.

It depends on the setting.
For instance, in the game I'm in finding ANY way to trade out your humanity for power is a good idea, because otherwise you're going to end up getting dicked over by someone either already born above normal mortals, or traded out their mortality themselves. The issue is that any solution that you don't just luck into is hard as hell to pull off short of becoming butt buddies with a vampire, and vampires are considered a joke by basically everyone else. Now granted, a lot of governments outlaw most of the sort that you aren't just born into (which mostly only covers half-dragons), but the thing is, putting down super-wizards, demons running around in supercharged mortal coils, and literal demigods is pretty hard.

>The Bible condemns even tatoos.
But that's wrong.

>>Vampires cannot pass on to Heaven or Hell, only oblivion awaits them.
Sign me up.

Still holding onto 0.1 essence point.

There is a major non sequitur here, though. What part of transhumanism intrinsically suggests that you must lose your individuality, become a 'cog in the machine' or a 'drone'?

It's pretty much the age-old view that advancing technology dehumanizes/devalues humanity; lose your biological components, and that makes you less of a person (ignoring that by implication anybody who loses their limbs in an accident or warfare is now less human, or the implication that getting prosthesis is dehumanizing).

A result of the intense anti-science/anti-technology rhetoric that's been being pushed by various political and religious groups for decades. It's a shame, because it only exists to remove people from the truth and depower them.

What element?

The element of surprise!

There are advantages to it, and certain groups want to do it, but the Colonial Authority has made it illegal to do to humans, both from a cybernetic and a genetic engineering standpoint, outside of a slowly growing list of simple mods available to everyone that have undeniable medical benefit.

The CA pockets are mostly lined with the so called 'kings of Jupiter', old money that got absurdly rich in the first days of expansion out into Sol, who have a pretty conservative bent. Such people are deathly afraid that, if human modification is allowed to run rampant, humanity will shatter into a dozen different 'species', each one modified to live on different planets previous considered uninhabitable, until the currently existing human government no longer can act as a unifying force.

This would be disastrous, as humans cant build FTL tech. We don't have the technology for it, and be agreed not to build our own by treaty. We get a certain allowance of new FTL engines every year from a larger galactic power as part of the benefits of membership under their protectorate, but they cant be bothered to deal with us on a world by world basis and instead ONLY are willing to talk to a central government that presents us as a species.

If humanity splinters, our membership in the protectorate could unravel, and that means no new engines (which even after 300 years we still only understand in general terms, we don't understand the mechanics of how it does what it does. Like a cave man who knows a TV displays pictures but doesn't know what a pixel or electricity are) and worse yet would mean we would be open to attack from other alien factions without reprisal by the protectorate.

> Humans cant do a thing

God, the HFY crowd is going to tear you apart.

humanity is unimportant. only sense of self is important.

what you are does not dictate who you are.

It does if the things you become are so fundamentally different from humans you lose parts of what make you tick.

you must have missed the sense of self part.

>Is humanity something worth holding onto, or should it be discarded while one transforms themselves into a superior lifeform?
Should you lose something, for example empathy to your former fellows, while ascending then whatever you ascended to isn't strictly superior to your previous form.
Should you merely gain, for example raw intelligence or mental or physical capabilities, then the question is irrelevant.
Either way you won't ever stop being a human, no matter what else you might become.

I dunno user, neuroscience and AI are advancing pretty fast right now.

But why would you want to trap yourself into a robotic body? Live in the Cloud and use remote control to interact with the physical world when you want to.

>Theseus' Ship. How can we be sure that a transfered mind is indeed transfered or simply copied and the original (you) killed?
Your body is replacing the matter it's made of all the time, so in that case the original (you) is long dead, and the current version will be in a few months. So just do the upload cell by cell, or perhaps even a cell component at the time, and you aren't any deader than you'd be anyway.

>Your body is replacing the matter it's made of all the time, so in that case the original (you) is long dead, and the current version will be in a few months.
Except that brain cells last until you die, and don't get replaced if they die off early, so the grey matter driving the replaceable meat puppet isn't nearly as interchangeable.

that works if your old "self" dies with the creation of the new one. but if you upload your brain expecting to end up a robot, and it turns out you are still the human, doomed to die, looking at a mere copy of yourself, you'd be understandably upset.

you lost the coin toss.

Is that a coin toss you can ever win?

no.

you lose it every time.

>Leviticus 19:28
>Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.
Funniest thing I ever saw was people tattooing themselves with Leviticus 18:22 about homosexuality being a sin against God when just a few paragraphs later they have tattoos also being a sin against God.

> Connect neural network to your brain
> Brain uses digital storage as part of itself
> Slowly remove organic parts of the brain
> Become digital without risks of your consciousness being replaced with its clone
Physical body has ability to sustain itself in physical world. Who knows what can happen to a cloud storage.

physical body is all in one location, cloud is massive with multiple copies of same files.

the cloud can't be ended by a single bullet.

>economy
Not quite. Economy lives and dies on its ability to enhance satellite markets by allowing people to pursue incentives and desires. Go post-grad, remove their need for pursuing incentives, and suddenly you stop all incentive for economic advancement and market competition and cooperation, which leads to economic stagnation and death

I'd say that's actually questionable, doing some research, that passage is a list of prohibitions against the religious practices of the surrounding people (If we'll remember the golden calf incident, the Hebrews had a habit of adopting pagan beliefs and practices and needing to be corrected). From that, it could be said that the differing intent of a christian tattooing a reminder of their faith, combined with the usual Old Covenant/New Covenant thing make it okay.

This doesn't look like the most unbiased source in the world, but the arguments hold water and he sources good commentaries: sacredink.net/tattoo_and_the_bible/

>just components that are themselves made of molecules that we label a "ship" for convenience.
So if we remove the chemicals that make up the brain, it is no longer that she brain, so downloading yourself to a computer doesn't mean you've ascended, you've just destroyed the original consciousness and made a fascimile of what would originally be made by different chemicals

A replica is never the original

> the cloud can't be ended by a single bullet
But your comfortable life inside cloud can be ended by taxes and actions IRL. Someone important is placed on the same server as you — fuck you and thousands of unlucky people.
Physical body is pretty much a blessing if you're a generic white/blue collar worker. The head can be reinforced with armor that will save your consciousness in case of explosion near you, so the insurance company can just give you a new body.
Also, hibernation. Take out all the soup cans your dad stacked in his nuclear shelter, place batteries inside it, turn yourself off for several decades in case shit goes down. Then emerge and observe either a post-apocalyptic landscape or a new utopia.

Not true, you can take a path instead

What's the difference between downloading your brain/making a backup of your mind, and making a clone or replica of yourself?

Is the clone you? Is it not its own entity? Does it automatically become you upon your death? If your clone killed you, would it be murder, suicide, or an accident? How does one determine who has more right to your identity? Does a clone have any right to being an individual divorced from the original's identity? Would a copy even still be considered human? Do you have any intrinsic right over the life of your replica?

>Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth

> Is the clone you?
It's your copy. From your point of view, it's not you. From others', depends.
> Is it not its own entity? Does it automatically become you upon your death?
It's not like your instance of consciousness will teleport into clone's body. Technically it will become a different person, although very similar to you.
> If your clone killed you, would it be murder, suicide, or an accident?
Murder. Unless he accidentally stabbed you 50 times.
> How does one determine who has more right to your identity?
Why would you clone yourself in the first place if you don't have an answer to this question?
> Would a copy even still be considered human?
Sure.
> Do you have any intrinsic right over the life of your replica?
Why? It's your copy, same intelligence and everything.

Then downloading your brain into a computer is just cloning yourself, then letting the clone kill you.
Checkmate Transhumanists

My way of looking at it is that any changes to the skull and the things outside the skull do nothing to change the fact that you are you, but brain augments that change how you think do. That's either an amazing or horrifying.

If you made a digital copy of your brain, then had the hemispheres of your brain separated, then connected each hemisphere to it's digital opposite, which version would be the real you?

The joke is on the clone, now he's the one stuck being me.

Depends. This method implies that you won't be cloning yourself. You're not creating a copy, you're moving data from organic neurons to synthetic/digital ones.

...

That's something everyone has to decide for themselves. But if you're looking to transform yourself into a superior lifeform, there WILL be risks and hidden costs. You could lose your sanity, your life, or your self. You could become a monster.

And in the end? Maybe it was worth it. Maybe it wasn't. There's only one way to find out.

this is either
a. the correct way of transitioning to a computer brain
or
b. dying slowly enough you simply don't notice.

Sauce?

That's not even a bit true.

biology.stackexchange.com/questions/24020/are-brain-cells-replaced-over-time

The other you wins it every time. If you're not okay with that then maybe you should stop being so selfish and let at least one you live forever.

youtube.com/watch?v=fVd9wauRKr8

>then maybe you should stop being so selfish and let at least one you live forever.
But if the two of you are the same person, that still makes the other you a selfish cunt for abandoning the previous you to death just to grant himself immortality, effectively making him a selfish parasitic bastard. No matter what, the moment you decide to make the coin toss is the moment you decide that one person has to be the bastard and the other the sacrificial lamb to fuel your own desires. Such an act is irrevocably and irrefutably evil by its very nature, as even though the replica is a copy.of you, they are still an individual, thus you have forced a choice that makes one person suffer undeservedly for your own gain

I mean, they're a clone of you though, so as long as you wouldn't suffer by dying and the other you continuing, and wouldn't suffer by having to outlive the original, then what's the problem? I'd give up myself if I "lost the coin toss" to keep the other me living forever, and by that logic the clone would feel the same. I might feel a little bad if I was the copy, but it's not like it changes pre-copy me's life at all, it just means I would go on as normal except I'd have a copy of myself to fuck around with until I die, and then other me goes on and lives whatever life it chooses with it's new "infinite time" capacity.

Each time a part is replaced, that part lose its memory (iatrogenic brain dystrophia). Unless the synth part have the memory already copied, but then it is Theseus' Ship again, only bit by bit.

A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS!

All the responses say is that new neurons are created throughout life. They're not replacements in the way something like skin cells are, or they wouldn't disturb memories. Conversely, if neurogenesis was widespread and caused the brain to cycle, nobody would have childhood memories.

The parts aren't replaced, synth parts are attached via whatever interface to the brain. So you can check whether the neural network is being used by the brain or not.
If memories are moved around the brain matter (I can't remember if they are), there is a significant chance that the brain will move them to the synth part. That way, even if the organic part dies, there are still some memories of your old self stored inside the network.

There was a story (an urban myth?) about a shady doctor, who inserted an electrode inside some guy's brain who was completely blind. Hooked up a camera to it. It worked at 10-15 FPS and low resolution that camera could output.

Just saying that doesn't make it true.
1. Presume that consciousness is the result of matter interacting
2. From that presumption we can conclude that a consciousness is not an object that can be left behind, but a process that can happen in any sufficiently complex system
3. The differentiating elements of individual consciousnesses are memory, personality and cognitive function, all of which are in constant flux
4. Our recognition of individuals as distinct entities is derived from the direct and obvious connection of one state of memory, personality and cognitive function to the other through time, the latter deriving from the former, mutated by outside factors and entropy
5. This direct and obvious connection is maintained with mind digitalization

You think it'll be a matter of one person dieing and another person appearing. Presumably you think of day to dat existence, which each millisecond following the next as different. But is that distinction justified? Why do you think mere matter is the key to a continous being?

>Such an act is irrevocably and irrefutably evil by its very nature
But that's not true.

>that still makes the other you a selfish cunt for abandoning the previous you to death just to grant himself immortality
not really
first of all, presumably the mortal you is just as much the person that took the decision to create the copy, so he has to be okay with it
second of all, it's not murder to outlive someone

>The body is made by God to hold our souls, modifying it is not cool.

This is literally the exact opposite of biblical themes. The entirety of salvation in Christianity is effectively an exercise in transhumanism, starting with a mental/moral reform and ending in a physical resurrection into something that in any other setting would be called a god.

The New Man doesn't give a rat's ass about what we call 'human'.

worked out for Said and the rest of the merchant princes of Egypt.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZDXCzghbDH4

Reminder that AD&D mummies are tied to the positive energy plane, not the negative.

>Is humanity something worth holding onto, or should it be discarded while one transforms themselves into a superior lifeform?
If Mecha-Satan offered to turn me into a gorgeous vampire girl in exchance for 12M souls I would become twice Hitler immediately.