For the record, I'm not Evan LeFavor or an Evanist, but I appreciate the creativity of his theories and depth of his belief system.
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Assuming we can merge our bodies with more and more technology, why does that necessarily mean we'll become immortal? Wouldn't we also be opening ourselves up to technological viruses, in addition just biological ones?
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@geke Our biology is already opened up to biological viruses. We evolved a biological immune system in order to deal with it. If technology ends up expanding the attack surface we'll evolve technological responses.
The difference being that instead of your enhanced immune system learning about viruses from fighting a losing battle against viruses, you can just download someone else's immunity.
Yes it would make you immortal assuming that there is no deity who wants to take your soul and add it to his collection. But by definition we cannot fight deity. Ergo no use being afraid of it either. On the other hand if we can fight it then it is no deity.
What if we are how deities reproduce though, and this is the process by which they do it? Meaning that all those who choose not to make the journey are like so many sperm that fail to make it to the egg wherein new life is created?
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This just made my morning. Totally stealing it. :)
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Yes, I'm sure tech immune systems would be even more successful than our biological ones. Exponentially so. But what about the early adopters of new tech bugs - exposure before the patch is programmed in, or even written? It seems to me that if this is actually possible, at best it will greatly improve your chances for long life rather than assure immortality.
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@geke While I have no evidence or indications of this, I have a feeling that a system created to detect and repair damage while warding off invaders, would probably be something that would become intimately "aware" of your proper state. This to my mind means that any virus which tried to hijack cellular machinery would be summarily dealt with.
Then the question becomes "what about computer viruses". The best answer I can give is that we need to be careful building these things to make sure that they are able to validate their own code.
The final question and the one that bothers me the most is what happens when we shed biological material. Example tears, sweat, blood, semen. All of these run a very high risk of carrying this kind of tech. If it's doing it's job correctly it's going to be hostile as hell to any organism it enters if it doesn't have some method of knowing it's no longer inside it's original host.
I'm not just talking about humans either. The net effect of necrophages such as dust mites or parasites such as lice consuming this tech by way of being what they are could be devastating to the whole earth. It doesn't mean we shouldn't explore the tech, but it does mean we should be extremely cautious.
In the end I think the ultimate solution will be to move beyond our current concept of "body as self" and recognize the fact that we are "information that thinks". I think therefore I am, and by way of this, moving outside our current rather limited concepts of physicality.
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We will be digitally immortal possibly but physically it's not possible. The laws of physics don't permit physical immortality.
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@dana-edwards The laws of physics as we understand them don't permit the material we're made of to be physically immortal without serious help.
If you had nano-bots that could repair any damage and did so by replacing aged dead and senescent cells with freshly cloned stem cells. You would be functionally immortal.
You'd still only live about 500 years though. Beyond 500 years the odds of you dying from horrific random crap such as lighting strike, explosions etc begin to rapidly approach 100%.
You're going to need spares.
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Public funding and private funding is being used to conceive and develop methods of joining technology and biology. This is done for the alleged beneficial guise of helping people through medical implants whereby technological improvements can be given to those who have produced capacities such as hearing, vision or whatever else. Not only does the public fund the degradation of human evolution, but they are also conditioned over time through the tacit acceptance of cybernetic benefit for those who can improve and regain something they have lost. The cybernetic implants will not stop the medical establishment as it will be and already is favorable for many in our current time to view cybernetic and technological implants within the body in order to augment certain cognitive or physical capacities as extremely desirable.
For people it will be about performance increase, and for government it will be about performance increase as well as a capacity to perform in an energy way per-person in order for the production of society, but also more important for the controllers is a technological control over biological mechanisms which will lead to mind control of a direct nature.
We have certain people are more performing and who are augmented in certain capacities it is clear that these types will get hired for jobs over others who do not have the increased abilities. Being biological will be looked upon as a low form of being which will be hard to survive undr, whereas being into the cybernetic society would be the only way to continue living in society without being rejected.
Go watch the movie Gattaca, watch the anime series Ghost int he Shell, and see how detrimental this is for people who reject these alleged "enhancements". This is a perversion of biological self-capacity to do what you are capable of doing, and instead rely and be dependent upon technology to advance in society and economically survive. People are becoming more and more obsessed and reliant on "augmentation" to "escape" their biological limits. You are not you, the bio-natural human animal, you become more of a machine, a static, dead, techno dependent pseudo-being. Look at the new fad of alleged "augmented reality". It's not augmented, its an unreality imposed over the real reality, and it's more escapism to try to escape the real reality in favor of an unreality.
Those who are infatuated with the idea of immortality and bypass the law of death that is part of life, get sucked into these degenerating/devolving transhumanism mindsets because it will make them "gods" in their eyes and be "immortal" yet fail to recognize what this does to LIFE and consciousness. It is the end of humanity, not the evolution of humanity. Go study what immorality does to a consciousness. Life having an end provides meaning and purpose. Immorality is not a good thing for consciousness beings.
Take care. Peace.
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Best answer I have seen till now! Trans-humanism come from the "Eugenesia"(don't know the name in English) theory who was created by the cousin from Darwin and got his max point with Hitler and the nazis. Not good at all
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Eugenics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Or Euthanasia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia
By definition Transhumanism is the polar opposite of both. Since the focus is to increase the longevity and quality of life for everyone regardless of the circumstances of your breeding.
But to know that, you would need to read and understand instead of taking the fear based dialog of others at face value.
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@williambanks Eugenics thanks for that and for the links in English, better that in Spanish. I would love to write in Spanisch so you would see i have read and understood a lot about this and other things in my 38 years but sadly u will dont understand and it is not possible for me to write properly in English because i live in Germany and the German language took away a lot of my English knowledge (im form cuba so my mother language is spanish), so i can only say, please think whatever u want i can not change that and dont want to, it is your opinion and im fine with that. It will not change what i know or not ;) And this "increase the longevity and quality of life for everyone" im pretty sure will be not for everyone. You only need to see how the world is now to realize that. At least Im.
@dana-edwards please read carefully, i said "by the cousin from Darwin" ( Francis Galton), not Darwin and he use the name Eugenics for the first time. Read the link tha @williambanks put about Eugenics.
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Herbert Spencer not Darwin. And social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwin and is more associated with Ragnar Redbeard.
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I find it hilarious when I read comments such as yours, literally this is the "luddite" perspective.
That somehow a "God" who gave us the ability to overcome natural selection by taking direct charge of our evolution, would for some reason NOT want us to explore it. And for what reason? Because knowledge is power and only God's elite and select few will have knowledge given to them from on high by a God who supposedly loves all of his children equally.
I don't buy it. You defer to the words of a preacher, and you are just giving that person your power. You do it because thinking for yourself is too hard and it's frightening to question everything you've been taught. In other words you would rather someone else take charge of thinking for you.
You miss the simple fact that you are allowing yourself to be manipulated by the very power structure you fear.
As long as knowledge is confined to only a handful of selected elites, then that handful can control the many.
Death is not a law. Death is the result of a disease process that begins at conception. There are plenty of organisms that have huge lifespans that make humanity look like mayflys by comparison.
The rest of your arguments are invalid if you own a computer, cell phone or otherwise participate in a modern society.
You feel fear and you are afraid. This is because you refuse to ask the hard questions and instead appeal to a God who by all logic and reason is not listening to ANY OF US for whatever reason.
If God wants to stop a thing he will. If he wants to tell me something, he has my cell phone number.
Otherwise, appealing to deity is just the point at which you have decided to stop asking questions, meaning that you view thinking for yourself as being something too hard for you to do anymore.
If you feel like there is a some government conspiracy and a "medical establishment" at all. I heartily invite you to disavail yourself of modern society. There are plenty of organizations you can join which feel as you do. They choose to live a simple life in service to a deity who could appear to care less, or who likes to test their faith in cruel ways.
Otherwise stop trying to spread fear because someone else is afraid and it scares you. Look at what causes death, realize that death is nothing more than a disease and if the eternal creator of the universe wants your soul for his collection, there isn't a damned thing any of us can do about it. May as well make the best of the time we do have and that includes inventing stuff that maximizes our quality of life.
Personally?
If some deity wants my soul, by definition there is nothing I can do to stop him.
Because of that, no bronze age fairy tale is going to make me anymore or less afraid what happens if/when the curtain on my story draws for the final time. No use being frightened of something I can't do anything about and if I can do something about it, then he is no deity.
My perspective is that I believe we're at a watershed moment where we discover that we are the last generation to die and the first to live forever.
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Lot's of irrational assumptions on your part. Example? You keep bringing up God when I don't even mention it. God doesn't exist. Keep projecting your nonsense to attempt to validate transhumanism.
Projection: "You defer to the words of a preacher, and you are just giving that person your power. You do it because thinking for yourself is too hard and it's frightening to question everything you've been taught. In other words you would rather someone else take charge of thinking for you."
Projection: "Otherwise stop trying to spread fear because someone else is afraid and it scares you."
You're the one that is afraid of being human, and want to be something else.
You want to go beyond being human, and pervert yourself. Get it yet? You don't want to be human, you want to be something else. THAT is the fear.
You're the one that's lost and can't think because you want transhumanism to be so great and believe it to be so.
Developing technology and keeping it outside of biological augmentation when it is not required (did you lose a leg, no? Then leave your leg alone) is not the same as transhumanism (not happy that you can't run as fast as someone else? Get a robo-leg!).
Learn the meaning of the word and educate yourself out of your own inability to see corrupted modalities of being for what they are.
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the guy is a troll. in other videos he claims to be the original founder of the illuminati and that he time-travelled.
I agree that transhumanism could be good though, as an atheist hoping to live forever I'm generally in favour . Those who don't like it can remain flesh and die naturally.
more concerning would be transhumanists "illuminati" who wish to be gods on earth with superpowers and subjugate everyone else. that is the dystopian scenario.
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@simoneighties I agree about the subjugation aspects. But you have to keep in mind that people making claims like that are just really, seriously, mentally ill. They aren't very likely to make it to the next stage and if they do, they will be lacking the critical thinking skills to make the leap successfully.
Consider that once you accept that you are "information that thinks", running on a biological substrate.
Once you remove the substrate, the only immune system you have left are strong critical thinking skills.
I equate this with human will and a desire to learn rather than accept things at face value even when those things are coming from your own senses or the senses of others.
Unfortunately in the case of this guy...
It takes a certain degree of insanity to believe in conspiracies in general.
Especially when the world keeps proving time and time again that the only way 2 people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
What's really going on under the surface is that the human brain is fantastic at recognizing patterns, even when they aren't there. It's a matter of selection bias and confirmation bias . But it's hard to face the fact that you spent a lot of energy chasing unicorns. To make matters worse, when the unicorn is confirming your worst fears it just builds into a negative feedback loop.
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deep thoughts. very deep
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I cannot imagine anything more horrible.
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@richardcrill You lack imagination...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methods_of_torture
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What could be more tortuous then being trapped in a machine forever? I actually had nightmares about that as a child!
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I am already the best nano tech there is or could ever be. Its already possible through extreme meditation training to do the things that science will take a long time to achieve. My body/being is the ultimate form of technology. We just don't know how to use it to its utmost. If one looks into the stories surrounding Mahavatar Babiji one can see that he achieved immortality and could change his form at will and all other manner of miraculous things: http://ombabaji.org.uk/downloads/teachingsofbabaji.pdf
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@onesunbeingnow Yeah there are a lot of myths about humans achieving these kinds of skills in antiquity. When one of them steps forward and has the correct ratios of c12/c14 in their biological tissues then we should listen to them. Otherwise it's just more mythology.
http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=67749
Also the point of the transhumanist message is that you are not the best there ever was or could be. If you go around people with ebola do you get sick? If you jump off a building do you die? Can you share your thoughts and memories as easily as sharing pics on instragram? Not then you aren't there yet.
One day you can probably be this, but you have to be careful, because often we find that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
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