You only live once: a reframing of working towards posthumanity

John_Maxwell

Let's say you recently purchased a new computer game. Reviewers like the game, but they say that the game itself pales in comparison to a massive, difficult-to-access secret area near the end. Bizarrely, this secret area contains over 90% of the content in the game. It's also rumored to be a lot better designed.

If you're like most gamers, you'll probably play through the game normally a few times, and go for the secret area on your second or third try. But what if the game was real life, and you died as soon as your first try ended?

Edit for clarifying points:

Posthumanity is definitely an area within the game. It's not prohibited by the laws of physics. The relevant questions are how difficult it would be to achieve and whether it would be enough fun to be worth the effort.
The reframing is meant to deal with the issue that humans tend to be bad at thinking about unprecedented events (black swans).
But the reframing is not perfect. For example, it ignores the fact that posthumanity may be achieved without your help. It also ignores the fact that by achieving posthumanity, you are helping more people than just yourself.
If no effective plan for achieving posthumanity exists, you'll have to think of one one in order to access the proverbial secret area. This isn't about any specific plan.

Edit for clarifying points:

Posthumanity is definitely an area within the game. It's not prohibited by the laws of physics. The relevant questions are how difficult it would be to achieve and whether it would be enough fun to be worth the effort.
The reframing is meant to deal with the issue that humans tend to be bad at thinking about unprecedented events (black swans).
But the reframing is not perfect. For example, it ignores the fact that posthumanity may be achieved without your help. It also ignores the fact that by achieving posthumanity, you are helping more people than just yourself.
If no effective plan for achieving posthumanity exists, you'll have to think of one one in order to access the proverbial secret area. This isn't about any specific plan.

Well it is certainly a secret area present within the game. Immortality, space travel, etc. are not prohibited by the laws of physics. And saying that getting from here to there within the next 40 years is actually impossible (as opposed to very difficult) sounds pretty loony to me.

Some players have been paying a premium monthly subscription for years in a hope to get the expensive future upgrades promising priority access to the area when and if it is out of beta.

This is an argument for working towards posthumanity in general, not giving money to specific groups working towards posthumanity. The argument is supposed to work even if no such groups exist. (If you don't know of any good groups working towards posthumanity, that's pretty much the same scenario.)

The idea is to reframe working towards posthumanity as an expected value calculation, since it's hard for our brains to think well about totally unprecedented outcomes (i.e. black swans).

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You only live once: a reframing of working towards posthumanity

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You only live once: a reframing of working towards posthumanity

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