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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Transhumanism in the real world
Rugby players who get a bottle opener to replace a missing tooth.
That's no more transhumanism than this.
False! It's adding functionality rather than just a cosmetic change.
Cosmetic changes can be highly functional. Ask any girl :-)
On a slightly more serious note, I tend to think of tranhumanist modifications as ones which confer abilities that unenhanced humans do not have. Opening beer bottles isn't one of them.
Having been in a group of drunk people who found that they had no bottle opener, and having seen what bizarre ideas they concoct to get the bottles open, I'd say a bottle opener in one's tooth merits the status of transhumanist modification.
There was a saying in my youth: "There is no item that is not a beer opener." There was a bit of a competition for creative moves (drinking beer was considered a high status adult move for teenagers, opening them in creative ways even more). Keys. Lighters. Doors, the part where the "tongue" goes in on the frame, not sure the English term. Edges of tables or edges of anything. Using two bottles, locking the caps to each other and pulling apart. I still consider it the coolest manly way to open a beer when you sit at a fairly invulnerable e.g. stone table to just put the cap against the edge and hit it. Another 101 ways.
Strike plate?
You can open a beer bottle with your natural teeth easily enough.
These people lacked in knowledge, not in tools :-P
However, you can damage a tooth by using it to open bottles.
Would you consider a Wikipedia brain implant to be a transhumanist modification? After all, ordinary humans can query Wikipedia too!
That's a weird way of putting it. Would I consider an implant which consists of a large chunk of memory with some processing and an efficient neural interface to be transhumanist? Yes, of course. It will give a lot of useful abilities and just filling it with Wikipedia looks like a waste of potential.
I don't think trivializing transhumanism to minor cosmetics is a useful approach. Artificial nails make better screwdrivers than natural nails, so is that also a transhumanist modification?
But nigh-effortless verbatim memorization is, so if you carry around a pen and a pad of paper...
"nigh-effortless"
"a pen and a pad of paper"
Ahem.
Well, you know what they say about "one man's modus ponens".
Here is your first transhumanist then, from pre-Columbian Maya...
I think the attitude toward the modifications is a relevant factor as well - wanting to be "more than human" in some respect, even if only a trivial respect such as "more awesome-looking than a regular human" or "more able to open beer bottles than a regular human" - but given that, yeah I'd be totally on board with considering some pre-Columbian Maya or other stone-age person "the first transhumanist".
I see a smooth transition into tool-using, then. Picking up a stick certainly gives you more capabilities compared to a stick-less hominid, and probably makes you much more awesome as well.
NancyLebovitz didn't imply the rugby player was showing signs of ideological transhumanism - only that they're doing something transhumanist. Transhumanists don't have the monopoly on self modification. It's the same sense that Christians refer to kind acts as Christian and bad acts as un-Christian.
Transhumanists would claim the first intentional use of fire and writing and all that as transhuman-ish things. (And yes, I would consider self decoration to be a transhumanish thing too. Step into the paleolithic - what's the very first thing you notice which is different about the humans? They have clothes and strings and beads and tattoos, which turn out to have pretty complex social functions. Adam and Eve and all that, it's literally the stuff of myth.)
So, using tools. Traditionally, tool-using is said to be be what distinguishes humans from apes. That makes it just human, not transhuman.
Yes, I bite that bullet: I think "you aught to use tools to do things better" counts as foundational principle of transhuman ideology. It's supposed to be fundamentally about being human.
Well, me might just be having a terminology difference.
My understanding of "transhuman" involves being more than just human. Picking up a tool, even a sophisticated tool, doesn't qualify. And "more" implies that you standard garden-variety human doesn't qualify either.
I'm not claiming there is an easily discernible bright line, but just as contact lenses don't make you a cyborg, a weirdly shaped metal tooth does not make you a transhuman.
But that's because everyone uses glasses, as a matter of course - it's the status quo now. The person who thought "well, and why should we have to walk around squinting all the time when we can just wear these weird contraption on our heads", at a time when people might look at you funny having wearing glass on your face, I think that's pretty transhuman. As is the guy who said "Let's take it further, and put the refractive material directly on our eyeball" back when people would have looked at you real funny if you suggested they put plastic in their eyes are you crazy that sounds so uncomfortable.
Now of course, it's easy to look at these things and say "meh".
Edit: If you look at the history of contact lenses, though, what actually happened is less people saying "let's improve" and more people saying "I wonder how the eye works" and doing weird experiments that probably seemed pointless at the time. Something of a case study against the "basic research isn't useful" argument, I think, not that there are many who espouse that here.