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drethelin comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.