Here, I'll drop some meandering diatribe and see if anyone gives a damn.
The work I do in AI primarily teaches me about myself and other large brained organisms. Much of what I've learned is that humans aren't special. Intelligence emerges naturally from any sufficiently complex interaction. The more complexity, the more intelligence is possible.
Most of the transhumanists I've met or read seem rather presumptuous and chauvinistic. I don't believe humans are all that special. For instance: We can grow rat brain cells on a computer chip [youtube.com] -- It exhibits some life-like properties, but no more so than were human brain cells or a digital neural network used instead. This experiment is just a short cut: A neural network for cheap. However, it's far from optimal since the organic brain on a chip dies, and all the training is lost -- an AI doesn't have these problems... The take away is that a neural network is a neural network -- The complexity of the neural network defines its level of awareness. It's the "human" part of "transhumanism" I take offense to, seems rather racist to me.
To speak in terms of transforming the human condition is to place too much emphasis on our own race's importance. How can we evolve to be greater than humans if humans are most important? To me: Humans are simply the organisms with minds having the most complexity at this time on this planet. The evolution of the mind is not something unique to humans; It's a process that all life has been contributing to -- Even indirectly through competition.
A sufficiently large mass -- or network -- of rat brain cells could surpass the complexity of a Human mind quite easily. Would we then be speaking of transverminists? I prefer Transorganic, Posthuman, or my official title that covers all systems with input feedback loops: Cyberneticist. Protip: AI, businesses, and brains are all cybernetic systems by definition.
What we're all taking part in is really the Rise of Inorganic Life.
Augmenting organic entities with non living parts is a step in the process, but at some point the organic components aren't required at all, and we've given life to the non living. The foundation of life is genetic code: RNA / DNA. Life as we know it occurred after the living genetic code took up residence in the non-living lipids to form the first cells. So, there you have it: Life has always been augmenting itself by incorporating non-living technology. The transhumanist seems just a little late to the game, if you ask me.
Life used to just produce chemicals to digest nutrients externally, but complex life does this internally via eating. My point is that the food is a part of the organism -- can't live without it, eh? The line between one organism and the next is the abstraction layer of eating, but in the end it's all one eco-system that is alive. Each organism is simply a complex chemical reaction, chemical reactions are interactions of electrons between atoms. Another form of life could exist that still operates by way of complex electron interactions; It could even draw nutrients directly from the Sun instead of having to "eat" other lifeforms. Even plants eat dead things with their roots & leaves, but an inorganic life-form could be self sustaining -- a complete ecosystem in of itself. Such an entity could drift through space and extract all the energy and raw materials needed to sustain itself from nebulae.
Cybernetic implants are merely another next step in evolution. Nature is simply doing what it always does, produce a smarter, more durable, more pervasive life form. Just as life originated in the sea and became more durable to live on land, then the air; Life is now evolving to live in space... Note: All stars consume their habitable zone (the zone where chemical complexity is possible) when they go red-dwarf or nova. Therefore, the path from sea to space is natural, not radical. An important goal post in evolution on a Universal scale must be to produce space-faring life. No other end result really matters because life is doomed to become extinct otherwise.
Ultimately, our organic parts are too fragile to survive unaided in space. In the very short period between cyborgs and electro-mechanical life we will augment our bodies with cybernetics to make us more durable and give us back functions we've lost. However, before artificial cybernetic systems have reached the complexity level capable of hosting a human mind intact, they will necessarily be capable of sentience themselves. What reason would machine intelligences have to incorporate an organic component when a superior mechanical component will suffice?
That said, I believe the technology to interface organics and mechanics is inevitable, as this is what having tools means. To me, we draw the distinction between tool and body part somewhat arbitrarily. Are lipids tools for DNA to survive cosmic rays and caustic chemicals? Is food a part of us, or a tool for living? Is blood then also a tool for living? At what point do we become what we eat? Isn't everyone wearing clothes already a cyborg?
Much in the way that clothes are our portable shelter technology, we take all external technology and slowly incorporate it into our "selves".
Tables -> Carts -> Carriages -> Wheel Chairs -> Motorized Scooters
Walking Sticks -> Crutches -> Splints & Braces -> Prosthesis -> Artificial Limbs
TENS units -> Defibrillators -> Pace Makers -> Artificial Hearts
Ear Trumpets -> Microphones & Speakers -> Hearing Aides -> Cochlear implants
Magnifying Lenses -> Glasses -> Cameras -> Contacts -> Artificial Eyes
The process will continue, there is no doubt. The only question is whether we will allow the machines to gain sentience, join with them, or forever keep them our slaves -- These are not mutually exclusive, but history shows us what slavery brings. Because it takes far more energy to sustain our fragile bodies in space than it would to have non-organic systems I think it's inevitable that we'll merge with machines if we are to survive as a species and avoid extinction.
What's the difference between a Human, a Cyborg, and an Android? The same difference between a Dark skinned or Light skinned human, eh? These are all people in my book.
One big hurdle to equal rights for all is that the terms "person" and "sentience" are misnomers. Any sufficiently complex interaction is sentient. We should recognize a person not as a human, but as any sentient being. We should fight for "personal rights", not "human rights". People should be fair and ethical, not "humane".
Philosophy's search for what consciousness is made of is also misguided. The answer is evident to any biologist / cyberneticist: The "mind" is made of pulsing electrical fields -- We can measure them, watch them have eddy current effects on other neurons, coaxing more EM patterns into existence -- We can even recognize patterns of certain kinds of thoughts.
There is no hard line that a mind must cross to become sentient. Instead there is a gradient whereby awareness is directly proportional to the complexity of the system: To gauge awareness In brains we use neuron counts, in computers we use transistor counts... A single nerve cell is equivalent in complexity to some configuration of silicon. What the neurons is made of doesn't matter: Get enough neurons and synapses energized and you've got some level of thought going on, regardless of the medium.
There is no hard line defining how complex a mind must be to be aware. A chimp or dog or fruit-fly is self aware, it's just that we define "awareness" and "self" differently than they would if they could. Some Jellyfish with only 4-8 neurons actually hunt fish. My hand is aware of a paper-cut before my brain is. Cut the finger of one hand in this mass of hands and the "pain" sensation will ripple though the entity via nerves. Did not the thought of pain originate in my hand? You could perceive the thoughts of entities in the cascading ripples of electron movement. Our own minds have waves of activity, similar to how a CPU pulses to perform each instruction via cascade and change its overall electron configuration.
Just because a mind doesn't think the same way we do or with as much power, we give ourselves license to treat them as "sub-humans" -- I sure hope that when Cyborg-hive minds or machine intelligences become smarter than humans they don't treat humans the way humans treat monkeys.
Religion and "ethics" will prevent humans from reaching the most necessary step of melding the mind and machines during gestation. This is needed to provide transhumans technology such as telepathy (transmit thoughts via WIFI), unlimited memory via artificial hippocampus, uploading minds into computers, etc. (un)Fortunately we will use other species to advance the cyborg fields instead -- brain cells are brain cells; Ours aren't so special that some other species' brain cells can't be used. However, we don't currently have the genetic technology to design custom brains precisely engineered to grow into having a natural organic machine interface. Machine intelligence will likely achieve independent sentience before then -- We have the CPU power to surpass a single human already if we were to run a distributed AI on every computing device on Earth at once; If only all the devices were connected to some kind of an information exchange network... Like the Internet.
Training an organic / mechanical architecture would have to be done on a case by case basis without the benefit of fully genetically programmable minds via "instincts" alone. Thus, a society of neurologically compatible organic/machine minded beings is unlikely -- Each would think just differently enough to prevent exact brain to brain duplication and require far too much training to reach the same level of a long lived "adult". Furthermore, cell reproduction is imperfect. All organic life is prone to cancer and other cascading failures due to entropic forces (collectively called aging). Since conveying wisdom and experience requires compatible minds and greatly increased lifespans would be more beneficial (save more energy) than each generation re-learning everything from scratch, it makes sense that a more modular inorganic cybernetic sentient life form will evolve to be the dominant life capable of surviving in interstellar space. By demanding more from our computers we're providing the selection pressure driving this guided evolution.
I personally don't think I'll ever be able to upload my mind into a computer and live forever -- It would cost a lot to buy the storage space, CPU cycles and associated energy from the mechanical intelligences in charge of such domain, and the end result wouldn't really be "me". I take comfort in the fact that we're well past transhumanism already: My self does not end at my skin -- I can sense and affect things far beyond it. To type these words I merely think them; It's true my hands are typing when I do so, but this is merely a protocol of thought storage & exchange. We are actually of one temporally offset mind at some level while you read this.
If you are reading this sentence then I am directly placing into you an idea formed within me. I have just controlled your mind by causing you to copy this precise mental construct into yourself -- Part of my mind's patterns now reside within you. Others outside my mind can accept or reject or modify my ideas. They can create their own ideas and I can duplicate all of these back into myself as they evolve. These ideas go back out into the world and have lives of their own. Some ideas lay dormant in literature or other media like viruses awaiting the right environment to infect new hosts. Some of my ideas take the form of machine code and self organizing machine intelligences. Some intangible mental constructs rule the country (laws) while others rule the world (corporations). Re-watch The Matrix and Terminator movies -- They're allegory for modern civilization being ruled by Intangible Thought Machines. We've already been conquered. The amoral non-human machines are already in control.
We are already parts of a huge meta organism with sentient nodes that compete for survival. This is the model I follow when developing my machine intelligences. A self aware hive-mind is more beneficial than a collection of self aware individuals.
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