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Category Archives: Transhumanism

Deep Quandaries of Metaphysics

Some questions can be asked in a single sentence, yet despite (or perhaps with the aid of) their brevity, they probe the deepest passages of meaning and the darkest abyssals of mystery. For example, “Will super glue stick to teflon?”

Last night, while drinking down beverages flavored with improbable syrups, Joshua and I came up with another: “What happens when an alien facehugger attaches to a zombie?”

I hope everyone appreciates the profundity of these conundra.

And just think, without the Internet, you probably would never have heard of them. Makes you wonder what else you’ve been missing all these years.

Most Christians happily disavow Baal and the Flying Spaghetti Monster without reference to monographs of Baalian exegesis or Pastafarian theology.

— Richard Dawkins

For the record, I think Predator vs. Alien vs. Night of the Living Dead came up when we were talking about Kaavya Viswanathan. “If they had hired me to write an inspiring book for teenage girls about a young woman who goes to Harvard,” I said, “I would have had her meet the admissions interviewer in chapter 1. The interviewer says she’s got good grades, but she needs more extracurricular activities. So, in chapter 2 — fast forward through the clubs and the senior prom — she gets into Harvard and her parents drive her to Cambridge in their Range Rover. Then, in chapter 3, she gets bitten by a vampire, and the biotech lab in Roxbury explodes, releasing a zombie-making virus all over Boston. So, young Emerald and her friends have to use her growing vampire powers to fight the legions of undead moaning their way up Massachusetts Avenue. . . and that’s why they don’t hire me to write inspiring books for teenagers.”

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More Cyberbrain Fun

One thing which I find missing in physics is the eclectic mix of observations known as “case studies.” Really, those medical types don’t know how lucky they are when stories like an 84-year-old woman who believes she’s receiving e-mails in her brain sound like old hat.
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Seriously, Now

Dear Internet:

There was a fourth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? It came out a month ago? And I never heard?

Seriously, Internet, you’re letting me down.

Oh. They never mentioned it on ScienceBlogs — that would explain a few things.

Not only do I feel betrayed by the Blagnet, but I also feel like I missed what could have been a deeply personal experience with resonances of happy times in my past. Back in high school, my friends all dressed up as the Turtles for Senior Ambition Day. I could have had some serious, only partially ironic enjoyment.

Curse you, perfidious Network!

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American Teens Invent Cyberbrain

According to Thomas Hobbes, in the state of nature all men have equal power. Smarts, sticks and stones allow us to compensate for our physical differences and achieve parity. His Leviathan has its flaws, but it’s nice to see the process he described at work today, and in such an important environment as our schools. Via Orac comes the reassuring news that students continue to outsmart their teachers and administrators while learning valuable life skills:

Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.

“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”

Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.

Furthermore, the administrators’ grasp of statistics and evidence-based reasoning — essential for citizens of the Enlightenment — continues at its all-time high:

Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said she does not have hard statistics on the phenomenon but said it is not unusual for schools to ban digital media players.

“I think it is becoming a national trend,” she said. “We hope that each district will have a policy in place for technology — it keeps a lot of the problems down.”

Look, NASSP, you’ve got your priorities all backwards. Learning at a tender age how to follow prompting from a concealed “wire” is invaluable training for those of America’s youth who wish to enter politics!

To people (including Orac and Rob Knop) wondering why those darn kids are so willing to put energy into cheating when they could get good grades legitimately by putting the same effort into their studies. . . well, I should say that if you’re familiar with the tools you have, then using them isn’t much effort at all. If you have to memorize a lot of random whoosywhatsits, and you know you have a machine which can remember everything, what you do with it is a pretty simple deduction. Moreover, if you have no reason to suspect that what you’re told to memorize will ever be useful to you ever again, then you definitely burden the machine with it!

It’s really a Chinese Room problem. The student doesn’t understand the material, but the combined system student + iPod does. As long as they’re never separated from their iPod ever again, it’s fine! In fact, I believe this marks the first step on our species’ road to cyberization, a procedure which will have many benefits indeed. We should take pride in our nation’s youth and their pioneering spirit!

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Russell Blackford on Human Enhancement

I’m not sure when the idea of “human enhancement” first bubbled up in my brain. It seems to be one of those possibilities which I just grew up with, thanks to a childhood lost in books. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote,

There must be ways of putting nucleic acids together that will function far better — by any criterion we choose — than any human being who has ever lived. Fortunately, we do not yet know how to assemble alternative sequences of nucleotides to make alternative kinds of human beings. In the future we may well be able to assemble nucleotides in any desired sequence, to produce whatever characteristics we think desirable — a sobering and disquieting prospect.

The video version ends with “awesome and disquieting prospect,” by the way. Sagan’s friend Isaac Asimov was a little more cheerful; while dying of AIDS, he concluded the revision of his book The Human Brain with these words:

Man would then, by his own exertions, become more than man, and what might not be accomplished thereafter? It is quite certain, I am sure, that none of us will live to see the far-distant time when this might come to pass. And yet, the mere thought that such a day might some day come, even though it will not dawn on my own vision, is a profoundly satisfying one.

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