• The Transhumanism and The Digital Tantalus

    From Raskolynikov@21:1/5 to All on Wed Oct 11 14:40:14 2023
    One might crave naturally to live forever, as death is a painful act and if you ask psychiatrists, they will say that thinking and speaking about this
    natural end of things is "morbid". This by no means that they or their
    patients become immortal by the psychiatry or their mind drugs. On the contrary, average schizophrenic lives 10 to 20 years shorter than the
    control group in the same living conditions.

    Life isn't such a wonderful thing, not in this mortal and corruptible body: whatever choicest delicacies and most expensive foods and drinks you
    put into your mouth, the output is always reduced to poo, pee, blood,
    sweat and tears. Rather pathetic - and this is equal to the starving
    in Africa and supermodels on catwalks, no matter how many perfumes
    and makeup they use to hide that natural fact from the environment
    and the consumer of the "Instagram artificial reality".

    If you are a rich oligarch or a statesman, you might produce more
    expensive poo, but it is still poo and no good for anything than
    sewer or a fertiliser plant if you live in a smart city. But most of us do not.

    The problem becomes worse if we are infants or the elderly or the terminally ill: somebody will have to wipe off our poo and pee, or we will suffer infections,
    decubitus and gangrene. This will eventually kill us, just as the hip joint break
    or the lung disease coming from the long lying in a position where the lungs are not ventilated properly. But I am not a licensed physician, I just came across where people were terminally ill and dying, beyond the help of
    human medicine and science.

    And this is the reality.

    It is not morbid. Eternal life in this world would eventually mean losing
    all hair and all teeth, no matter how much we take care of both.
    Many things we see attractive would mean our spiritual death, stop
    of existence of us as we know us. This is sometimes worse than the
    physical death. And life is constant fight against all of these negative
    and destructive inclinations.

    I like to say that there are 360 ways to fall down, but only one direction
    to stay upright. The vertical one.

    Even worse it comes when they tell us that we should digitalise our
    minds and live in a computer that would eventually be perpetuated
    until forever. Not only that this is not forever - it ends in the Big Crunch
    of the Universe, or thermal death of our beloved star Sol.

    But what would come much sooner is the condition with no satisfying
    our five senses (eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch) and seven inclinations
    (envy, arrogance, greed, anger, lust, eating and drinking, laziness).
    What would the mind do without the senses? It would probably not
    come to greater scientific truths, but suffer an existential vacuum.
    What is now depression, psychiatrists recommended that we cure
    with shopping, medications or walking in nature.

    Needless to say, for a mind trapped in a digital computer nothing of
    that is available. It will suck up in itself and without the receptors
    for pain it would invent new ways of suffering and misery.

    This is what I called "The Digital Tantalus".

    Tantalus baked his own son Pelop to test gods of Olymp whether
    they would really be omniscient and recognise they are eating
    human flesh. Demetria recognised as soon as it touched her lips.
    But it was such a defilement and insult to gods that it required
    divine retribution. Gods realised they should never mingle with
    the common mortals - and we don't see much of them ever since.
    People would offer them man flesh, stone them or crucify them
    just because they are [sons and daughters of] gods.

    So, Tantalus was placed in Tartarus, and he saw beautiful fruit trees
    and plenty of water to drink. He was very hungry and very thirsty,
    but when he reached for a fruit, it would escape his grasp, and so
    did the water, ever-increasing his thirst and hunger.

    This would be the condition of a digital mind with cravings for the
    physical objects of the five senses, but no means to satisfy them.
    Today we have microphones, tactile sensors and cameras.
    But we have nothing that could watch straight into the Sun like
    a guru and later watch a million times less bright moonlit scenery.

    We have nothing that could hear a whisper and then an airplane
    passing at 100 decibels. The difference is again a million or more times.
    10 decibels more means ten times stronger, not 10 per cent stronger.

    With touch, we know that a bodybuilder can lift 150 kg, and then gently
    touch a baby or a butterfly without hurting them or crushing them.
    We do not have such androids.

    But the worst thing is to think that the replacement of brain with
    a computer and body parts with artificial prosthetic would make us
    stronger like Ripley was in Alien 2 against the aliens.

    First, computers are hackable. If we would like an interface to the
    world instead of being blind and deaf to the environment, those
    sensors would be hackable too, in a way we cannot imagine, but
    hackers can.

    Having a hacked computer brain and core wars inside one's head
    isn't quite a sense of peace either.

    Eventually, we would lose the ability to procreate with the human race.
    We might even marry as intelligent or financially prosperous, but
    females would instinctively seek someone with brute force and
    raw genes instead to conceive with.

    But there are other forces at work, or man of today by the current
    woman selection would be very tall, and with manhood of a donkey
    or horse, but not with a very significant brain.

    We have such species, but we castrated them to pull wagons and
    do the ploughing for us before we invented tractors. Obviously,
    the evolutionary success of homo sapiens is not in what women
    want from man today (three sixes: six feet tall, six inches in bed and
    six figures salary). Or we would never transcend apes.

    I am not certain that even chimpanzees select males by the biggest
    male organ, but by some other characteristics, like the status of
    an alpha male or even some characteristics of a beta male.

    But the result in the human race is that the only guy who got seventy
    virgins is a porn actor whose company could offer what was required
    for those verified virgins to comply.

    This means that sixty-nine guys will be without a girlfriend or wife,
    or with second-hand goods. For their lifetime.

    I think the human race has a serious problem, it is in a major decline,
    and I don't really plan to leave offspring here, or tend to the illegitimate offspring of the guys with three sixes.

    Traditional values and the patriarchal system provided greater
    warranties for the survival of all others (without the three sixes),
    by the means of family and religion and the Ten Commandments,
    unlike sexual freedoms, reproductive rights and gender ideology.

    Even the transhumanistic bodies when perfected, would
    not all be produced equal - the poor would receive the ones made
    out of cheap, affordable components, while the reach really lasting
    ones, the design for the eternal life.

    Embracing mortality might be a difficult process, but there
    is the salvation of the soul and the hope of the resurrection of the
    physical body for those found worthy. Maybe the reincarnation for
    the rest, rather than throwing them into the pit or Hell.

    In the end, the absence of suffering in the digital mind would also
    means the absence of evolution. As the pain is our best teacher.
    Those minds would only calculate but never learn much from errors.
    Without being able to be hurt, digital minds in the digital bodies
    would become more and more reckless like the youth drivers,
    out of mere wanton spite.

    Eventually, something non-digital and material would break,
    causing digital minds and transhumanistic bodies to maybe not die,
    but to cease to function.

    in the LORD
    Amen

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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