Ideally, I am still a transhumanist and an immortalist. But in practice, I have abandoned those noble ideals, and pragmatically only continue to be an EA.
Ok, so some of the things that you value are hard to work towards, but as you say, working towards those things is still worth your while. When I’ve been in similar situations, pretending to be a new homunculus has helped, and I’m sure that you’ve figured out other brilliant coping strategies on your own.
I see that you’ve become less interested in transhumanism, though, and your post doesn’t give me a solid feel for why this is, so I’m somewhat curious. Did you shift your focus towards EA and away from transhumanism for utilitarian/cost-benefit reasons? Did you just look back one day and realize that your values had changed? Something else? I’m curious about this partly because there’s a part of me that doesn’t want my current values to change, and partly because I’m sad that transhumanism no longer interests you as it did. Thanks!
He says at the end he’s still a transhumanist. I think the point was that, in practice, it seemed difficult to work directly towards transhumanism/immortalism (and perhaps less likely that such a thing will be achieved in our lifetimes, although I’m less sure about that)
(Diego, curious if my model of you is accurate here)
I am particularly skeptical of transhumanism when it is described as changing the human condition, and the human condition is considered to be the mental condition of humans as seen from the human’s point of view.
We can make the rainbow, but we can’t do physics yet. We can glimpse at where minds can go, but we have no idea how to precisely engineer them to get there.
We also know that happiness seems tighly connected to this area called the NAcc of the brain, but evolution doesn’t want you to hack happiness, so it put the damn NAcc right in the medial slightly frontal area of the brain, deep inside, where fMRI is really bad, where you can’t insert electrodes correctly. Also, evolution made sure that each person’s NAcc develops epigenetically into different target areas, making it very, very hard to tamper with it to make you smile. And boy, do I want to make you smile.
Ok, so some of the things that you value are hard to work towards, but as you say, working towards those things is still worth your while. When I’ve been in similar situations, pretending to be a new homunculus has helped, and I’m sure that you’ve figured out other brilliant coping strategies on your own.
I see that you’ve become less interested in transhumanism, though, and your post doesn’t give me a solid feel for why this is, so I’m somewhat curious. Did you shift your focus towards EA and away from transhumanism for utilitarian/cost-benefit reasons? Did you just look back one day and realize that your values had changed? Something else? I’m curious about this partly because there’s a part of me that doesn’t want my current values to change, and partly because I’m sad that transhumanism no longer interests you as it did. Thanks!
He says at the end he’s still a transhumanist. I think the point was that, in practice, it seemed difficult to work directly towards transhumanism/immortalism (and perhaps less likely that such a thing will be achieved in our lifetimes, although I’m less sure about that)
(Diego, curious if my model of you is accurate here)
I am particularly skeptical of transhumanism when it is described as changing the human condition, and the human condition is considered to be the mental condition of humans as seen from the human’s point of view.
We can make the rainbow, but we can’t do physics yet. We can glimpse at where minds can go, but we have no idea how to precisely engineer them to get there.
We also know that happiness seems tighly connected to this area called the NAcc of the brain, but evolution doesn’t want you to hack happiness, so it put the damn NAcc right in the medial slightly frontal area of the brain, deep inside, where fMRI is really bad, where you can’t insert electrodes correctly. Also, evolution made sure that each person’s NAcc develops epigenetically into different target areas, making it very, very hard to tamper with it to make you smile. And boy, do I want to make you smile.