While i doubt it’ll get me banned anywhere, it does get me very weird looks if i bring it up in meat space, so I’ll bring it up here instead!
As a product of totally random processes selecting for absolutely nothing in particular humans are pretty cool, but from any kind of intelligent perspective we are a failure. Our teeth don’t fit, our backs don’t work right, we have organs with no other purpose than to kill us. God or evolution, which ever, has put in an absolutely minimum wage effort into our bodies and i think we should strive to do better, to be better. I understand being against current possibilities (I’m not getting magnets in my hands or the musk brain chip), but to be against transhumanism in general is completely insane.
Do you actually get that strong of reactions brining this topic up? I have conversations about this sort of thing kinda often.
I don’t disagree in general, but I do want to point out that, although parts of the evolutionary process are random, the selection is not (though it is a greedy process). There is a specific objective: the ability to survive as a species. Humans are very successful in performing this task, even outside their original environment. And I would argue the the main reason is their intelligence (the meaning of ‘intelligence’ is a different topic entirely, mind).
But yeah, evolution is a slooow process. Organisms are basically living on the dev branch and have to deal with bugs and weird legacy functions that seem to do nothing but cause problems when removed. On the other hand, if creationism is right, then Jesus christ the development period should have been longer than 7 days.
Anyway, about transhumanism itself. There is a mountain of literature about it and I’m not sure I have much to add personally. The main argument I have against it is: evolution has given the human body millions of years to improve and go through testing. It may not be the best, but it normally works (in the statistical sense). My main argument for it is that successful natural selection isn’t guaranteed get you anything more species-wide survival. It’s natural to want more than that.
So, improving the body? Sure. Want to phase out the appendix? Be my guest. But when you start messing with the brain, some things get weird. The sort of things that technological advancement can’t hand-wave away. Identity, action attribution, thought influence, etc. Since cognition enhancement is a fundamental part of transhumanism, I can’t embrace it wholeheartedly.
And in general, the human body makes the LHC look like a toy in terms of complexity. We need a measured approach when trying to modify it.