But the image is of a state of mind being moved form one head to another.

And as soon as you say it you know its wrong. — Banno

The image is a figurative one, I think obviously so, since our minds are not directly connected. And with it interpreted so, I see nothing so obviously wrong with it.

Right now I’m touching little images on a screen with the understanding that through a very complicated process you will see similar images appear on another screen arranged in the order that I touched them and that by looking at and interpreting them through another complex process you will hopefully come to comprehend something of what is going on in my mind — how I am inclined to behave in what pattern of response to what experiences — and, hopefully still, that will instigate a process in your own mind by which eventually similar things will be going on in yours as are going on in mine as I write this — that you will become inclined to behave in a similar pattern of response to similar experiences. I.e. you will understand and agree with me.

What sort of thing is a state of mind? — Banno

states of mind can best be analyzed by their role in our functionality: what difference does being in this or that state of mind make on how we behave in response to what experiences? — Pfhorrest

They can be more or less transitory or long lasting, or different along a bunch of other dimensions too.

as if language were no more than a system of roads along which we might transfer and trade the commodities of our intellect. — Banno

One thing we might be trying to do is to convey some state of mind — Pfhorrest

There are other things we could be doing too.

What do any of you think about pragmatism as the consequences of the meaning of a sentence. — Shawn

Analyzing what we’re trying to do by saying things is the right way to analyze speech.

One thing we might be trying to do is to convey some state of mind from us to someone else, either just to show our own state of mind or to evoke a state of mind in them.

And states of mind can best be analyzed by their role in our functionality: what difference does being in this or that state of mind make on how we behave in response to what experiences?

Philosophy is the bridge between the abstract and the practical, using the abstract tools of logic and rhetoric to do the job of creating the tools with which to do the practical job of investigating both how anything really is and why anything morally should be.

The OP of that thread was mine.

The atheist's position is a negation, but it's affirmative to the extent it says "I have reviewed the facts, and there is no God," which makes his position far more difficult than the agnostic's. — Hanover

I had my own conversation with 3017 a while back where I put forward my own complete review of all the different things one might mean by “God”, and reasons to reject either (1) that such a thing exists or (2) that such a thing is rightly called “God” in a sense that can differentiate between theists and atheists:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7860/on-the-existence-of-god-by-request

Plenty of serious believers will hear a naturalistic account of the Big Bang creating the universe and the Earth forming from the sun’s planetary nebula and life emerging from chemical reactions then evolving into humans, who just die and decay when we die but who should still do good as in not hurt each other even though there’s no eternal reward or punishment in any afterlife... and ask “so where is God in all that? you don’t believe in God?”

They clearly have some vague notion of some being from which everything came and for the sake of which everything is purposed, some fuzzy answer at the end of the chains of “how?” and “why?” that prompt all of philosophy, which naturalistic accounts don’t suffice for.

An atheist doesn’t believe in whatever that’ll supposed to be. Doesn’t think an explanatory of what is or what ought to be requires some vague ultimate answer in the form of a person: the usual kinds of answers will do.

My question was what this means in the context of the debate. I know what it means in the context of soccer because that has an established scoring system. The result of the debate seems like it should be binary: the proposition is supported, or it is not. — Kenosha Kid

I guess since nothing has yet been proposed, that nonexistent proposition can’t be either supported or not, which leaves a score of 0 to 0, as initially.

what do you call them who lack belief in any superstition, supernatural, ghosts, fortune-telling or whatever fantasy you can come up with? — Christoffer

A naturalist or physicalist or something in that ballpark.

Two fighters enter the ring for this turn-based fight, one clad in white and the other in black.

The fighter in black asks who should throw the first punch, and the fighter in white volunteers.

The fighter in white asks to confirm that the fighter in black would prefer to defend against a left jab.

The fighter in black denies that he has such a preference.

The fighter in white asks what kind of attack he should throw then.

The fighter in black says “whatever man, just try to hit me with something.”

The fighter in white declares round one a draw, still yet to throw a punch.

The video is a guy from Fermilab talking about how the “mass increases with velocity” thing is only if you mean relativistic mass, and most physicists today don’t use the word “mass” in that sense, though they used to, and your paper does.

If you think that’s a critique of me then you misapprehend me. I’m all about recursion.

Yes, my point was to clarify why your video and jgill’s paper seem to conflict.

I was not raised in any religion at all, and was about 7 years of age when I first realised that people actually believed this stuff (the fundamental difference between Jesus and Superman). — Kenosha Kid

Strangely, I WAS raised in a religious family and it STILL took me by surprise some time during my growing-up when I realized that adults didn’t think of Jesus and Santa Claus the same way: stories you tell children as if they were true as a kind of game or moral lesson but not something grown-ups literally believe in.

My family gave me all kinds of religious fiction (as in, stories even the believers knew was fiction) that featured angels in modern times and prayer saving people via miracles, or events in ancient times featuring fantastic monsters defeated by righteous soldiers of God, that so far as I could tell was indistinguishable from urban or high fantasy respectively. So that probably (unintentionally on their part) helped me to categorize religious mythology in the same category as any avowedly fictional mythopoesis.

@180 Proof I’ve located the post of yours that @3017amen is quoting, since you said you couldn’t find it:

I accept such a challenge provided you posit something other than a strawman – e.g. (A) weak/negative atheism ... OR (B) strong/positive atheism ... OR (C) antitheism (my current position, having long since "outgrown" both (A & B)) ... OR (D) ??? — 180 Proof

here's one definition of Atheism, does this describe your belief accurately?

Atheism: a disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods. — 3017amen

No, but that will suffice for (A) weak/negative atheism on my list of coherent positions for me to defend. — 180 Proof

So I think 3017 has taken it that you are willing to defend atheism as thus defined, and now he is asking you to do so.

You, however, also make the great point that he has yet to actually formulate an attack on that position, so there is as yet nothing to defend from.

3017, please see my earlier comment in this thread:

The starting point of any inquiry is that everything (and its negation) might be logically possible. Then someone or another shows some reason or another why something is not possible, and so its negation is necessary. The question at hand is about whether or not atheism is logically possible, not whether it is definitely true. 180’s position is, of course, “I don’t see any reason why not”, because if he did see any reason why not then he wouldn’t hold that position. So everything really rests on 3017 offering some supposed reason why not, the merits of which can then be debated.

180 probably also has some reasons why theism isn’t possible, but that’s not the subject of this debate. — Pfhorrest

Also, can't a body with mass travel at the same speed in all frames of reference (except light speed) providing it is provided with sufficient energy to produce the momentum. — RolandTyme

A massively object can in principle be accelerated to any sublight speed as measured from any frame of reference, but observers in different frames of reference measuring the same object at the same time will measure its speed differently.

There is a difference between rest mass and relativistic mass. Physicists today usually just mean rest mass when they speak of mass, and frown on speaking of relativistic mass at all. It’s only relativistic mass that increases with relative velocity; rest mass is constant in all frames of reference

I do not think there is such a thing as approximating complete philosophical truth.

Work on philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them). (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value) — Fooloso4

Still you think it is nevertheless possible to be philosophically in error. If philosophy (the mass noun) is that kind of self-work, a philosophy (the count noun) would thus be a way of being, and a philosophical error would be a flaw in oneself. Then we’re back at the same situation with regards to progress: if one’s traits can be flaws, then either all traits are inherently flaws, or by identifying and removing flaws we approach a state of flawlessness, which flawless state of being would on such an account be identifiable with a completely correct philosophy.

Philosophy is a process, not a concatenation of true statements. — Banno

“Philosophy” the mass noun, like “lets do some philosophy”, is different from “philosophy” the count noun, like “this is my philosophy, what’s yours?” The mass noun refers to an activity or process, like you say. The count noun refers to some collection of opinions. “The one true philosophy” would be a philosophy in the count noun sense; it makes no grammatical sense to be referring to philosophy in the mass noun sense.

What more do you think there is to approximating the complete truth or making progress other than ruling out the things that are in error?

Unless you think everything is categorically in error, so finding one particular thing to be in error is no progress as everything already was.

180's opening shouldn't have been diverted by a weak opening by 3017, but should have just made out his case as if he had gone first. — Hanover

The starting point of any inquiry is that everything (and its negation) might be logically possible. Then someone or another shows some reason or another why something is not possible, and so its negation is necessary. The question at hand is about whether or not atheism is logically possible, not whether it is definitely true. 180’s position is, of course, “I don’t see any reason why not”, because if he did see any reason why not then he wouldn’t hold that position. So everything really rests on 3017 offering some supposed reason why not, the merits of which can then be debated.

180 probably also has some reasons why theism isn’t possible, but that’s not the subject of this debate.

Sure, we can’t ever be certain what the complete truth is (about anything, not just philosophy). But in judging some things to be in error and others not, we act as though there is some complete truth that we are fallibly approximating, which lies in the limit of our process of figuring out which claims are not a part of it (i.e. which claims are in error).

What do you think “the one true philosophy” means above and beyond the conjunction of all philosophical claims that are not in error?

Surely you can have only one such set of claims, since it’s the set of all such claims; and being true is being not in error; and “a philosophy” is a set of philosophical claims.

So there’s one of them, it’s true, and it’s a philosophy. How is it not thus the one true philosophy?

Some ideas are in error. — Fooloso4

And the conjunction of all the ones that are not in error is ... ?

You were replying to David's reply to me wherein I supposed that giving everyone constant peak experiences was part of the aim of the transhumanist project, which David confirmed, elaborating that "mastery of our reward circuitry" was the means to that end. So it seems clear to me that he's talking about us (humans generally) obtaining the technological means to change the way we feel about things, with the aim of changing it in a way that always feels like a peak experience at worst. Your reply to him in turn seemed concerned with the behavioral consequences of feeling like that all the time, so I was elaborating on the way that those kinds of feelings have impacted my own behavior, as an example of how letting everyone feel like that all the time doesn't have to have the behavioral consequences you fear.

The same technology could, of course, be used to different ends, that could have the consequences that you fear, but nobody here is advocating that.

... that committing atrocities or acts of kindness are identically psychologically motivated, no? — 180 Proof

Speaking from my experience with peak experiences, one absolutely can be full of bliss regardless of what's going on outside of oneself, and yet still have sensible preferences between atrocities and acts of kindness.

It occurs to me now that perhaps this relates to another topic I'm commented on before: empathy as a supposed origin of morality. I've commented in the past about how I generally don't actually feel bad about other people's suffering, but nevertheless I'm completely committed to alleviating their suffering as much as I reasonably can, not because I'm emotionally driven by the need to stop this thing that's making me feel bad, but because I've intellectually reasoned that that is the thing to do.

Writing that out now, I can hear how that sounds like some cringey "hurr I'm a smarty who thinks with my intellect not with my feelings", but I can't think of a better way to put it. I literally don't feel bad for other people, but I still decide to help them anyway. So, there's some kind of motivation to commit acts of kindness rather than atrocities besides that atrocities feel bad.

Actually, now that I write that out, I realize that even though I don't feel bad at seeing other people suffer, I would feel very bad about causing other people to suffer on purpose. But even if it wasn't the case that causing people to suffer made me feel bad, if it merely diminished the degree of otherwise constant good feeling, that would still be a motive not to do it.

The physicists are right that it's impossible to travel at or beyond the speed of light, but we can sensibly talk about what it's like to approach arbitrarily close to it.

For an illustration, let's consider a spaceship traveling to the closest other galaxy, Andromeda. It takes light over 2.5 million years to get from here to there, as observed by someone co-moving with the center of gravity of the two galaxies. But to the beam of light, zero time passes at all, and also there is zero distance between the two galaxies; the light-beam's entire existence is just the instantaneous interaction between the two galaxies.

So if this spaceship can somehow travel very close to the speed of light, to an outside observer it will take somewhere over 2.5 million years to get from one galaxy to the other, and from the perspective of those outside observers, the clocks on the spaceship will have been ticking very, very slowly, and the people on the ship will have been aging very, very slowly. Conversely, to the people on the ship, their own clocks tick at a normal speed, but clocks back on Earth or wherever are spinning out of control and whole human lifetimes pass by in a flash, children born and grown and died in seconds; and the stars seem to fly past, and they find themselves arrived at Andromeda in minutes.

Hope that clears things up some!

ETA: So yeah, if somehow you could travel at the speed of light, from your perspective the universe would instantaneously end; or, at least, your existence would instantaneously end, as all the time between now and whenever you somehow or another get destroyed would elapse instantly.

In his post about the self being contingent on material substrata? How? — javra

Oh, it looks like I somehow mixed up those two threads of conversation... I'm not sure what happened, but sorry about that. But to respond to your actual point that I mixed up with the different point: I don't see why one generation necessarily has to go away completely in order for another to "have their day in the sun" (modulo the question of how to sustain that many people at all), or how that relates to issues of selfhood. If I could quietly retire to a little cabin in the woods (or a virtual version thereof) and spend eternity learning everything there is to learn and helping to teach and guide anyone in need of it, I don't see how that would stop any new kids from having more or less the same individual childhoods, growing up, becoming their own people, having their own adventures, friendships, families, and eventually retiring to their own virtual cabins in woods or whatever suits them, just like they could if I was just dead and buried.

Here's one concrete example: Some humans have been known to lunge with knives at bystanders, such as in dark alleys, so as to gain cash that wasn't theirs. Lack of immediate punitive justice in such situations leads to bystanders being killed. In at least cases such as these, how would the punitive justice be injustice when it saves the lives of bystanders? — javra

You're talking about deterrence, which I did already admit was an (arguable) instrumental good that could come of it. I'm talking about whether it's intrinsically, not just instrumentally, good for such attackers to suffer. Say for instance it was shown that punishment did not have a significant deterrent effect, or just that other methods were more effective than deterrent punishment at preventing muggings. What if it was more effective to prevent muggings by helping the muggers solve whatever problems led them to need money so bad they'd kill for it? Wouldn't that be the better thing to do? Or would that be bad because then a "bad person" got rewarded instead of punished? I foresee that someone might say that that would encourage more muggings to get that help, but we could of course just make that help available on request, no mugging required, and easily solve that problem.

(I'm reminded of an incident several weeks ago where a homeless-looking man at a laundromat was throwing a fit and hitting one of the dryers, scaring several other customers. My girlfriend was with me and was really irritated by him, and complaining to me about him like how dare he ruin our laundromat experience like that. Meanwhile I figured he was angry that the machine ate his money and he probably didn't have any more and now had to deal with wet laundry with nowhere to take it. I wanted to just give him some change to make the situation better for everyone -- fix the guy's problem and calm him down for the sake of all the bystanders -- but the girlfriend and I split the cost of our laundry change, and she didn't didn't want to spend money on an "asshole" like him, even though we each independently have enough money to dry the poor dude's laundry tens of thousands of times over.)

I'd argue for the trying to be done with some solid foundations - or trying responsibly / with appropriate due diligence. — CountVictorClimacusIII

I agree completely.

Elsewhere would probably be the way to go. If we assume that everything that transhumanism is trying to do could be possible some day, then we can also assume that extraplanetary colonization could also be possible to sustain us. — CountVictorClimacusIII

I have no objections to offworld living, but I do question the practicality and necessity of it. The middle of the Sahara, the South Pole, and the bottom of the ocean are all far more hospitable places for human life than anywhere that isn't on Earth. The technology that would be necessary for sustained human habitation anywhere besides Earth would also be sufficient to open up many, many currently uninhabitable parts of Earth to human habitation. Basically take your space station or Mars habitat or whatever you're thinking of, and just build it in the desert... and don't bother to launch it. Then people can just drive there instead of taking rockets. Much more convenient.

Maybe more succinctly, immortality of self requires a stagnation of selfhood; whereas, I'm thinking, mortality of self is required for the evolution of selfhood in general. Here, one grants other selves their moment in the sun just as past selves have granted you this opportunity. With each generation learning from the last. — javra

I thought @180 Proof had already addressed that adequately.

Everybody? Including the optimal happiness of all murderers? I'm not one to subscribe to this, maybe for obvious reasons. I have a hunch you don't subscribe to it either. — javra

People who are currently murderers should both be stopped from murdering and also be enabled to be optimally happy. Causing the murderers to suffer doesn't improve anything intrinsically, only instrumentally (and then still only arguably) as a means of getting them to stop murdering.

Punitive "justice" is just injustice. People suffering isn't good, even if those people cause other people to suffer.

what a layperson might term a heightened, or raised, consciousness. Which encompasses far more than mere happiness and longevity of lifespan — javra

I agree that it's a heightened or raised consciousness. But the value of that is that it's a more pleasant, more enjoyable, state of mind; and besides that intrinsic value it's also instrumentally valuable to higher functioning and so the pursuit of further value (like, say, continuing to live to experience such a heightened consciousness).

Basically, it's a kind of happiness, and a happier kind of happiness than a lobotomy, which was my point.

rather than, say, producing something akin to drug-induced altered states that deviate from such heightened consciousness — javra

From what I've read, some drug-induced states are basically the same, and there's even a current exploration into using low doses of psychadelics to treat depression because they cause exactly that opposite feeling of everything being hopeless and meaningless. The brain is a physical thing, and I would expect that whatever transhumanist intervention would improve our mental states would be a physical intervention, including a chemical once since our brains are electrochemical. (Post-organic mental substrates, if they become a thing, would of course need to have that implemented differently).

if an individual's happiness alone is the goal — javra

Who ever said it was any one individual's happiness? It's everybody's happiness. Hedonists aren't (all) egotists.

This raised consciousness thereby leads to empathy. But empathy can lead to one's suffering when others suffer. The greater one's general empathy, the greater the number of people whose suffering will impact one. — javra

In my experience that's not the case, and though I've heard often that it is the case for many others, apparently it doesn't have to be since it seems not to be in my case.

One of the things that has somewhat consistently pushed me into peak experiences in my life is when emergencies happen to other people that I care about and I am able to do something to help. That's not to say that "it makes me happy" when people I care about suffer, but rather that the act of helping turns on that kind of "raised consciousness", which in turn feels good.

Case in point, my girlfriend's parents are both suffering some severe medical issues at the moment, girlfriend is having to take care of them both way more than she usually would be, and she's really stressed out and sad about all of that. I'm not happy that any of that is the case and if I could wave a wand and make it not the case I would in an instant. But because I'm currently unemployed I've had plenty of time to help their whole family out and take at least some of the stress off of them, and doing so pushes me into that state of peace and joy and overflowing positivity: I'm literally happy to help. I don't see them suffering and feel like suffering is thereby thrust upon me too, darkening my day, but rather I see them suffering and well up with love and caring, which feels good to me, not bad.

What do you think about the Hedonic treadmill? — Shawn

I think that that's a good insight, connecting the hedonic treadmill to my notion of the "emotional drain pipe". The converse possibility of an "emotional fill pipe" is consequently a rebuttal to the use of the hedonic treadmill concept as an argument against hedonism more broadly.

Without tangible specifics on the how of doing things it's not realistically applicable. — CountVictorClimacusIII

Sure, which is why people are out there researching the specifics of how. What we're talking about is whether or not they should be doing that. Your position seems to be "it's not clear that you can succeed, so maybe you should stop trying". That's exactly the kind of defeatism I was talking about earlier. My argument isn't "success is inevitable", just "it's worth a try".

So what do we do with all these extra people? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Either figure out a way to sustain them, on Earth or elsewhere, or else (if we fail at that) a lot of people will die. But the status quo is already "everyone will die". So what's the downside in trying?

The way I first stumbled into my manta/motto of "it may be hopeless but I'm trying anyway" was the last time I was employed, a little over a decade ago, where I was always hesitant to apply for many jobs because of fear of rejection, until it occurred to me: the worst that can happen is I won't get the job. But the status quo is already that I don't have the job. So, it can't hurt to try...

What, if anything, then makes lobotomizing oneself bad, granted that it will lead to greater degrees of unperturbable happiness for the remainder of one’s days? — javra

I don't think that that can be granted. The peak experiences I have had, which are what I imagine is more in the ballpark of the aim of transhumanist mind-alteration, feel the opposite of what I imagine a lobotomy would feel like, assuming a lobotomy would feel something like drunkenness or sedation. During a peak experience I not only feel more calm and happy and tranquil and accepting but I also feel smarter and more aware of both myself and the world around me, I take passionate interest in everything and find it all wondrous and fascinating, and I want to learn and to create, to find and build connections between everything. It's both peace and joy. Just being numbed into emotional painlessness, if that's what a lobotomy would even do, sounds like a much less desirable state of mind than that; even setting aside the dis-utility of being unable to take care of oneself, as in your scenario.

As another type of example, mass murders who've committed and continue to commit "perfect crimes" can also be said to live happy lives, and if they obtain immortality while so doing they'd be so much the happier. Should we then change our brains into such mindsets? — javra

Murderers are making other people unhappy (the people who get murdered, and anyone who might miss them), even if they never have to answer for their crimes. It's therefore better that they not murder, and so better that they not want to murder, and it would be worse if our brains were made such that we wanted to murder too. Given that someone already is a murderer, though, it's not somehow an improvement of the situation if he's a really unhappy murderer rather than a cheerful murderer.

Does the threat of, and inevitability of death make the act of living life more beautiful / meaningful? — CountVictorClimacusIII

No. — Pfhorrest

Why not? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Why would it? What is meaningfulness or beauty, and why would the inevitability of death add that to life?

Fixed. How? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Of course I don't know all of the details of exactly how to fix everything, or I would be out there fixing it myself. We don't even know the details of how to go about living forever yet. But the topic is whether it's worth trying to live forever, and if the reason not to try is that there could be problems as a consequence of succeeding, the possibility of overcoming those problems is the natural counterargument. We're talking about what to aim for, not the specifics of how to get there.

Sure. How would that change with several billion immortals? - actually, if estimates are correct, about 11.2 billion at peak:

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth — CountVictorClimacusIII

Interesting! In the same post you're responding too I made a back-of-my-ass calculation on what world population would stabilize at if right now a cure for mortality was found and also from now on everybody had exactly one child, and I estimated about 12 billion. Pleasing that an actual data-driven estimate is so close, too.

I'm hesitant to say that living longer isn't going to automatically make you feel happy; but, rather that long term plans of living that do not incur death are going to be hard to determine whether one wants to pursue new things. — Shawn

I'm unsure if I understand you again, but I didn't mean to suggest that living longer will automatically make anyone happier (though relieving death anxiety is something that could make people suffering from it happier). Making people happy just to be alive is a separate thing from enabling them to continue to be alive.

Death anxiety is quite a strong motivator, but, once you eliminate it, what do you think would be the new prevailing motivator to pursue in life? — Shawn

I think most people are already motivated by things other than avoiding death. Having a persistent fixation on death is psychologically abnormal and unhealthy; a normal healthy mind finds a variety of things interesting and meaningful and pursues them for their own sake, not just because they will be instrumentally useful in avoiding eventual death.

Also, supposing that one needs a specific motivation is kind of putting the cart before the horse, and indicates a mentality where, in that metaphor I used in my last post, the pipe drains rather than fills, so you need to find something to keep filling yourself up with. If we can instead let everyone have a pipe that fills them to overflowing, it's not a question of needing something to motivate you, because your motivation comes from inside: it's just a question of where you're going to pour your overflowing positivity, and anything at hand will do.

Learn things just for the sake of learning them. Accomplish things just for the sake of accomplishing them. Teach others for the sake of teaching, and help them accomplish their goals too, just for the sake of helping. Reach out to harness all the resources and information of the universe, and then spread them far and wide to everyone else too. That project is probably infinite, but even if it's not, then you can just rest contented at having finally "won at the universe", and look back happily on all that you've learned and achieved, contented forever after.

The issue is sustaining being grateful for a very, very long time. I'd think we'd need a different type of brain to be able to do that. — Manuel

I'm not convinced that that's true, but if it is: okay, let's make ourselves a different type of brain, and in the mean time survive long enough to do so.

In contrast to Darwinian life, transhuman life will seem self-evidently wonderful by its very nature. — David Pearce

:up: :100:

And some of us, myself included, have been fortunate enough to experience glimpses of what that "self-evidently wonderful by its very nature" view of life is like. They're called various things like "peak experiences", "mystical experiences", or "religious experiences". I've had them here and there over the course of my entire life, but it wasn't until 2019 that I experienced a prolonged period of the opposite kind of thing -- an unprovoked nearly year-long period of abject existential dread -- that I realized the significance of them.

That there's something entirely interior to the mind, regardless of actual circumstances in the world around oneself (though it can also react to them, of course), that's something like a... I think of it visually as a water pipe connected to a basin, where the basin is sort of one's emotional being and the water is wellness.

And the pipe can either drain water out so that no matter how much emotional wellness gets poured in from the outside it's never enough and one feels helplessly emotionally empty and like nothing could ever possibly make life worth living no matter how good things might be outside in the actual world, like just living at all is inherently awful and nobody should ever be subjected to it.

Or, the pipe can pump water in instead, to fill up the basin to overflowing, so that no matter how much of an emotional drain things outside are, one is still always filled up with emotional wellness, so just being alive at all feels worthwhile, and whatever problems there might be outside, one feels happy to go out and fix them, to take that overflowing well of wellbeing and pour it out onto the rest of the world until everything outside is as good as one feels inside.

I take it that part of the transhumanist vision is to enable everybody to feel the latter way all the time, and make it so that nobody ever has to feel the former way.

This sounds very much like a sentimental assertion, or a coin flipping problem. Isn't the issue then to enhance life rather than obey norms about how it happens or proceeds? — Shawn

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but the point is very much to enhance life, yes. To make life feel worth living, and to enable people to continue living it.

Did you factor in exponential population growth? — TheMadFool

If every person has one child, as I stipulated, then population doesn't grow exponentially, it grows... logarithmically? Sorry it's 4AM and I should sleep. The whole point is that people can keep having kids, but so long as they have kids at below "replacement" levels, then it doesn't matter if the old generation stays around without getting "replaced", the total population converges to some limit instead of diverging to infinity. (If the old generation was still dying, then population would instead be shrinking, as it is in many first-world populations).

There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. — Albert Camus

And his answer to that question was "Fuck that noise, suicide is for quitters... and make-believe fairy-tales are for quitters, too."

whether at any other point in history was this promoted. I mean, alchemists or the search for the Holy Grail were things — Shawn

That is a good point. I guess there have always been a mix of defeatism, and Absurd defiance of the so-called “inevitable”.

Now, the question would be, would you jump on? — Shawn

I’m personally hesitant to be an early adopter of any new technology, and especially hesitant about invasive medical interventions, but if the time comes that it’s either risk a new technology or die, life is worth the risk. I just hope I live long enough to get to make that choice.

Does the threat of, and inevitability of death make the act of living life more beautiful / meaningful? — CountVictorClimacusIII

No.

Or, would we eventually become bored and nihilistic immortals? What could that then lead to? Detachment? Desensitization? Would we "act out" because of said boredom? Would we "act out" in destructive ways? — CountVictorClimacusIII

If so, that is another problem to be fixed. We’re talking about transforming the whole human experience for the better, not just prolonging it as it already is. We could fix boredom etc too, make it so that everyone is always happy just to be alive and wondrously fascinated with whatever is going on at the moment, though still to varying degrees depending on the situation.

Will a supply shortage also push up wages? — CountVictorClimacusIII

If so, that’s a good thing. Labor is undervalued right now.

In my opinion, extending life expectancy further and / or prolonging it indefinitely has its fair share of philosophical and practical problems. It would be irresponsible to strive for this goal without planning for and resolving the issues that it would create. Or are we assuming a technological utopia here? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Not assuming one, but aiming for one. “Utopia” shouldn’t be a dirty word; we should be aiming for utopia, but in a practical way. You do raise other problems that will need addressing, but better to survive to face those problems than just die so that we don’t have to face them.

Irrespective of all the technologies that could be offered as a solution for boredom, I think that it can't be overcome in the long term. — Manuel

Boredom is a product of the brain, and a fairly basic one too. If our technologies include making changes to how our brains work, curing boredom should be simple. Not by making new stuff to entertain us, but by letting us not get bored with stuff we already have, letting us feel happy and grateful for all the good things we have no matter how long we’ve had them.

Immortality is quite obviously going to lead to a huge space/resource crunch - how many people can the earth sustain (carrying capacity of a habitat). Both antintalists and transhumanists may want to stop procreation but obviously for entirely different reasons. - for one, it's too painful, for the other it's overcrowding. — TheMadFool

Assuming about half of the current world population do not already have children, if all of them had one child, as did each of their children, etc, and starting now nobody ever died again, global population would stabilize at around 1.5 times what it currently is in about half a century (technically still growing at a rate of like 0.5 people per decade globally, but that’s negligible for a very long time). Out of 8b people currently, the 4b who aren’t parents yet have 2b kids right now (and we’re up to 10b), then in 20ish years those 2b have another 1b kids (and we’re up to 11b), and then 20ish years later they have another half a billion (and we’re up to almost 12b now), and then the last half billion are slowly filled in over many more generations.

they are neo-Epicureans, no? — Shawn

In that they’re altruistic hedonists, and generally anti-superstitious, “materialist” pragmatists, they’ve definitely got a lot in common yeah, though I don’t know that that’s enough on its own to define them.

Well, as these sample populations didn't exist in the 2000's, only around some kind of, dare I say, 'fad' with avoiding accepted existential norms. But, I think it's mostly economical, in how these things are becoming possible? — Shawn

I’m not sure what you mean about those populations not existing in the 2000s; the religious have been around for tens of thousands of years, the radical skeptics for thousands, the “Modernists” for hundreds and the Postmodernists for decades.

You are right though that this kind of progress against the oldest of foes like death itself are only now on the verge of technological possibility, but striving to make them technologically possible should have been a driving goal for the whole history of humanity.

I was just thinking earlier today that transhumanism is really sort of the ultimate manifestation of my “it may be hopeless but I’m trying anyway” philosophical mantra/motto. Half of that is optimism in the sense opposite antinatalism, but it’s importantly not optimistic in the sense of “everything will just work out okay” that lots of religious folks express. Instead, it acknowledges that everything will NOT be okay, that horrible things will happen like dying, UNLESS we do something about it, and we may not know for sure that we actually can succeed at doing any about it, but there’s nothing but upside to at least TRYING.

Both the pessimism that says trying is hopeless and the optimism that says it’s unnecessary are just lazy excuses not to try, and in doing so to guarantee failure. I’m extremely proud of transhumanists and techno-progressivists more generally, like @David Pearce, for having the courage to dare to at least try to fix the biggest of problems that have always been either seen as hopeless inevitabilities or excused away with happy fantasies as not real problems at all. They’re sort of a manifestation of Camus’ Absurd Hero in that way, too.

Bravo to anyone with the gall to look Death straight in the eye and say “Fuck you, and the pale horse you rode in on.”

Oh, and I guess to answer your actual question:

What do you think will it take for humanity to look at death as a problem that needs to be circumvented — Shawn

First and foremost the general excuses for defeatism (quitting) need to be vanquished. I call these broadly “dogmatic transcendentalism” (roughly the religious mindset), “cynical relativism” (basically radical skeptics cum effective nihilists), and most dangerously “dogmatic relativists” (“Postmodernists”) and the “transcendent cynics” (what Postmodernists call “Modernists”) who are doomed to collapse into them. In short, we need people to get on board with the idea that doing something, in general, in every context, is both possible and necessary, neither useless nor hopeless.

:up:

but I see the employer-class as unethical and undesirable, I don't want a return to any "natural state", I want society to make an ethical and practical decision to rearrange things and abolish capitalism - or create a hybrid between capitalism and socialism where socialism is favoured and promoted. I don't think Democratic Socialism is enough but it's better than nothing. — Judaka

That all sounds like the same thing I want, so now I'm just more confused about where any disagreement lies. I'm wondering if it's just the talk of "natural state" in my earlier post that's throwing things off: if so, all I meant by that is that ownership and usage coinciding is what we would ("naturally") expect to happen if nothing unethical was going on, so the fact that we have separate owner/employer and user/worker classes is a sign that something unethical is going on.

The employer could have more or less wealth than the employee but the power imbalance is inherent in their positions. The employee exchanges wages for labour, nothing more, what wages and what labour, are the only questions. The employer owns his business, makes all decisions regarding the businesses direction, chooses how his business will operate, promote, demote, fire his employees. Should the business care about the environment? Should it care about the community? Should it do anything? Only the capitalist decides, the employees have no voice. That is why it doesn't matter if we're talking about high-level employees or low-level employees who make nothing, we're only talking about the ability of an employee to negotiate or resign in opposition more easily. The profit drive is to pay for expenses, enable the business to grow and enrich the capitalist. The employee only exchanges labour for wages, they're not involved in what happens to profit. In every single situation, about everything, the employer has near-absolute command and his authority is in-built into capitalism. It's not dependant upon his wealth, status or connections, the employer-class simply has these authorities over employees and that's how capitalism works. — Judaka

I agree with all of this too, except your claims that how much wealth the employer and employee have relative to each other is irrelevant. The person who is the employer (call him Bob) is always going to be the person with the more wealth, because the only reason the other person (call her Alice) works for Bob is that Bob owns the stuff needed to do the work and Alice doesn't. If Alice did (or could) own the stuff needed to do the work herself, she could go into business for herself, and not work for Bob. She might still choose to work for Bob after all, but because she would have the easy option to not work for him without any great loss, he wouldn't be able to be abusive of her, since she wouldn't need him; it'd be more like she worked with him, than for him.

So, I contend it's the very system, rather than the specifics or specific people and the unethical employer-employee relation which is by itself, a class-based system. The unequal resources are a product of the unequal system, the inequality of the relationship goes deeper than that for me. — Judaka

I agree that it's a systemic issue, not anything about specific people. My contention though is that it's the inequality of wealth that creates and perpetuates those class differences that underlie the employer-employee relationship. That some people own the means of production and others don't is why those others have to work for the first class. I don't see how you would go about fixing the abusive employer-employee relationship without freeing the employees from their dependence on the employers, which dependence comes from their unequal wealth.

The usual state-socialist solution is just to take wealth from the owners to give the the workers, "manually" fixing the problem. I don't have a strong objection to that as a band-aid at least, a way of ameliorating the symptoms of the problem, though it's not a perfect solution as it depends on state force backed by violence to accomplish. I'm much more interested in the cause of the disease in the first place: what is it exactly about the specific system of legal rights and obligations that underlie capitalism that makes it the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and so we end up with these owner and worker classes and the exploitative relationship between them?

The usual anarcho-socialist answer to that question is that it's the state protecting private ownership of things that other people are using that's at fault: if the government just stopped acting like the apartment building is the property of some guy who doesn't even live there, instead of the property of the people who live there, then the people who live there could just keep their rent money for themselves and not have to pay that other guy just to keep living where they do. (And since they wouldn't owe that rent anymore, they wouldn't need as much money from a job, and so could walk away from an abusive employer much more easily; never mind saving up the rent money they would have been spending to just buy some means of production of their own so they don't have to work for anyone but themselves anymore.)

But you and I already agree that that's not the best solution. So I have my other proposed solution that I've already described, instead; the one about contracts of rent and interest.