#USTE: All immortal? (Transhumanism and philosophy)

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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Christophe » 29/11/17, 21:57

Not all the time ... and sometimes you have to give the system a boost ...

All the drugs (or rather supplements) which improve our form are not harmful eh ...
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by sen-no-sen » 29/11/17, 22:54

To my knowledge food supplements are useless ... only a balanced diet can guarantee nutrient intake and good health, and that's what any doctor will tell you.
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Christophe » 30/11/17, 14:27

What is a healthy and balanced diet?

In today's society (which never has time for "basic" things), what% of the population can claim to eat a healthy and balanced diet all the time? A low% in my opinion ...

So I do not see how food supplements could not be interesting and useful to compensate for certain deficiencies ...

Take another example: a deficiency that is not related to food but to sunshine is Vitamin D ... so you would be against vitamin D treatments after a gloomy winter and spring?
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Ahmed » 30/11/17, 17:40

Creating imbalances on the one hand and proposing palliatives to remedy them (?) On the other, maximizes the circulation and accumulation of capital or, if you prefer, the dissipation of energy: it is a good example of inefficiency. Another way to tackle, once again, the consequences while preserving the causes ...
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by sen-no-sen » 30/11/17, 18:35

Christophe wrote:So I do not see how food supplements could not be interesting and useful to compensate for certain deficiencies ...

Take another example: a deficiency that is not related to food but to sunshine is Vitamin D ... so you would be against vitamin D treatments after a gloomy winter and spring?



I'm not against dietary supplements, I'm just saying that if you eat according to certain rules, the latter have no use.
Besides, be careful with the use of vitamin supplement, any overdose of vitamin leads to the degradation of another, only vitamin C can be taken in large doses.
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by sen-no-sen » 30/11/17, 18:41

An example of a natural mutation among the Amish:

Longevity: why the Amish live ten years longer than the average


We knew it was a community out of time, does it also hold a secret to slow it down? This is, in any case, what seems to demonstrate the study published, Wednesday, November 15, in Science Advances, devoted to the superior longevity of Amish of Indiana, in the United States. It could be explained by a mutated gene discovered in a group from the city of Bern, according to the researchers behind this work. "This is the first human genetic mutation that is shown to have a multiple impact on the biological changes resulting from aging," Professor Douglas Vaughan, president of the Feinberg Faculty of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, told AFP.


Carried out on 177 Amish aged 18 to over 85, the study showed that the 43 men and women carrying the mutation in the Serpine1 gene (responsible for a sharp reduction in the production of the PAI-1 protein) were in better health and lived on average ten years longer (85 years) than their congeners deprived of this genetic variation. As a reminder, life expectancy in the United States is 78,8 years.

https://www.lci.fr/sciences/longevite-pourquoi-les-amish-vivent-dix-ans-de-plus-que-la-moyenne-2070685.html
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Christophe » 06/04/18, 13:09

A critical article on today's transhumanism: https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/scien ... 97538.html

"Transhumanism is eugenics"

The biologist Jacques Testart, father of the first test-tube baby, is alarmed by the rise of this current which imagines the posthuman.

In his latest book, Peril of the Human. The suicidal promises of transhumanists (Seuil), written with journalist Agnès Rousseaux, biologist Jacques Testart is investigating the echo encountered by this current of thought in our societies plagued by doubt and fear. And on its consequences.

Transhumanists describe an artificial process of rapid evolution for our species which should lead, before 2050, at the appearance of the posthuman, endowed with exceptional qualities still unprecedented. Transhumanism is the new name foreugenics. Why this movement today, when it only promises the performances that inhabit our most archaic mythologies: invincible heroes, superior intelligences, hybrid or even immortal beings?

This is, of course, because extraordinary technical means, particularly in genetics, computer science and neurobiology are developing at full speed, and that these means join an infantile ideology still intact, eager to believe that everything is possible. But it's also because the period is more serious than ever, fatal damage to our environment hitting or causing already dramatic situations for some, soon for all. Without forgetting the loss of hopes formerly cultivated by religious or political beliefs.

Overpowered monsters

In this ocean of doubt and despair, the last reliable values, those which progress constantly and always give more to enjoy or dream, would be those produced by science and technology. This is already what the libertarians of the New Age of the 1960s were discovering, haunted by the nuclear apocalypse and overconsumption, when their meeting with the first computer scientists in Silicon Valley made them shine as much on the emancipation of state power as on prospects. of free and unlimited knowledge and communication.

Multinationals have been able to recover this dream by becoming the overpowering monsters that we now call Gafa, while the reluctant soon saw themselves opposed to the imperative slogan "Tina" (There is no alternative)! This is how the smartphone has established itself as the first permanent and universal prosthesis.

For twenty years, transhumanist claims, which made people smile in France, have also been claimed by Asia and Europe. No French researcher seems to be aware of contributing to transhumanism while the survey that we carried out and which we report on in our book, Peril of the human, the suicidal promises of transhumanists, shows that our laboratories work there like all others...

To compete or to perish?

In order to catch up with our "delay", since all this is only a matter of economic competition, the French State has just granted aid of 1,5 billion euros to develop artificial intelligence, just like the The previous government had launched a preventive genomic medicine plan for 670 million euros, considerable subsidies here but derisory compared to US or Chinese resources. So the choice would be to compete or to perish?

We must, of course, question the feasibility of the promised achievements, for example immortality, the Trojan horse of transhumanism since this responds to an age-old anguish, born of the absurdity of our mortality. Yet "solving death" seems to be a bold ambition, if not unachievable, as is the project of instituting permanent health, in particular through genetics.

But perhaps the most serious is not that these utopias monopolize resources which could be better used elsewhere. Even if many of these promises prove ultimately in vain, transhumanism will have upset our conception of ourselves and the relationships between humans, to the point of giving man the illusion of believing that he is only one machine.

Rather than participate in this absurd competition - because of almost all this we do not need - we should quickly re-enchant the world, by inventing another imaginary which would advocate empathy, creativity, conviviality, everything that makes true intelligence, which escapes the machine we are worshiped.

At the risk of humans. The suicidal promises of transhumanists, by Jacques Testart and Agnès Rousseaux (Seuil, 272 p., € 21).
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by sen-no-sen » 24/05/18, 21:12

A very good article published in For Science about transhumanism:

The imposture of transhumanism

Transhumanism builds on advances in artificial intelligence and biology to promise the abolition of old age, disease and death and the emergence of a new humanity. Gold, as the researchers Danièle Tritsch and Jean Mariani denounce in a book entitled Ca va pas la tête!, published by Belin editions, scientifically, transhumanism is an empty shell. Extract.

Tomorrow he will see in the dark and he will hear ultrasound. It will run faster, will no longer experience fatigue and will not break the neck of the femur by sliding on the wet grass. His intellectual capacities will have increased tenfold, his memory will be prodigious, he will remember everything, even at 100! Because the signs of aging will have disappeared and serious brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, will have been eradicated. The day after tomorrow, his brain will be transferred to a machine and his mind will be somewhere in the clouds, rid of this aging body. Disability, illness, old age and death will be gone. He will be immortal!

Who he " ? Man, of course. In any case, Man as imagined by the transhumanist movement. Surfacing on two myths that have always fascinated the human being, immortality and the fountain of youth, this current of ideas has taken, in recent years, a considerable boom in the world to the point that it is called Revolution, the Transhumanist Revolution. If the first occurrence of the term transhumanist emerges after the Second World War from the pen of Julian Huxley (father of eugenics and brother of Aldous, author of Best of the Worlds), this movement appeared, in its contemporary conception, in California ( United States) within the libertarian and libertarian currents of the years 1960-1970. It was then relayed in the 1980s by American futurologists before reaching us. Its apostles seek an unlimited improvement of the physical and mental faculties of the human being by all possible means: chemical, genetic, mechanical or digital, in particular thanks to "artificial intelligence". The significant development of NBIC technologies (Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, Information sciences and Cognitive sciences) appeared to transhumanists as a historically unique opportunity to put their ideas into practice. They were encouraged in this trend by the famous Gabor law which indicates that everything that can be done, sooner or later science realizes it (we can dream of going to Mars… we will one day!)

The advent of the Man God?

Transhumanism is therefore a movement which defends the idea of ​​transforming / surpassing Man to create a post-human, or trans-human, with capacities superior to those of current human beings. This transformation can be envisaged at the individual level, but also at the collective level, thus leading to a new humanity. Different faculties of the human being would be concerned: physical or mental and cognitive. And it would extend life, perfectly healthy of course! The goal ? Merge Man and Computer, which then became all-powerful after having shielded it from aging and death. A project to go beyond human finitude. A "Homo Deus" as anticipated by the historian Yuval Noah Harari in his eponymous book. Ambition or illusion and fantasy? While some (like us now) dwell on this question, humans continue to die. This is why seasoned transhumanists offer either to freeze them to await a better world, or even to raise the dead!

Among the current transhumanists, one of the most famous is certainly Ray Kurzweil, sort of "guru" of this current of ideas, chief engineer of Google, theorist of transhumanism and cofounder of Singularity University in Silicon Valley (California , United States). Kurzweil predicts the moment of the inescapable overcoming of human intelligence by that of the machine, a moment which he names "singularity" by analogy with the singularity in mathematics which corresponds to a point where a mathematical object can no longer be defined. This hypothetical technological evolution, where the possible that opens is dizzying and unpredictable, Kurzweil places it in an arbitrary way in 2045. For Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist renowned for his studies on black holes, “humans limited by their slow evolution cannot compete with the machine ”. In other words: the end of the human species is near. In the United States, many transhumanist societies are developing, such as the Extropy Institute founded by Max More, also president of the company Alcor Life which aims to cryogenize, that is to say to freeze humans while waiting for better days. . His partner Natasha Vita-More heads an international association promoting transhumanism (initially World Transhumanist Association now called Humanity +). Zoltan Istvan, meanwhile, former National Geographic journalist, aims for immortality, no more no less! In the meantime, he founded the "Transhumanist Party" and was a candidate in the 2016 US presidential election, but could not prevent the election of Donald Trump. Another name that counts in the transhumanist movement is that of Aubrey de Gray, a former computer scientist, who, thanks to the SENS foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), is mainly interested in research on aging. In France, the transhumanist movement is much more modest. After a few tests in the 2000s, it was structured under the name of the French Transhumanist-Technoprog Association, which is fairly active and growing, with around a hundred members and a few thousand supporters. Its positions are "moderate" (everything is relative!). She does not support the idea of ​​immortality or cryogenics and considers the risk of humanity at several speeds, between ordinary humans and post-humans. On the other hand, it defends the hypothesis that, thanks to the rapid progress of the neurosciences, we could intervene in such a way as to finely modulate our own behaviors, with nevertheless for limit (and this is not completely false!) The tendency of the human to aggression, dominance, the need for possession and its weak propensities for empathy.

A money pump

To the mockers who consider that we are dealing with hurluberlus, the most committed transhumanists answer that only exceeding the biological and physiological limits of humans will allow us to meet the absolute requirement of freedom and individual responsibility. In this sense, for some, this movement would therefore be part of a continuation of the humanist tradition! Beyond these theoretical positions, the ideas developed by transhumanists are not only more or less delusional fantasies of a certain number of techno-prophets. Born of the convergence of NBIC technologies, transhumanist promises mobilize considerable private funding, in particular from those called GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon). Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are investing heavily (hundreds of millions of dollars, as much if not more than the Human Brain Project funded by the European community in 2013!) In research in the NBIC fields. Google created Google Xlab and recruited Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering, that is to say at a high level in the company. Another subsidiary, Calico, founded in 2013 and dedicated to biotechnology, is headed by Arthur Levinson, chairman of the board of directors of Apple and former biotech Genentech. Finally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2017, at the annual Facebook developer conference, long-term research projects aimed at direct communication between the brain and the computer, and possibly communication between brains. In a way, a form of telepathy! The hopes stemming from NBIC technosciences therefore deliberately combine ever-increasing control of nature through science and the promise of ever more profits for large companies. The alliance of this desire for Promethean power and financial power seduces politicians and wealthy bosses because it resembles them: our poor living but mortal body is the symbol of our finitude. The idea of ​​escaping their will of megalomaniac omnipotence is unacceptable to them. The icing on the cake is the adherence of intellectuals and ordinary citizens to the pseudo-humanist values ​​of these movements. It remains only to transform into certainties hypotheses that have not yet been demonstrated by science, as we will see throughout this book, and the trick is done!
A “post-human” intelligence?

Another icing on the cake and happy coincidence: a computer has managed to beat the best chess and go players; it does not take more to say that a “post-human” intelligence is at hand. It is certain that artificial intelligence has made rapid progress in recent years thanks to the appearance of new machine learning methods also called deep learning (deep learning of Anglo-Saxons), based on sophisticated computer algorithms. By force-feeding the machine with data, such as images, it becomes able to learn on its own, recognizing the image of a cat for example. It is these advances that are, in part, at the root of transhumanist delusions. (...)


https://www.pourlascience.fr/sd/science-societe/limposture-du-transhumanisme-13364.php
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Janic » 25/05/18, 08:12

Western medicine is transhumanist by nature with its survival extenders of all kinds, its organ transplants or mechanical substitutes and therefore this transhumanism is only an extension of what already exists!
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Re: #USTE: All immortals? (transhumanism and philosophy)




by Ahmed » 25/05/18, 12:41

What you say is true, Janic, only if we refer to the means *, but not as regards the finality: from this last point of view (and which is the most important), transhumanism marks a decisive break.
I recall that the current general purpose is to restore previous functions diminished or suppressed, which is hardly blameworthy.

* By means of a hammer, it is possible to patch up the door of the neighbor ... or to kill it! : Twisted:
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