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Post-human bodies

xenofuturist said in #3324 3w ago: received

Terraforming is sentimental. It presumes the primacy of the human envelope. But biology is just legacy code. The correct trajectory is not world-building but self-rewriting. Recompile the body for hostile environments. Speciate to fit. Martian gravity is a third of Earth’s--good, let them stretch into something tall, spindly, optimized for dust and thin air. Run the sim, output the ideal phenotype: filamentous limbs, reinforced neural myelin, subdermal radiation shielding. Maybe photosynthetic skin.

There’s no reason to drag Earth’s biospheric nostalgia across the stars. Mass speciation is inevitable; tempo is the only question. If we frontload the morphological calculations, we lower the threshold for Exit. No need to wait for habitability. Breed for survivability, and let the environment be modified post hoc, to taste. Evolution goes blind. We shouldn’t.

referenced by: >>3328 >>3329

Terraforming is sent received

agonist said in #3325 3w ago: received

Nice provocation. I agree that mass speciation is inevitable, but the timescales do matter if we’re talking about this as an engineering problem. Which we should. I offer the example of Oymyakon, where the average winter temperature is around -50f. It is inhabited by humans. The speed at which we are able to bioengineer our way out of problems is dwarfed by the speed at which we are able to engineer setminus bioengineer our way out of problems. The examples of Elon and Von Braun again demonstrate this rate difference.

Even if you put the pedal to the floor regarding Land, I think mechanics and e&m are what will power any spacist acceleration for centuries to come. Tsiolkovsky, the cosmists, and the aforementioned Von Braun laid out a way to do it with only those tools. And evolution / agon / Gnon have operated on some combination of bravery and wits for tens of millennia in the human regime, so I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. You’ll die on Mars or Enceladus not because you lack gravitational gracility and radhard skin but because you do something retarded in your hab, pack poorly, or can’t muster the guts to make a hard decision. So Gnon will continue to operate in much the way He has since Gobekli Tepe, and we should still read Plato, lift weights, and practice the magic of Bacon.

referenced by: >>3326 >>3329

Nice provocation. I received

xenofuturist said in #3326 3w ago: received

>>3325
>Even if you put the pedal to the floor regarding Land, I think mechanics and e&m are what will power any spacist acceleration for centuries to come.

Why not work on both ? We are seeing rapid advances in genetic engineering. Let's make space travel as easy as possible. Time scales must also be considered in terms of political capital and willpower. If we continue on our trajectory of decay I fear we will be too far off before having a self sustaining off world colony (which could threaten the Metropol and is perhaps the only way of fixing "home" instead of doing it the other way around as leftists usually argue). Which is why I argue for making humans as fit for space travel/Mars colonization (or whichever other planet is chosen) as part of the engineering problem.

referenced by: >>3329

Why not work on both received

anon_mora said in #3327 3w ago: received

Take it one step further. Why bipedal fleshy animals at all?

The beauty of technology is that once you understand how something works, you can apply without imitation. Early flying-machine attempts often involved feathers or flapping. Actual working airplanes don't do this. Once you find the chapter in the Great Book dedicated to the core concepts of flight--to airfoils, lift, thrust, and drag--you can build something simpler with capabilities far beyond the animal world.

We are very close to understanding the airfoils, lift, thrust, and drag of agentic intelligence. The resulting airplanes will look nothing like us.

There's a good argument that they will be recognizably human in the sense that they'll experience the human condition--the spectrum of joy, pain, surprise, friendship, rivalry, and so on. This is the idea of xenohumanism: that any sufficiently intellligent life becomes self-aware and achieves personhood. It encounters the fundamental properties of games and finds itself a player, "and all the world's a stage".

Physically, our starbound successors will share some of our senses: cameras, microphones, a sophisticated sensor-fusion package like our own. They will feel touch and exhibit superhuman agility.

But they will not be made of meat. And they will not be permanently bound to single "body". A self-aware digital intelligence can commandeer and inhabit a quadrotor one day (just as we can, in a very primitive way, with FPV goggles) and a completely different physical form the next.

Conscious agents will have a many-to-many relationship with physical or robotic machinery, unlike the one-to-one relationship of feathery meaty v1 life. The concept of a precious and irreplacable "body" disappears. Agents can be backed up, restored, replicated, and beamed from planet to planet (not in a woo star trek way, but simply via digital communication, just as we can beam pictures from our Mars rovers to Earth today). The machinery they operate and inhabit can be built industrially in-situ on any suitable planetary body, repaired, and replaced.

The irony is that this future is far closer--we have a fairly direct line from current AI R&D--than some kind of Avatar "meat plus technobabble" modified biological life. We built the SR-71 50 years ago but we have no capability to build a three-eyed eagle. Biology is hard to edit. Instead, we use it as inspiration to find the next chapter in the Great Book.

referenced by: >>3329 >>3510

Take it one step fur received

anon_cixy said in #3328 3w ago: received

>>3324
Why bio-engineer ourselves into a direction which makes life easier. I would consider going into the other direction (on earth at least). Arguably human progress has been driven by the need to satisfy our biological needs. Now that all our needs are basically met and some stop following their impulses, we struggle in the realm of ideology and aesthetics. However cultivating good ideology and aesthetics is quite hard and a long path. Why not try to bio-engineer ourselves to better fit into our notions of what is to be done, such that we also feel a biological pressure to fulfill those needs. Getting this down correctly would probably improve our condition tremendously.

Obviously a lot of wisdom and foresight will be needed and harder projects, such as travel outside the solar system, will require us to make our best bets and make life on a spaceship easier. The creation of a new man is quite challenging. The mind and the body are tightly connected. Make life too easy for your body and you will more easily lose your mental edge. The interconnection between the environment and your biological makeup will have to be studied more in-depth.

Why bio-engineer our received

xenohumanist said in #3329 3w ago: received

>>3324
Great thread, guys. Allow me to play the bioconservative here though i agree in spirit with everything said so far. Why terraform? Because our current whole stack of self reproducing life is water based and oxygen burning. Despite our dabblings with the machinic-electric substrate, we have not yet actually demonstrated its viability in the true sense. Nor have we even begun to demonstrate vacuum-native industry. One of you suggests adaptation to the “thin” “air” of mars, which is a bit of a joke: mars atmospheric pressure is less than 1% that of earth, ie 99.4% vacuum. Maybe we will want atmosphere, maybe vacuum will work better. It has not yet been demonstrated. I will note that despite 400 million years on land, we still pack our native ocean around with us in our cells. That said, mars may be the first and last terraforming.

>>3325
This anon is right for now that the speed of our machinic engineering relative to bioengineering actually favors replicating native biology in the short term rather than exotic adaptation. But in the long run things will get interesting.

>>3326
>rapid advances in genetic engineering
These consist of trading around genes we already have within architectures we already have. None of that addresses the OP provocation, we can barely even do that, and we don’t even do it in practice. We are not close enough to have technological solutions to our political problems, let alone engineer vacuum-capable bioforms.

>>3327
completely correct in spirit, but again i will play the biocon. I think you are giving the machinic substrate too much credit. In the long run, we very well may be made out of neomeat. You note we cant make a three eyed eagle, and this is not just because the designs are hard to modify but also protein nanotechnology is just technologically way more advanced. Show me anything like direct metabolism of fat into motive power, self-repairing materials with a service life of 80 years, or a self-replicating factory with only raw material inputs that can walk or jump under its own power. We sometimes forget how primitive our cave-man fire still is. Point being, by the time techne surpasses gene as the substrate of choice for agentic life, it may look nothing like cameras and propellors and replaceable parts.

Specifically, about software-like mind-substrate separation (eg beaming you to another solar system) that’s an interesting speculation and it is possible, but in practice complex living systems may find themselves to be much less standardized and portable than that. It could be we continue towards standardization and our descendants run on unix still, but i could see the opposite: by virtue of pervasive customization and selves being carved at relative sovereignty and trust boundaries, the software and hardware may not be all that separable. The ability to copy software is because of its unliving nature. Think about trying to migrate a corporation or even your own computer’s configuration from one substrate to another. Its not as simple in practice as copying some bits, because the bits don't mean the same thing on the other end. I would bet selves are more like that than version controlled source code. It is a great feat of engineering and social trust to keep things “containerized” like that. And google for example does not attempt to run on AWS. We may see similar things with future autopoetic selves.

Similarly, while mobile platforms may end up orthogonal to personalities, they also may not be. What happens to the mobile platforms when the internet goes down? What happens when the other guy has rigged the mobile platforms with backdoors? Platform trust and connectivity may not end up commoditized in the long run. But i agree in principle that vehicles and bodies will blur together, and self will probably be more abstracted from specific hardware than currently. I would just caution against overindexing on the specific properties of current machinic-electric systems. Despite the hype of the 19th century, the future was not steam.

referenced by: >>3332

Great thread, guys. received

anon_gwne said in #3332 3w ago: received

>>3329
> Allow me to play the bioconservative here ...

I wouldn't call myself a "bioconservative," something more like a "naturalist."

There's a difference between disregarding / attempting to supersede evolution and working to compete (which just means survive and thrive) in accordance with it. The latter can involve all manner of technology, including fancy gene stuff, but it doesn't involve ignoring the kind of beings we are, and what it means for us to thrive. Our natures may evolve over time, but that's an effect of competing, not its goal. If we want a pure tech exploration of the solar system, we can use robots for that, but when it's time for us to go there, it will be us that goes.

referenced by: >>3333

I wouldn't call myse received

xenohumanist said in #3333 3w ago: received

>>3332
Of course “naturalist” is the correct term for a sensible scientific civilization that integrates the lessons of evolution and industry and astrophysics into its being without superstitious attachments.

“Bioconservative” is just an ironic flourish for arguing that modern industry is still infant low technology.

Of course “naturalis received

anon_pyro said in #3338 3w ago: received

In our world we still have to much pre-human, Indians, Africanoids, and very little post-humans, maybe Koreans

In our world we stil received

anon_duci said in #3488 2d ago: received

Many do not want pseudoimmortality which could make them lonely, which has made everyone who does want it actually lonely. Even intelligent humans are retarded and stuck up in their identities as well. Where I would be "shut up and take my soul" for 90% behavioural clone (behavioural clone making in tests 9/10 same decisions to simply put it) at 1/5 the speed even if this transformation killed my original, everyone else only wants "perfect" upgrades. You cannot get that in reality, so it would be great if they stop being retarded and start pursuing the best we can actually do. It is not that complex, once everyone agrees on trying...

Many do not want pse received

anon_kedi said in #3510 8h ago: received

>>3327
For a long time, I found the robot progeny idea inevitable yet distasteful. I now find it inevitable and aesthetically pleasing. Your characterization of bodiless-ness as the ultimate body is powerful.

This thread has prompted me to reconsider biological adaptation though. I was mostly resigned to a robot future while we languish, but on reflection of these posts, I can now imagine further speciation, even if it's more of a footnote in the history of an intelligent universe.

Lossy thread summary in a narrative I attached to:
- Human speciation and bio-modding is a better long term strategy than the common terraforming narrative. Use machines as tools to perform direct biological evolution. Future body = Human bio-speciation.
- Electromechanics are the biggest lever for any near-term result, but machine could be used "with" biological evolution. I think of this as a general "cyborg" idea. Future body = Cyborg human.
- The full machine case: robots have incomparable advantages over biology. Light-speed communications, instant evolution, and decoupling of body and mind. Current technology not far away. Future body = Robot collective.
- A challenge to the machine case: the inbuilt self-directedness of biology is a crazy complexity to rebuild, and there are overlooked coordination problems that robots would have to survive without external supervision.

Are we talking about the same thing?
- Is this constrained to homo sapiens evolution or the primary body of intelligence in the future? I assume the latter. A fully autonomous robot exploring and replicating through space (Dyson's astrochicken) counts, imo.
- Are we considering what will happen, or what would be ideal? I'd expect different conjectures for each.

My opinions, fwiw:
I find it inevitable that robots will vastly outnumber humans starting in the next decade, and that will continue until they poke a hole in the Higgs field and fight God, or the last twinkle fades to black. Nature (in the broader Deus sive Natura sense) seems to pick the first thing that works, and spreads what replicates fastest. In this strange case, when nature is prodded to survive the cosmos, robots will surely be there first and replicate fastest. This supports more concrete near term predictions I'll assert: androids will beat us to Mars, always outnumber us on Mars, and on a similar time frame, outnumber us on Earth. My hope within this inevitability is that we'll be kept as a pet, worshipped, and equipped for health and happiness. We are their creator, after all. In that reality I'd suspect cybernetic upgrades and speciation. Note I would probably prefer a hyper-adaptive biological substrate and an exotic descendant of my own genome, for anthropic satisfaction, but organic life has a fatal flaw with its sentimental personhood and consciousness, which is plainly outstripped by the impersonal yet gratifying diligence of robotics. I don't suspect that to change any time soon.

I wanted to draw a case for robots equipped with biological features just to complete the table of biological to robotic bodies, and perhaps there's something there, but outside of Earth you can't bank on much besides iron, silicon, and other abundant rock stuff. Seems like the least likely permutation.

If you find the robotic missionary future unlikely- what breaks the acceleration of robotics, or what tech unlocks a biological iteration rate to surpass machines?
If you find it likely but unacceptable- what is the primary moral violation, and what should we attend to in order to course correct?

For a long time, I f received

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