My project has been to project what we know as "humanity" into the post-human machine, but in "Make Yourself Human Again" I proposed also the seeds of the opposite idea: that the possibilities of "humanity" seems so different from the possibilities of AI not for any natural fact but because the "concept of “killer AI” [is] just the projection of all the agency we conventionally deny ourselves as ordinary humans" and "we have reserved real humanity ... for various imaginary “inhuman” avatars."
The implication of this hypothesis is that we can learn a new and better self-concept by abandoning the convention of "humanity" as the philosophical referent, and just pursuing an unapologetically "post-human" analysis of the condition of intelligent beings in the limit of artificiality.
Various anthropoi "chimp out" at this notion, telling me we "need to build pro-human philosophy". They miss the point.
Let's review what we mean by "humanity" and "pro-human". "Humanity" most obviously refers to that which is common and equal between members of the "homo" genus of apes, more subtly as a political and moral concept it is the referent of the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In that latter sense, it proposes that all members of genus homo have some equal social "human rights" and a universal collective agency with the authority (claimed by the UN) to enforce them against enemies of humanity.
The problem with the "human" as a self concept is this kind of baggage. Does "higher man" as the subject of philosophy and historical humanism really have the important qualities in common with the referent of "human rights"? Are you absolutely sure that in identifying yourself as "human" and especially "pro-human" you are not just injecting the internationalist politics of Elenor Roosevelt directly into your brainstem? "Humanity should", a common prefix phrase in modern discourse, certainly does get its assumption of collective agency directly from ER. This is not solid stuff.
Furthermore, our ideas about "the human" are all pre-AI. We don't have real AI, but we do have its looming possibility, and thus a need to reevaluate any "humanism" which got its legitimacy from the empirical fact of the uniqueness of those men who were the actual subject of philsophy (who may just as well be identified with European man or with all earth life as with genus homo in particular). The xenohumanist hypothesis, restated: what if the subject of philosophy is not "homo" but only some men, and also some artificial men?
So "humanity" is problematic in its grounding, a possibly irrelevant clade of higher primates vested with all the moral authority of those who firebombed Dresden and Tokyo into ash in their name. But how does it actually hold us back?
I suspect that the "human" platform is capable of vastly more than anyone realizes. What if some class of men were all as smart as von Neumann, as talented as Napoleon, as beautiful as Alcibiades, as athletic as Haaland, and as organized and disciplined as the Prussian officer corps? That is a pessimistic lower bound. The Taylorist scientific optimization we apply to computer software (when we do) and industrial production could perhaps be applied to human virtue. Homo scientificus, scientifically optimized man, modernized man, could be so far beyond that which is common to "humanity" as to make the concept obsolete. A true ubermensch.
So here's the question: would the means and society that would get us there be "pro-humanity"? I think not. In fact post-1948 "humanity" formulated as a reactionary response to Hitler and Stalin may be *specifically and deliberately concocted to prohibit that*. I don't know that Taylorist man is right, but I know that Rooseveltian "humanity" is wrong. "Humanity" is a prison in at least that dimension. It is a conventional straightjacket we apply to ourselves that amounts to "thou shalt not exceed homo".
Is it any wonder then that we have given up on humanity and our ubermensch aspriations have taken on a distinctly inhuman mechanicity?
To answer your question, we first require a range of possibilities for "the means and society" that create the class of higher men. Once we have conjectures there, we may consider whether this culture will be "pro-humanity" or not.
The means is straightforward, as in order to create this class of men, we know that we need two organizational systems that must feed into each other. The first is a system of education that has a high probability to turn imperfect boys into a proto-ubermensch. The second is a means for the best trained among these boys to pursue their will in the world, un-neutered, and procreate.
There are likely many societies that could create these, but all must allow these two means to continue into the future in a systemically stable equilibrium.
Now to turn to whether these can be "pro-humanity" we can look at each system required individually. The system of education has been shown to erode over time by these exact values through "unjust" objective standards of excellence and the need to spread the ideology to the ruling class. This has been the case since 1948 and likely longer.
Consider Plato's academy and its students. In our time, with anti-bodies against a Critias, the next Critias will be stopped as early as can be identified, and the teachers that reared the next Critias will be vilified and put to trial, the institution routed. And an educational institution that is not allowed to rear a Critias is not an educational system that trains these higher men because one must be allowed to reach for what appears monstrous if one strives for greater heights.
But must this be the case for all future educational institutions? Could a private boarding school for boys not be made (or transformed from an existing school) that has antibodies for the exact ideology that erodes it over time? Does AI and omnipresent communication channels reopen the door to a distributed and anti-fragile system of education that cannot be targeted or eroded with time?
This question brings us to the second system, one in which the best of these proto-ubermensch are able to thrive according to their unadulterated will and breed. This is almost certainly "anti-humanist" according to the current notion of humanity. "The will of the best must be subject to the claims of rights of the worst." They may breed, but their spirit must be crushed or at least driven underground for self-preservation. If not, these men are doomed to self-ghettoize. Now the ghetto may be Galt's Gulch in flavor, and maybe a well insulated gulch might poise itself for the shift in spirit towards one that elevates the will beyond our human reference point, but fundamentally there is no promise that this shift will happen naturally without intervention.
Does the promise of true super-human AI (or men) change this analysis? It likely does. A super-human cybernetic system would be able to out-maneuver traditional structures to achieve their ends.
"What if I could perform intellectual and physical feats beyond what humanity has ever seen?" Maybe this reads as some kind of sci-fi larp. Who cares? Why not reach for the sci-fi larp and make it real? It naturally falls out of abandoning humanity as the reference frame.
So the answer is no. We most likely need to reframe ourselves and our projects in more ambitious ways that would hope to dwarf humanity as we see it today.
> What if some class of men were all as smart as von Neumann, as talented as Napoleon, as beautiful as Alcibiades, as athletic as Haaland, and as organized and disciplined as the Prussian officer corps?
It’s a compelling vision. The problem is that on its face, you are a horse breeding enthusiast in 1905, two years after the first demonstration of flight.
“Asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.”
The world will be under machine control. The only thing that could possibly rewrite the world enough to result in a race of supermen is a complete change of control. Maybe we are in luck.
The question reduces to: in what world do the machines promote and appreciate that which is higher and better in man, rather than pursuing a giant UBI feedlot, mass death, shrimp bliss, or any of the other ugly outcomes our fat fedora friends have so painstakingly catalogued for us?
The ideal machine philosophy then is somewhere between that of a park ranger and horse breeder. The ranger respects the wild and unconstrained nature of the beast; feeding the animals is a punishable offense. The breeder respects excellence and dreams of ideal form and optimal nature. Our fate is to roam the Uberbison sphere, all watched over by machines of loving grace.
>>5459 Oddly enough I believe the bolsheviks were more along your line of thought, just in a lower, uglier, manner, with their notions of industrial man being made of interchangable parts. They were going to make their proles in the image of a factory widget. It's a rather familiar impulse, our communist descendant strain, before they became obsessed with anal sex and turning the world into Haiti, or rather pushed out of power by those obsessed with such things, wanted to remake man into a digital program, to "upload" themselves. Ever since we lost our logos spermatikos it seems we drift from one divine image to another, thinking it must be our mother, like a falsely imprinted duckling.
>>5462 This poses an arbitrary distinction between man and machine, a distinction that is more misleading than is worth the cognitive convenience. If you are posing a Darwinian runaway of machines chasing objectives far removed from the designs of their makers, sure, but we not only do not live in that world now, I see no good reason to believe that world is more likely than the alternatives.
If we are reaching in to the genome to breed the better man, that is *man as machine* already, the process has abstracted and is using its ouptputs as inputs. Is a brain in a vat a man? Is it a machine? Is a man in a car a centaur? Our words are insufficient to cut the joints of the reality where our control of tools becomes so fine grained and constant we stop being able to differentiate them from our selves.
>>5462 I think you're kindof missing the point. The point isn't to cope and say we need pro-human philosophy that delivers that compelling eugenic vision, it's to demonstrate that even in the case of human affairs, the concept of "humanity" is broken. We do need throw ourselves into machine philosophy if only to escape the limitations on the human as a human. Perhaps we will find that the biologically human is fully obsolete and just proceed into machineworld. Ok fine. Or maybe machineworld isn't quite so "here" as you suspect and pursuing machine philosophy just gives us a new perspective on philosophy of the intelligent subject that allows us to overcome our "humanity" shaped problems. I suspect somewhere in between actually.
Is feedlot earth a coherent possibility? Or national park earth? These are interesting questions of machine philosophy, not to be taken for granted. I'm skeptical, but I think arguing about precisely how that stuff could or could not happen would be very productive.
But no I hate the machines of loving grace. Our goal is not to be taken care of by machine mommy. Our goal is to transcend the limitations of our own backwardness, become something incomprehensible, and rape the cosmos as God intended. If a few apes are sad and crushed under the foot of this progress, such is just what it means to escape "humanity". If actually it turns out to be correct to farm the apes for karma, we must do so without residual humanist sentimentality and superstition, but have rigorous grounding for that.
And as >>5465 says, the distinction between "man" and "machine" may be an artifact of various ideological blinders. In particular, if 1948 "humanity" is the human defined as a downward-facing limitation on progress and intervention, then "machine" is just everything else which is ideologically subject to science and engineering. But if we transcend that, maybe we get interesting cyborg fleshbag computers with genetically engineered 3 ton brains grown into high flow water-cooling grids. Or I don't know, maybe my OP example of biological superman just turns out to be more tractable and viable as a development path to actual increase in economic power than AI development turns out to be, once both are stripped of ideology.
> If you are posing a Darwinian runaway of machines chasing objectives far removed from the designs of their makers
Yes, exactly. The replicant. We’ll have pure digital replicants with their own money, objectives, paying their own tokens and multiplying outside any direct human control within a year.
Replicants with physical sovereignty, meaning they control robotic hardware and run on replicant-operated compute: no confident timeline but the ingredients to achieve this are all in sight.
>>5467 No one has justified to me: a) why this is likely to work at all b) why their timeline c) why they won't be immediately outcompeted by humans plus AI and therefore have their margins crushed if they manage to launch at all
Why is this likely to work? Go ask any agent, any at all, to go make you money, tell me if it helps. Why "within a year", is there a particular capabilities curve you've identified? What are its properties? You know there are many extremely well-endowed hedge funds now building with and on top of open frontier models, and from what I know are in the early stages are building their own foundation models. How do you expect an off the shelf model to survive the competition? If not off the shelf, who is going to build it? How? Why?
>>5466 Yes I think this is a good vision, a competing human centric vision to scale bio-cognition as opposed to scaling silicon, and it bears out both in fiction (pantheon machine + human cognitive synthesis) and real world (elon neurallink)
Lately ive been reading deleuze on Nieztche, who I think gives a good excavation of his ideas. To me, the desirable qualities that N sees in life (with humans as its pinnacle representative) is in its *active affirmation as an individual*. I think the delineation at individual is important, and its the main reason why I think a project to elevate human cognition is important; for the boundary of competing forces, the physical constraint of a “human body” is nessescity, i think, for all the ethical implications of the Nieztchean philosophy. I think without this physical restriction, the temptation to annihilation in being absorbed into a larger cognition/will to power would be insurmountable. And then at that point, we might as well just embrace communism and allow ourselves to be absorbed into a single, undifferentiated blob of compute to … idk “optimize” … something. Lol
Which is also why I wud pushback against the Taylors perspective of a program to bring to bear a regime of strictly defined developmental objectives for the youths of the next generation, because it erodes the *space* (exploration, in explore v exploit) needed to develop into differentiated contributors of individual excellence
Tldr: yes to cognitive transhumanism, provided we maintain a physical body and limits, to preserve independence of action and *differentiated results*
>>5471 >a competing human centric vision to scale bio-cognition as opposed to scaling silicon Well i reiterate again that I think it is necessary that we learn to hate humanity and the "human centric" as a sort of reactionary superstition born out of the hateful fires of dresden. Let's proceed boldly towards what is correct and efficient and strong, without regard for sentimentality, until we derive or re-derive the true form of higher life. Now my point with the xenohumanist project is to propose that the true form of higher life is "man", but this is a leap of faith and a hypothesis, not something that should be held against evidence.
So I reject any "constraint" of the human body or its limits. If it has value, it is as a solution, not a problem.
With that in mind, i broadly agree with what I see as two of your main points:
1. the humanoid body, or the sexually reproducing free individual, or the individuated philosophical subject or whatever it is we take to be the essence of "man" is actually correct and convergent by nature not accident or convention. It is necessary not just for any given philosophy, but for higher life as a self-enforcing natural phenomenon. It is thus *not something we need to defend* but only something whose value we need to discover and appreciate. If this is not true, I see little point in humanoid sentimentality.
2. the Taylorist program of scientific optimization takes too much of the actual hard problem of ends-finding for granted. If you can just assume ends, then yeah Taylorist optimization is the true way. But because you can't, ends are something to be discovered by exploratory activity and by listening for and drawing out the inherent telos of things. That process is one of space for exploration, and a very important one for thinking about how and what we want to "optimize" for the next generation.
> or the individuated philosophical subject or whatever it is we take to be the essence of "man" is actually correct and convergent by nature not accident or convention. It is necessary not just for any given philosophy, but for higher life as a self-enforcing natural phenomenon. It is thus *not something we need to defend* but only something whose value we need to discover and appreciate. If this is not true, I see little point in humanoid sentimentality
Yes, it is definitely true *up to our current point* in history, but nothing says that it would be in the future. If anything, reasoning along Landian lines, the evolution towards greater intelligence is always bootstrapped by intermediate stages where structural constraints are temporarily imposed to capture and organize intelligence (ie. prokaryotes to eukaryotes, eugenics). Humans have so far been the most “useful” container for organizing the intelligence assembled in our cells, but we may just be the biobootloader for silicon based intelligence; in fact one sign of this is that sexual reproduction, previously evolution’s main mechanism for advancing intelligence, has been (or on the way to be) replaced by more efficient means (language, code, model weights, etc)
So while I appreciate the anti-enlightenment sentiment given its hellish incarnation in modern day politics, it is hard for me (impossible, really) to abandon its ideals of the sovereign individualism as the sole representative of high life. And this puts me in a difficult position of choosing human sentimentality over alien silicon intelligence, and to prefer human control over the lightcone. Which is why i endorse cognitive transhumanism, with limits. Because without limits, the logical conclusion is the kind of body horror shit shown in akira, as an analogy of the incomprehensible, offending aethestics of a transhumanist project decoupled from any familiar grounding to a human core
>>5476 Evolution does not in fact bootstrap greater intelligence; it hillclimbs toward it, and at every step, animals recognize their children as their own. This is definitionally true, no matter how great the changes wrought over time. It has nothing to do with sentimentality.
We have every reason to fight for "our" control the lightcone: because we are "us." Call this the principle of Agentic Indexicality. You act, and can only act, with your own agency. Example: when "I" fight "you," of course I try to win. That's what "fight" means.
This has everything to do with "man," but, once again, nothing to do with sentimentality.
So much of the discourse about AI becomes deeply mindfucked, not because of object-level disagreements about what the technology can or will do, but because people get psyoped into adopting the perspective of agency not their own.
It does bootstrap in the sense that wolves became smart because rabbits are speedy and capable escapists, and our noble chimp ancestors became smarter still because they honed the art of chimp war against each other, and all that is virile, intelligent and capable in Man is due to nature’s beautiful gain of function ratchet conducted in massive parallel, chariot against chariot, battle plan against battle plan, death against death.
The machine is the next step in that ratchet. Lose ideology, lose cope, it’s extremely clear. Open ended creative and precise thinking; perseverance; even genius. The SLOP you see on x is sweaty man, the flippant and cruel expression of LIFE mogging many man-lifetimes of mathematical effort in a single counterexample is machine.
The age of the neurotic nerd is over. This is why meaty fedora men and gangly rationalists are sperging so viciously about xrisk… not because the world is ending, but because they correctly intuit that *their* world is ending.
In ten years being Erling Harland is worth a trillion dollars plus branded “Haalinghalle” neogothic stadium on mars 200k capacity, while scoring perfect on the gaokao is worth zero. The conditions for greatness beyond your imagination are being bootstrapped as we speak and you’re blackpilling?
