How can I defeat transhumanism as an idea? It feels like every time I retort I'm met by some stunningly simple statement that is completely true yet feels totally empty. I cite happiness and they say "just dopamine". Every emotion is boiled down to chemical reactions and they use math to try and describe that it's impossible for this to be an original universe and we all exist in a copy of a copy of a copy ect.
I feel so overwhelmed yet I have no ground to stand on. They're correct, I think. But I don't want to believe it. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I don't want drugs to be a substitute for success and I want things to have objective value. What can I say to beat them? I don't want to be a nihilist.
Chase Walker
The easiest way I've found to beat a transhumanist is to show him that the first post is the best post.
Michael Adams
just hold his power button down
Jack Lopez
Meaning is derived, it is not intrinsic. Most classical structures of meaning such as religion exist solely to distract from the existential abyss.
Owen Foster
Sorry, there can be no victory for you.
Jordan Sanders
If the problem with happiness was only dopamine anti-depression drugs would just abuse that. The problem is that while it's possible to recreate the triggers of dopamine release it's impossible to know if it will actually cause the release, because even neuroscientist don't really know how the brain actually work.
Brandon Cox
Is meaning just a distraction then? Is the abyss reality? Are we pulling the wool over our own eyes?
Oliver Morales
>people who fall for the robotic jew.
nihilism is misunderstood. it doesnt mean "life means nothing", it represents the rejection of an imposed meaning by others. through experience and progression in life, we discover and define the meaning for our own life, not have it dictated by those in power or those we trust.
as for "winning" the deb8, thats not what deb8ing is for... you cant change someones mind in a debate, you only end up reinforcing them. t. every debate thats ever occurred.
most you could do is point out that theyre basically atheists who are trying to build for themselves and afterlife, that their so-called uploaded consciousness would be nothing but an imitation of self, that they as individuals would in fact be long gone leaving behind a mere perversion of their identity. transhumanists are cucks.
Wyatt Jones
Meaning is meaning, nothing less and nothing more, and it is derived from your experiences, your upbringing, and your genes.
To attribute a higher power to your meaning of the universe is faulty, but to say your meaning of the universe means nothing is also faulty.
How else would we orient ourselves in the universe if we did not attribute some value to something? As unsatisfying as it may sound, meaning is what you make of it.
Camden Hughes
these guys are deluded - some of the may be among the most intelligent people around, but they have absolutely zero wisdom when they imagine "progress" concerning our nature. they're benignly incorrect at best, and dangerously naive at worst - considering the amount of money and connections some of these folks have.
these futurists think they can out-think human nature with technology. the bodies we're inhabiting aren't our age but the age of life on earth. that's a long time for creatures to figure out how to not die in the environment, and we've gotten really good at that. why these guys think they'd be able to think up better answers for survival for us when their hopes and dreams are simply a technology-fetishist's vain hopes for immortality and superpowers is beyond me.
Joseph Rodriguez
>these futurists think they can out-think human nature with technology. the bodies we're inhabiting aren't our age but the age of life on earth. that's a long time for creatures to figure out how to not die in the environment, and we've gotten really good at that. why these guys think they'd be able to think up better answers for survival for us when their hopes and dreams are simply a technology-fetishist's vain hopes for immortality and superpowers is beyond me.
the entire point is that you can use the techniques and processes that evolution has already devised to bootstrap yourself into higher levels of intelligence, which you can then use to bootstrap even further and so on.
and besides, even on a moral level i believe this is what humans are supposed to do. we're sentient, sapient, self aware and so on, why shouldn't we strive to be the very best we can be? aren't we fundamentally designed to invent, innovate and make our own lives easier?
if we can wrap the whole world in cables to talk to each other, create a massive power grid, and acquire the means to destroy ourselves, is enhancing ourselves really that radical? isn't it what we've always been doing, just by proxy?
Bentley Carter
i think its just because theyre scared, m8. they fear the big ride so theyre trying to avoid it. methinks theyre fucking retarded, id much rather go the way that everyone before us has, not be stuck in some rushed-to-market never-ending virtual reality fever trip where you can never sleep, never eat, never have relief, never even know if a thought you had is your own or whether it was implanted by pepsi.
Landon Price
>they use math if they're going to break down every abstraction that you present into its constituents then you might as well break down their abstractions (math/logic/science) as arbitrary human activities that have no meaning either. they're trying to be impractical so you should show them what being ironic really is like
Luis Price
Read The Artilect War, by Huge De Garis. Take the Terran argument.
Read the Unabomber Manifest. Argue that technology is enslavement.
If that fails, just say that you just want to watch the world world. No one can argue against pure, unrepentant solipsism.
Jack Moore
>even on a moral level i believe this is what humans are supposed to do okay so i'm supposed to assume your moral principle as a factual statement to reach your conclusion. i reject your belief that we're supposed to be in an infinite cycle of making life easier for ourselves because it will never stop and there's no actual definable end it to
Ethan Brooks
>letting google(tm) have power over your vital organs Great fucking idea
Jeremiah Turner
if it's possible, I'm not against it. but right now it's purely hypothetical. which means it's trivial science fiction fantasies by nerds who don't have anything else to look forward to. all of them lack a religion, so they posit some future where technology will circumvent death. and I just don't buy it - I don't think it'll happen
Jonathan Jackson
Equating doing drug highs to natural highs like fucking a girl or a runner's high or the thrill of combat is fucking retarded. That's like saying you've experienced Europe because you saw the sistine chapel in a picture, and thus you wouldn't need to see it in person. Or that you could possibly appreciate what being in a fight is like 'cause you watched a couple of Rocky movies. This shit isn't even an argument, it's stupidity.
Thomas Perry
you can reject it, that's fine, but that doesn't change the underlying reality that humans are greedy and will try to acquire more than they currently have. this is going to happen, it's just a matter of time.
but mate, most of this shit isn't hypothetical. in fact, a large part of why we don't have bionic arms and shit is down to governmental issues. same with almost all experimental medicine actually.
simply put: if our bodies can do it naturally, that obviously means it can be done. that's straight forward. and if our bodies can do it through billions of years of trial and error, surely we can do it in much less time if we take a few tips and tricks here and there and steam through.
we may never get to the hypothetical complete immersion VR that a lot of people like to talk about, but we sure as hell can become cyborgs and create much more advanced VR.
Lucas Allen
>you kill them.
Alexander Cox
I used to think that transhumanism might be a way for humanity to proceed upon an evolutionary path without doing so via natural means (which we've all but conquered now).
But then I realised that it'd just mean waking up every morning to a pepsi-sponsored list of breakfast recommendations beamed into my skull, which would allow me to get up in 30 seconds once the ad stops playing on my retinas.
We are, on the whole, better at fucking things up and degrading them than creating them in the first place.
We'll just find a way to fuck up the singularity too.
Carter Myers
>even neuroscientist don't really know how the brain actually work. yet
Jayden Reyes
>I don't want to live in that kind of world.
Neither did he.
David Cox
You don't beat the transhumanist. You horrify them with their own ideas.
Yes, eventually people will be augmented and genetically engineered from the ground up.
But it won't be everybody! Only the most wealthy, powerful people and their families will have access to this kind of life altering technology and they will separate into a genetically superior species.
Since by this point we'll have automation in full swing, transhumanism will be marked by the extermination of almost all non-augmented people because they will in fact be genetically inferior.
Julian Harris
Microtransactions.
If the wrong person figures shit out you will have to pay for microtransactions.
Also who is going to care for the computer after you are code.
Daniel Parker
>Yet Hopefully they'll never know because it's the end of the line for humanity if they do.
Logan Nelson
In answer to your question, though, they're not right. They're just lost in moral relativism. Happiness might just be "dopamine" to you, but it's also a long, long list of naturally derived consequences for others, and for the world around you.
If you're overly logical, you tend to boil things down, and your conclusions can't be generally applied any more, which is, paradoxically, illogical.
One can infer an ocean from a drop of water, as Sherlock Holmes might, but that ocean only exists in inference, and cannot be generally assumed. Inference cannot become assumption.
Ayden Ortiz
>describe that it's impossible for this to be an original universe and we all exist in a copy of a copy of a copy ect. irrelevant because we can speculate but not prove it
>I cite happiness and they say "just dopamine". Every emotion is boiled down to chemical reactions that's reductionism. emergent features are important in complex systems, otherwise we would be industinguishable from a lump of carbon and a puddle of water.
>I feel so overwhelmed yet I have no ground to stand on I'm not sure whether critical thinking can be taught to adults.
Jayden Reyes
>I don't want to be a nihilist. Why? It just means that there is no intrinsic meaning and purpose in things.
You can still assign your own meaning. As mentions for most people it is just assigned for them anyway.
Julian Barnes
Slap them with the ship of theseus.
Basically make them question they're even the same person anymore when they replace large parts of their organism with artificial enhancements.
Charles Perez
>which we've all but conquered now
Technophiles are so arrogant they actually believe this shit.
Carter Phillips
Why don't we just put some guinea pig in a miserable situation and administer feel good chemicals such as dopamine regularly and see how they rate their quality of life after the experiment?
Oliver Diaz
Having conquered something does not mean having total control over it.
Think of humans as administrators over an unstable, complex system. If we make bad decisions the whole system can come tumbling down. But we're still the ones that can actively steer it with sufficient effort and planning.
Camden Brown
>But it won't be everybody! Only the most wealthy, powerful people and their families will have access to this kind of life altering technology and they will separate into a genetically superior species. > >Since by this point we'll have automation in full swing, transhumanism will be marked by the extermination of almost all non-augmented people because they will in fact be genetically inferior.
this is entirely assuming that such a technology will forever remain completely inaccessible to anyone who is not at the top of society, and in fact, it assumes that there WOULD be anyone at the top of society.
now, before you call me a dirty commie, hear me out.
why do we have civilization? we have it because we're far more powerful when grouped together then we are individually. it also allows us to specialize, which has the side effect of compartmentalizing everything and making things more robust.
we only do this because alone we're weak little apes with no inborn knowledge and a genetic programming that forces us to fight each other.
but, with automation and advances in materials tech, we may arrive at a point where we don't actually need full on factories anymore. if you want something, perhaps you could just use a star trek style replicator to create it at home (and if you disagree as to the possibility of this happening, ask old cunts what they thought about the star trek communicator then go and look at the bleeding edge of nanotech), you wouldn't actually need to rely on factories.
you could free information. from everything we can tell, encryption is very easy to use but incredibly hard to break. with shit like hash based knowledge systems (assange wrote something up about it iirc) you could make the spread of information permanent, as long as said information is able to get out in the first place.
cont
Kayden Turner
Well, i'm not really a technophobe..but we have. I don't think we'll physically alter ourselves any longer to suit our environment, because we're altering the environment to suit ourselves.
Henry Williams
>transhumanist party take over a country >if you don't get chipped with the compulsory neural impant/tracking device/thought/behaviour monitoring implant you'll be fined $100 every day
Anthony Torres
Your attempt at a nuanced view of it is no less delusional.
Which scientific field do you work in?
William Mitchell
Which scientific field do you work in?
Sebastian Martin
kek
Kevin King
I don't?
Bentley Parker
>why do we have civilization? To appease the vagina.
Hunter King
>In answer to your question, though, they're not right. They're just lost in moral relativism.
This is my issue with transhumanists, on what basis are transhumanist ethics grounded? For religious people, it's some type of god or spirit. For most liberals and libertarians, it's human nature. Where do transhumanists derive their ethics from, some idea of progress or efficiency? Where are these ideas derived from?
The whole thing to me sounds like some Nick Land-esque acceleration toward human extermination. Why should we become cyborgs when it would be more efficient to kill everyone and let full machines take over?
Tyler Parker
>implying normal humans will let you exist in your degenerate delusion.
Easton Long
...
Brayden Baker
>The problem is that while it's possible to recreate the triggers of dopamine release it's impossible to know if it will actually cause the release
I've done lots of amphetamines and they're dopamine releasers; from my experiences I'm pretty sure the recreated triggers did their job and did it well.
The issue is that happiness isn't euphoria, or a sense of focus and purpose, strength, superiority, quickness, brilliance, triumph, or any of the other feelings that dopamine provides.
Good chemicals feel good physically and physiologically, but feeling good isn't being happy.
Happiness is a byproduct, or result, of feeling a deep but simple sense of approval of / satisfaction with the person you have become through your actions, choices, and circumstances.
knowing even if you endured pain or sacrifice, you did the right thing. Knowing that you bettered a lot of other people's lives, knowing that you prevented or reduced pain in the world, being validated, knowing you earned something and receiving it... stuff like that.
Is the argument that literally every feeling, however conflicted, multifaceted, negative or positive is no more than a chemical soup of different quantities of neurotransmitters firing in response to the perceived virtuousness/fortitude of each one of your actions?
even if you made yourself vey very sad but knew you had to do the right thing, thereby investing in your long term peace of mind, sense of well being in your own skin as a person who is not at odds with themselves/lacks integrity?
Is a sociopath just a person whose empathetic neurochemicals fail to fire? imho, it's not a calculation of chemical levels. Your brain doesn't just process chemicals, it arranges the chemical release events in a chronological context and reflects on it all, and can even consciously suppress their abidance or observance of their emotions
Aiden Harris
Fpbp, checked
Easton Sanchez
This is almost always the case with you people. Popscience has given you a warped perspective.
Angel Young
Imagine a transhumanist prison. You could make someone experience maximal pain forever. We could Create Hell.
Glad I'll be dead before that.
Benjamin Long
2/whatever
with the freedom of information, increasingly cheap computing power, and as of yet theoretically possible but currently practically infeasible manufacturing technologies, we could potentially get to the point where we don't need to rely on factories, a military, a state and so on.
at that point, if anyone else figures out the trick to, for example, your genetic engineering technology (despite the fact that we're working through the human genome at a rapid pace and it's gotten to the point where in some cases the public research sector is publishing things that the governments of entire countries don't want to be released), the gig is up. you can't hide it. it's done.
of course there is another extremely concerning factor to this: you have the risk of people manufacturing nukes, other weapons and so on easily, states falling apart and savages (looking at you muslims) genociding, and all other sorts of horrific shit. you also have the fact that it seems very difficult to separate the inbuilt defense mechanisms of our brains from the rest of our brains, and at that point it does have to be asked if we're even human at that point (i reckon that we are, just on a higher level, but regardless that's a horrifically bloody scenario and i don't like thinking about it).
in short, we can't sustain the point at which we're at now, we can't go onto the societal model that the transhumanists propose without probably ushering in a clusterfuck 100 times worse than WW2, and the concept of the singularity necessarily lends itself to being very easy to understand but completely useless for any predictions whatsoever.
how will we get past this? i have no clue. will we have to get past it? in my opinion yes. will people die? yes, maybe even all humans. can we stop it? not without killing ourselves.
Jace Bennett
I suppose when pushed, they would also cite human nature. Most of the transhumanists in my acquaintance have fallen into the obvious trap of claiming it's a way to "perfect" human nature.
Of course when asked what this perfection should be, their answers are always opinions. Some of the take the Sam Harris route of the least possible suffering for everybody, but it falls flat because we don't need technology to appease natural states like suffering.
Basically, these people just kind of want to be awesome, without having to work for it.
Henry Miller
Who exactly is "you people"? And what's warped about this perspective? Humanity has been adapting the natural world to suit itself since the first cities of mesopotamia, and likely before that. Building a house is doing just that. If your city isn't within walking distance of a river? Congratu-fuckin-lations. You're defying your environs and adapting them to your purpose.
Justin Roberts
There's literally nothing wrong with augmenting your capabilities.
But I wouldn't really call replacing real things with drugs and simulations transhumanism. That matrix shit is something else.
The best argument I have against it is that if I were in a simulation, the moment I'd find out, I'd try to get out and make an impact in the "real world" asap. If I found out my experiences were just from being drugged up I'd kill whoever did that to me to make it stop.
The reason why I'd feel so strongly about being stuck in a fake world is that there's an instinctual desire to do things that "matter" and it's impossible to "matter" when you're a drugged out vegetable or stuck in a meaningless simulator.
Anyone who tries to rip that instinct out of me has killed a large part of me as that is a core component of my being. And that would prompt self defense against someone like that.
Chase Howard
Top 1% will become cyborgs and accelerate away from Homo Sapiens who will be left to die.
Camden Turner
Buddhism and non--dualism are the final red pills
Alexander Martin
Just tell him we haven't the technology for transhumanism to be feasible. Imagine taking a IPhone 2 and hooking it up to your body only to realize that things have enhanced a lot more over a short period of time. There's no reason to have constant augmentations for new tech when we can detach. As far as VR goes, that is infeasible as well until we develop some free energy source that can be controlled by AIs.
TL;DR Not advanced enough, not gonna happen.
Jacob Gomez
>accelerate away
They're far more likely to become useless soma-riddled emperors of the self.
Josiah Wright
Self directed evolution will always fail because intent never trumps the wisdom of nature's cruelty
Dylan Reyes
>it will never stop and there's no actual definable end it to I feel like thats the point.... if it ended, and the absolute best life-form/civilization was reached which could no longer be improved whatsoever, then there'd be no reason left for intelligent beings to carry on. No mountains left to climb, not even a tiny hilltop. They'd have no choice but to an hero.
Kevin Barnes
Ask him why he doesn't just shoot up heroin all day then.
Lucas Robinson
by that logic everyone else will too. the core concept around a runaway intelligence explosion has been very well documented (create intelligence, augment it, use smarter intelligence to create better intelligence, continue until you hit a cap), the problem is that nobody wants to do it.
Josiah Baker
physical enhancement of our limbs is one thing - that's relatively straightforward - but messing with our brains and genes would require human testing that will be next-to-impossible to gain approval for.
if some ingenious method crops up that sidesteps the entire issue then cool, but that's not a minor hurdle for these types of discussions - it's a dealbreaker whenever human testing comes up.
even if some theoretician is 100% sure that some tweak to the genetic code will have a totally positive effect like doubling IQ, there's no guarantee it won't seriously mess the individual up in other ways that aren't trivial.
hardly anybody's mother will offer their firstborn up for "advancements" on the altar of "human progress" if it's untested and nobody knows how safe it is. and governments will stop the few who are willing to subject their progeny these modifications because in utero/vitro human testing debases human beings to the level of lab rats.
so it won't happen - legally at least
Jose Allen
There will always be things to do until we reach the point in the universe where hubble expansion has made it so that it's impossible to reach other galaxies and all matter within the galaxy has quantum tunneled into iron-56.
Jack Roberts
This is literally the transhumanist future. Direct stimulation pleasure cycle: input modified to maximise please, bodies bio-engineered to raise cap on please. Levels of perpetual orgasm you cannot possibly imagine.
All the while being protected by a swarm of advanced AI nanobots programmed by these zealous machinecult addicts.
Charles Hernandez
>Who exactly is "you people"? Those who speak of conquering nature, have warped understandings of the depths of the current body of scientific knowledge, and those who have no grasp of the limits of man's ability to harness what limited knowledge is possessed.
Beavers build dams, birds build nests, ants build vast colonies, and chinos make tools of sticks. You think yourself apart from and above nature, but you are not and cannot escape her.
Cameron Cox
checked; qft
Liam Johnson
>chinos Chimps
Leo Carter
i do believe radical experiments regarding the things you're talking about are taking place, they're just top secret and hidden by the governments that are doing them. remember mkultra?
but yeah people are too morally constrained to allow common place human testing to happen, the only way i see us getting past it is a "cyber race" if you will started by china, which honestly i see on the horizon.
William Thompson
I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim that because beavers build dams and chimps can hold a stick that humanity hasn't vastly altered the entire globe to suit their own ends. We've not utterly conquered nature, but she's not a big issue any longer, and we're probably not more than a few hundred years away from making nature bend to our will.
Have you seen what our desalinization plants are doing in Africa these days? Great work, slow progress, but it won't take long.
Elijah Butler
while I do think China might have research in this vein, I don't see them sparking a race over it with other great powers. they've been intentionally discreet in their approach toward global superpower status, so as to not spook the other dominant geopolitical entities
gotta go. good talking to you, aussie
Ryan Fisher
The idea that life is only dopamine really disturbs me. It makes me have violent thoughts.
Levi Brown
>we build houses >so do other animals >that's disingenuous
You are deluded because you live in a first world nation and have ever experienced the reality of resource scarcity. This momentary period of surplus will end eventually and we are one plague away from a long overdue culling of the population.
Desalination plants don't mean shit. That isn't conquering nature, it is going to great lengths to satisfying it.
Austin Sullivan
Not everyone is concerned by that. And the standard counter is that your constituent atoms get replaced anyway. Water goes through every few days, calcium in your bones takes a few years.
Julian Gray
Compsci. Anyway, look up the percentage of land used for agriculture and feeding livestock.
Jose Davis
>we only do this because alone we're weak little apes with no inborn knowledge and a genetic programming that forces us to fight each other.
This is fucking cuck talk. Humans are the most powerful beings on the planet. We have the best hand-eye coordination, the greatest long distance endurance, the most powerful and neuro-flexible brains, some of the best eyesight, and every human comes hardcorded with grammar/language formation from birth.
>don't actually need full on factories anymore >star trek style replicator >bleeding edge of nanotech
Nanotech is fucking bullshit. Nano level physics works so differently from the marco level that it is fundamentally impossible to build replicating nanomachines or really any useful machines at all. Simple Brownian motion will rip these machines apart, thermodynamics will ensure they will constantly overhead, and the energy draw and communications have never been addressed. For most part, Nanotech is cold fusion: perpetually 20 years away for the last 60 years, but still affixed to research because its good marketing.
>you could free information >through encryption
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you high? Why would the increasing ease at which you could hide information make information more "free"?
>don't need to rely on factories, a military, a state and so on
Because magical nanobots will just make crime and religion and the need for political/culture/ethic unity to disappear?
>we're working through the human genome at a rapid pace and it's gotten to the point where in some cases the public research sector is publishing things that the governments of entire countries don't want to be released
[Citation Needed]
>you have the risk of people manufacturing nukes
Surely the nanobots can manufacture plutonium out of thin air too, right?
>very difficult to separate the inbuilt defense mechanisms of our brains from the rest of our brain
What the fuck are you talking about?
Jeremiah Moore
Well if they don't give a fuck about the possibility that they're unknowingly replacing their conciousness with a copy everytime they go to sleep or after some period of time, then they're practically nihilists and it's safe to dismiss any stance on ethics that they have based on that.
You can one up them by telling them that by their logic, nothing has any meaning because we can't prove that reality even exists and isn't just a simulation running inside my brain and the entire universe is just a computer program and none of you other fags even exist. Since this is unprovable by definition, they just ran out of bullshit arguments to justify their nihilistic ways.
Brandon Wood
One minor solar flare and you shut down.
Keep in mind solar flares are relatively frequent, often interfereing with telecommunications.
Isaac Carter
>Compsci That's what I thought.
How is the amount of land in agricultural use relevant?
Jayden Flores
>We've not utterly conquered nature, but she's not a big issue any longer Well, it's not quite that easy. Climate change can still easily fuck us over and it will take tremendous effort to prevent that.
So it's not like we can alter systems with a snip of a finger. But on the other hand it also demonstrates that with sufficient effort we can have an impact on global scales within decades.
This is orders of magnitude more impact than any other species ever had. Except maybe the cyanobacteria that caused the great oxygen holocaust.
Noah Cooper
It is a proxy for controlled modification over the environment.
David Fisher
fpbp. Checked.
Blake Stewart
>solar flare Don't worry, a nip and kraut who aren't involved in a scientific discipline have assured me that nature has been conquered or will be soon.
Landon Wilson
Serial Experiments Lain is a philosophical rejection of transhumanism.
David Jenkins
All animals shape their habitat to some extent. This doesn't prove conquest of nature, but dependence on it as we are a part of a larger system.
Carter Wilson
It's disingenuous to claim that because lesser animals have a measly fraction of human power that we, who have every power to build and maintain, are any less powerful.
The fact you had to go to plague to satisfy your hypothetical is telling. It literally needs to be one of the few things that can still fuck us over. Tidal waves can't do it. Earthquakes can't do it. Nature seems to be trying to flail us off, but it's not going to work.
>That isn't conquering nature, it is going to great lengths to satisfying it
it's literally adapting it to our use. How does one satisfy nature, exactly? Of what mind is nature to be satisfied?
Nathan Torres
Strawman much? Nobody is talking about controlling cosmic events.
And I for one am not claiming total control either. Since when has anyone had total control over anything? Against, the initial claim was conquest, conquest does not entail absolute control over every miniscule aspect. That would require an omnipotenent actor.
Jacob Butler
You are a human. You value things because they relate to your needs as a human. You can't look at the universe as if you are the universe, only as a human. Humanity matters to humans. Nihilism is a mental illness that disrupts your ability to recognize that you matter.
Luis Cook
AND YOU DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND
Nathan Gomez
Of course it's all relative. Humans just do it to qualitatively different extents than any other species does.
Of course there is more to be done, the grasp can be tightened etc. etc. Can it slip from our hands? That is also possible.
But right now humanity as a species at least has the capability of achieving reasonably set goals of modification of the ecosphere. Consciously chosen goals mind you.
Sebastian Rivera
science is bullshit, op. reject their basic assumptions, which is that they've proved the things they think they have.
thinking doesn't even happen in the brain. it happens in the blood. the brain is just a battery. gravity is an extremely flawed equation. black people are a different sub-species. they say there's no scientific basis for race? actually there's no scientific basis for species, genus, order, phylum, or kingdoms either. just arbitrary distinctions in the process of life's accretion. DMT is the realness hormone.
reductionism is a poisonous ideology and if you have a sufficient moral grounding you can reject it on that premise alone. consistency is what the leader and ruler demands of his subordinates, the subordinates have no expectation of consistency on the rulers part.
Ian Long
Easy OP, just take pic related and expand from there. If it's just chemicals, just cells that replace themselves completely every 10 years, just electricity traveling through your axioms then what are we? Why live, because it's what all organisms do? Humans are the only creatures to kill themselves with their own inventions and willfully knowing what death is. So why do we live, what's the point? Even the greatest philosofers knew there had to be something that served as a soul in the human being to exist, a concience, but who are we to define what is a concience, after all the only beings with a concience we know of are ourselves.
Joshua Phillips
>How does one satisfy nature, exactly? He means that we as humans have to drink water. Desalination plants are a way that we satisfy nature because we are a part of nature and need water. Or at least, I'm guessing.
Kevin Young
Well, we are natural beings, and I don't see any way for us to negate that need. I'm not going to argue that we don't have natural processes.
Robert Jenkins
kekd and checked
Elijah Morris
I never said we are less powerful. Why are you so insecure about the status of humanity?
Plague isn't the only thing, my point was that even a tiny virus can decimate a species. There are plenty of other issues that can arise, in particular draught, disease, or anything else that could affect crop yields. Pest control is in the same boat as antibiotics, we are running on borrowed time. The species targeted adapt very quickly and the list of options gets smaller all the time.
There are few species that would be made extinct by earthquake or tidal wave. Those are highly localized events, but also perfect example of the uncontrollability of the world in which we live. Those events claim human lives every year and sometime on a large scale.
>need water to live >remove salt to make water potable >look mom I conquered nature
No, you satisfied your physical needs. You are a slave to nature like everything else.
Nathan Williams
Youre on fire bro
Asher Ramirez
trans humanists don't use arguments, they are idiots.
if it's just dopamine, then why is he fighting? Why doesn't he let me use him as a door mat?
His response is nonsense, something like "I have to breed to continue my linage" which completely contradicts the previous statement that is obviously designed to cheapen emotion and the soul.
So you ask him why you shouldn't just kill him, and he argues the law. What is the law to him? Isn't it just a bunch of words?
He just picks up whatever helps him at the moment and tries to defend himself with it.
he is just a barbarian with no purpose, grasping at straws.
Trans humanists ARE trans humanists.
They have transitioned into GARBAGE.
ignore them.
Oliver Ramirez
Your consciousness is permanently bound to your gray matter. A digital copy of you is an immitation-- if you die, you will not suddenly experience life through the eyes of your digital "clone." You would just be dead, and the digital clone would be nothing more than an interactive headstone.
Benjamin Reyes
I suggest you consult a dictionary.
David James
nice goodposting
Charles Russell
>Why live, because it's what all organisms do? Pretty much. of course you can choose to do something with the time you have.
>So why do we live, what's the point? There is no point. You are the result of evolution, which is just a very complex system of optimizing self-propagation. You exist because existing is what this thing optimizes for.
>Even the greatest philosofers knew there had to be something that served as a soul in the human being to exist, a concience, but who are we to define what is a concience, after all the only beings with a concience we know of are ourselves. Sounds like self-adulation to me. Your brain is just more complex than that of other animals so it is capable of a very limited form of introspection. You can apply the theory of mind (which some animals have) to yourself. Big deal. It has its uses of course, but it's not a magical thing.
Anyway, that chain of reasoning is not going to faze a nihilist.