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Peter Watts's avatar

I dunno, dude. I think I disagree with your initial premise. I think Humanness is the first thing we need to get rid of, even if we accept as sacrosanct the fundamentally egotistical premise that Human survival should be some kind of prime imperative.

It’s thanks to Humanness that we’re wiping out 70,000-130,000 species every year. It’s thanks to hyperbolic discounting that today’s minor inconvenience is always more real to us than tomorrow’s global catastrophe. Family Values keep us churning out self-centred parasites, most of whom will just sit on the couch snarfing Cheetos and playing Animal Crossing until the ceiling crashes in, who we will defend with our lives for no better reason than that molecules have tricked us into making other molecules like them.

Of course, this isn’t just Human nature. Short-sighted selfishness is an inevitable hallmark of any organism forged by natural selection, because natural selection has no foresight. The difference in our case is the force-multiplier of Human intellect: that thing we could use to control our instincts, but instead use to make up complex rationalizations promoting them. The problem is that brains which evolved to handle short-term problems with local impacts now run technology with global impacts and long-term consequences. That’s Human.

We’re behaving completely naturally, of course. But it’s not working, is it? Being Human is killing us and our own life-support systems. Being Human threatens the survival of complex society itself.

We want to have a hope in hell of pulling this out of the fire, we gotta start behaving unnaturally ASAP.

There are indications of ways we might do that. Certain brain injuries that strip away Family Values, improving our ability to make ethical choices even if they don’t benefit our own larvae. Diseases that have the promising side-effect of suppressing the religious impulse. Hell, if we could just edit hyperbolic discounting out of the human mindset, get the gut to recognize the reality of future consequences, we’d be halfway home. Ironically, the best hope of saving Humanity might be by making us less Human. IMO this would be a good thing, both for our species and for all the others we’re wiping out—because this thing we are now, Erik, this thing you want to persist endlessly unchanged into the future: dude, it sucks.

Also I’m not entirely convinced that the incomprehension of the little guy in the Chinese Room really proves anything. Of course he doesn’t understand Chinese, any more than a single neuron would be able to tell you what the whole brain is thinking. Surely the question is whether the system as a whole comprehends, not whether any given gear or cog does.

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ConnGator's avatar

I am not sure the Nietzschean future ends they way you predict. An interesting alternate reality, as portrayed in "Beggars In Spain", is that GM people recognize the humanness of the non-GM. Right now, people in Mensa don't say that low-IQ people are sub-human. (I presume, having never been to a Mensa meeting.)

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