by BlisteredWhippet » Tue 15 Apr 2008, 03:22:28
These thoughts are perhaps too uneasy for the likes of this website.
But the fact remains that differences abound. The genome is fully integrating. The jewel of civilization might just be the inadvertent creation of
A: "Super-Humans", because of the unprecedented opportunity for a genetic reshuffling of traits.
and
B: A population crisis cresting the same time as the technology needed to cull it.
and
C: Gene therapies sophisticated enough to eliminate genetic problems and improve upon the functioning and ability of the organism.
The trend toward "merging" of the races, is, I think inevitable as much as irreversible. The conviction from which racial thinking generates is the R-brain subsystem. The R-Brain has been keeping "us" down for millenia. Its that irritating, won't go away part of our brain that overpowers our higher-order thoughts. Its the tail that wags the dog.
I think here that perhaps an r-brain is necessary to deal with other r-brains. Leading to the corrolary:
1. If the r-brian is deactivated, r-society must also be deactivated.
More ammunition for a scenario where a mass cull needs to be performed. Society or culture, as we know it, must be deactivated, since these are largely functionary elements of the relationships between r-brains. Will post-humans need "pets" as so many r-brained homonids do?
My own intuition is that having a human as a pet would be not bad, although a post-human's rationale for such indulgent egoism seems unlikely, without an r-brain to facilitate the random firing of neural networks that masquerade as "feelings".
Even so, a human might actually like being fed, stroked, and pampered all day long. It would probably invoke a blissful sense of peace and serenity into most people. We already express all instincts in this direction.
An enhanced-brain post-human without an r-brain is going to be experiencing states of awareness and emotion that contemporary people aren't going to be able to fathom. I can only describe it in the clumsiest, infantile forms: People will be really, really, really happy. Its going to be a "load off" for the brain without the trappings of evolution constantly in the picture.
But, in losing r-brains, will we be losing "our minds"? I think not. Our mental state is going to be better than ever. People flail through modern life rushing from one crisis or disaster to the next, only to find the joke's on them, that, for all their worrying, the reality wasn't so bad. The thing that's jerking our chain is our old, hardwired circuitry. Drug and non-drug therapies prove that that stuff is like a chronic infection of the mind. Its treatable but always present. Its an artifact of the order of the Universe and Biochemistry, but "we" don't need "it".
Its clear to me that intelligence was incarnated by the universe and the logical and proper use of it is a justification of its own ends. It supercedes logic, emotion, and morality. Intelligence, radically adaptive intelligence most of all, doesn't in itself exist to prove anyone's theories or arguments. And its preeminence in our physiology, its successes, and its revelations tell me that its works are not subject to a historical revision.
In the future, the history books will say, there were some people who were smart(er), then something happened, then there were a group of smarter people who then devoted themselves to becoming even smarter, etc.... until we come to some limiting factor far in the future. And by that time I imagine that none of those humans will look like us except superficially. And we wouldn't have a clue as to where to start identifying with commonalities of their experience, either emotional, logical, or spiritual, because, well, we'll be the Cro-Magnon. Our words, our social structures will be as alien to them as a monkey's world is to our own.
pushthebuttonpleasenow.