tranhumanism controversy

I read Timothy Leary's book "Game of Life" back in the 90's, and it's influenced how I look at the tarot and psychology. In the book, Leary discusses his 8-circuit model of consciousness. Recently, I discovered online that it's related to "transhumanism" (a term I just recently heard of) and that transhumanism was a term coined by the brother of Aldous Huxley in 1957. I stumbled across a website that takes a dim view of transhumanism and lists various media that is said to promote it. I find the books of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson interesting, and I think technology can help people such as with limb replacement after accidents. Do you think there's some conspiracy to promote a world in which we're all dehumanized cyborgs or whatever it is tranhumanism promotes? Are media stars like Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Black Eyed Peas being used in some vast conspiracy?

Here's a few relevant webpages:
en.wikipedia.org...
vigilantcitizen.com...

a reply to: GreenElf

force hyping newborns is an early form of transhumanism.

The premise is that standard humans are defective when born and must be required to have something extra to be vested in society. Won't take the injections? Force them out of society, lock them up, ruin their lives etc.

The implications run deep for "standard" humans. Watch your back folks.

a reply to: GreenElf

I have a friend who has an implant which interferes with pain signals, sent from his lumbar region, to his brain. He had a herniated disk, which was then operated on, and a failed epidural injection subsequent to that, which was done incorrectly. Damaged caused during that episode of his life, meant that the hospital offered to fast track him into an experimental program to have this device fitted to mitigate the painful sensations that he was left with.

The device is entirely contained within his body, with the implant itself being wired to an area close to his spine, and connected to something very similar to an induction charging pad. This pad inside of him, sits somewhere around his abdomen and charges from another pad like device which gets laid over the surface of the skin, directly over the internal pad. The external pad is powered by a battery pack, which in turn is charged from the mains.

The devices settings were developed over time, in collaboration between my friend, and the consultants who fitted it, to optimise the amount of relief the signal jamming was giving him, by providing him with ideally tweaked modulation options.

Before he had the implant installed, he could barely walk without crying, and could not get comfortable anywhere. He was on so many opioids, just to be able to move around AT ALL, that he was virtually drooling for the majority of the time, barely awake, and even at his most wakeful, largely ignorant of things going on around him.

These days he is up and about, has gotten into longboarding, playing his bass guitar again and back practicing with his band, and so on. In short, he is living a normal life, other than the fact that he has to charge himself up occasionally of course. He has reclaimed his humanity, not lost it, and as long as this is the extent of the transhumanism that we see, as long as people use technological adaptations of their bodies to positive effect, then I fail to see what the problem would be with that.

However, when we start to see weaponised humans, with cybernetic implantations made to their structures which would increase their lethality to a degree impossible for an unaugmented human, or people who have implanted hardware, software, or God help us Wetware upgrades to themselves in order to turn themselves into mobile identity theft devices, or even worse, altered their neural network infrastructure to the degree that they can not only access the net directly with their minds, but BE accessed FROM the net and used like a flesh puppet... That is a stage in this process which needs to be defended against in my opinion.

Technologies which give people their lives back, these are obviously positive, and we should CLAMOUR for more of them! But in terms of the potentially negative connotations associated with the idea of augmented humans, there must be certain limits placed upon what technology can be developed, and for what purpose.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: GreenElfTechnologies which give people their lives back, these are obviously positive, and we should CLAMOUR for more of them! But in terms of the potentially negative connotations associated with the idea of augmented humans, there must be certain limits placed upon what technology can be developed, and for what purpose.

Your post illustrates the difference that I'm seeing between two brands of transhumanism. There's apparently a benign variety then another variety to guard against. Transhumanism is similar to a term like "liberalism" that has more than one distinct meaning, so debate can quickly become problematic. I take it Huxley was warning against the malevolent variety back in 1957. I wonder the extent that the media pushes it, such as the Wizard of Oz, etc. I always liked the Wizard of Oz and at least some of those music videos in the cited webpage seem fairly innocuous.

originally posted by: InverseLookingGlass
a reply to: GreenElf

force hyping newborns is an early form of transhumanism.

The premise is that standard humans are defective when born and must be required to have something extra to be vested in society. Won't take the injections? Force them out of society, lock them up, ruin their lives etc.

The implications run deep for "standard" humans. Watch your back folks.

I'm not aware of that practice which would be very disturbing.

R.A. Wilson as a Transhumanist? That's a new one on me... though he was a technical social utopian (and a brilliant philosopher and social essayist).

Leary was a bit more "gee-whiz" with tech and did go through a "meld with tech" phase as he has a tendency to think the best of people and didn't think through the horrible uses some psychopaths could find for the trend.... he was too optimistic... perhaps too evolved, heh.

But it depends upon one's definition of terms... and transhumanism obviously has a couple meanings.