December 12, 2010
from
PreventDisease Website
Transhumanism is the name of a movement
that claims to support the use of all forms of technology to improve
human beings.
It is far more than just a bunch of
harmless and misguided techie nerds, dreaming of sci-fi movies and
making robots. It is a highly organized and well financed movement
that is extremely focused on subverting and replacing every aspect
of what we are as human beings - including our physical biology, the
individuality of our minds and purposes of our lives - and the
replacement of all existing
religious and spiritual beliefs with a
new religion of their own - which is actually not new at all.
According to Ian Pearson, a British futurist, death will be a thing
of the past by 2050.
Pearson is one of many futurists, cybernetic
experts and artificial intelligence researchers whose thoughts are
converging on the same basic idea:
Why not upload everything that's in
the brain - everything that makes a person who they are - into a
computer and then download it again into a new body?
Transhumanism
The Age of Transitions
April 07,
2015
Many critics of Transhumanism claim the movement will eventually
create a self-replicating breed of artificial or
cybernetic life.
"There is an incredibly dangerous
potential for transhumanism research to create beings which have
no memory or programming for emotional attachment or empathy
which would be disastrous for human beings," said Robotics
Engineer Tomas Jelic.
One of the key concepts of old school
Transhumanism was the elitist pseudoscience of
Eugenics, or “racial
hygiene“, which is a concept that still exists today in the modern,
shiny, high-tech version of what is adoringly called Transhumanism,
Human+, or H+, by its cult followers.
The modern mutation of Transhumanism claims to only support
“voluntary eugenics“, which sounds much more benevolent than
mandatory sterilization and euthanasia of undesirable humans,
doesn’t it?
But, if you have any sense at all, you will probably
realize that this ethnic cleansing of the gene pool (“improving the
species” and “improving human genetic qualities”) simply cannot and
will not ever happen if it is voluntary.
We should all understand that ideas such as “voluntary eugenics”
will not be voluntary anymore, if and when the people who believe in
these radical ideas get political and financial power.
In fact, they
already do have substantial wealth and power, and are working very
hard to impose this Transhumanist agenda on our world - whether we
like it or not.
Transhumanists believe they are working toward a new and improved
existence, leaving everything we have known in the dust bin of
history, welcoming a new “Golden Age” of superbeings. They want to
become an entirely new species, transcending what we are as humans,
using radically advanced technology to achieve their goals.
They want to achieve brain uploading within a few decades. They see
the preliminary steps happening before 2020 and that's just 10 years
away. If there are unexpected breakthroughs with quantum computers
the time line will be shortened considerably.
Some are not so ambitious; they're satisfied with the idea of
virtual immortality. In that scenario everything that's an
individual is uploaded into a digital avatar and survives 24/7
within a permanent, theoretically eternal, Internet.
An organization called The Digital Immortality Institute (DII) is
researching the possibility of doing just that. DII has determined
the three things necessary to achieve digital immortality are:
-
guaranteed Internet access
-
insure the identity integrity of the
avatars for each individual user
-
make sure the
personality, memory, everything that makes up the person as a unique
individual, has been uploaded into the digital facsimile before the
actual person dies...
A member of the new transhuman movement (beyond human), scientist
Anders Sandberg believes uploading minds and downloading them again
into new bodies is a technology that's imminent.
He believes it will happen because of
Mankind's desire to overcome aging and death, as well as solving the
problems associated with overpopulation.
What is Mind
Uploading?
Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind
transfer) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a
biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer
system or another computational device.
The computer would have to run a
simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in
essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical
purposes, indistinguishably. The simulated mind is assumed to be
part of a
virtual reality-simulated world, supported by a simplified
body simulation model.
Alternatively, the simulated mind could
be assumed to reside in a computer inside (or connected to) a
humanoid robot or a biological body, replacing its brain.
Whole brain emulation is being portrayed as a "logical endpoint" of
the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields.
Under the guise of brain simulation and medical research, it is
being discussed in
artificial intelligence research publications as
an approach to
strong AI.
But among futurists and within the
transhumanist movement it is an important proposed
life extension
technology.
Another transhumanist, AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky is convinced
the technology must be developed quickly before a group or
government with evil intentions does it first. He sees artificial
intelligence as the key to unlock the immortality door. But it must
be done in the right way for if it's not, dire consequences
Some like 80-year old Marvin Minsky, called the father of artificial
intelligence, creator of artificial neural networks and the
co-founder of the AI lab at MIT, believes the general masses haven't
a clue about how to handle immortality, nor do they deserve it.
From
his ivory tower perspective he believes that scientists need the
extra time that immortality can provide, while the rest of humanity
should be satisfied with normal lifespans.
Minsky waves aside any ethical considerations and argues that
scientists are above such things.
No restrictions on the research and
applications, no regulation of any kind should be countenanced by
the scientific community.
"Scientists shouldn't have ethical
responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do
what they want. You shouldn't ask them to have the same values
as other people," Minsky adamantly declares.
Pragmatic
Morality
The Transhumanist idea that they call Pragmatic Morality, is simply
a recycled and renamed version of the oldest deception in the world
- that there is no good or evil.
Here is how this concept applies to the beliefs of the cult of
Transhumanism:
“Ethics and morals must serve, or at
least not stand in the way of, boundless self-actualization.
They should be tools and guidelines for successful living, not
instruments of senseless repression. Like the flesh, traditional
morality is something to be overcome.
There is no ‘Good’ and
‘Evil’; just efficiency and inefficiency; intelligence and
stupidity; winners and losers. There is only rational
self-interest, and those too timid and ignorant to pursue it.
This simple yet profound realization forms the bedrock of an
empowered worldview, and is a key step towards achieving
enlightenment and transcendence.”
Selling
Transhumanism to the Masses
“The planned use of propaganda and
other psychological actions having the primary purpose of
influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior… of
groups in such a way as to support the… objectives.”
“Various techniques are used, by any set of groups, and aimed to
influence a target audience’s value systems, belief systems,
emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior.”
This is often referred to as,
“winning hearts and minds“, or
similarly, “Capture their minds and their hearts and souls will
follow.”
Metacommunication is a natural human
communication process, which is as simple as saying, “I love you”,
while you are smiling - communication on two levels. Throw in a hug
and there are three levels of communicating this positive message.
All communication consists of (at least) two levels.
-
First, there is
the “content level” of what is being said, literally.
-
Second, there
is the level that Gregory Bateson calls metacommunication, which is
the underlying message or tone of the communication, which can be as
simple as a facial expression.
We often recognize this as being the
“tone” of someone’s voice, or how something is being said.
So, you
have what is being said, and how it is being said. The tone is
actually the “command” portion of communication, because it is
designed to instruct or position the receiver (or victim) of the
communication to interpret the message in a certain way.
Bateson’s communications theory can help reveal the interaction
operating behind the message.
Every communication, he claims, has
both a report [the actual message] and a command aspect [tone].
While the report conveys information about a state of affairs, the
command positions the receiver to adopt a particular attitude
towards the report and (leads them to) respond in a certain way. The
command element of the message is a metacommunication about the
context of the message - the nature of the relationship in which the
information is exchanged.
The point where this becomes falsified metacommunication in mass
media is when they include a primary false message in an
advertisement or music video, which is designed not only to sell the
product, but also to influence the viewer’s attitudes and beliefs.
There are many layers of communication in movies, videos,
advertising and news media that we usually don’t even realize on a
conscious level.
The term, falsified metacommunication, was coined by anthropologist
Richard Herskowitz. It can be understood, in part, using the
simple example of a con-man:
He shakes your hand, smiles at you and tells you nice things… as he
steals your money.
It is a strategy of deliberately distracting you from his real
purpose or goal by using friendly, charming deception. It is saying
one thing, as a way of distracting the victim with deception to make
them feel comfortable with the situation, in order to do another
thing - to achieve the real goal, which is stealing your money.
The transhumanist movement (in various layers of government who
control media) use this type of communication very effectively to
spread their primary intended message, that humans are not good
enough the way we are naturally, and we need to be altered with
technological devices and reprogrammed with radically different
ideas in order to better ourselves.
Once
nanotechnology advances to a level where human beings can be cybernetically transformed
without consent, the survival of homo
sapiens will be a threat of extinction.
This will eventually be done against our own will according to
radical transhumanists.
This idea is dangerously flawed and it is a
complete dehumanization of our species, as well as being a very
troublesome vision for the future of humanity.
Sources
|