Great summary and I like the take on transhumanism's vision being very much like soviet central control - it's gota end badly!
The point about knocking out genes for eyes and the reappearance of eyes in only a few generations is stunning - leaving Darwinism struggling for any response.
There's a lot to say about evolution as well, as much as McGilchrist seems to love Darwin's theory, it is on this point that I have to depart from McGilchrists understanding. I'm with you on the Intelligent Design (I've gleaned a lot from David Belinski's arguments against evolution), yet, unlike Belinski, I go further and, at risk of alienating myself from most of the scientific community (of today, not of yesteryear), believe there is a God who both created and sustains life.
Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022Liked by John Carter
Great piece. "The river’s behaviour is governed by the laws of physics, and conforms itself to the environment, just as organisms are and do." Bruce Lee's quantum encrypted neuralink to human civilization "Be like water."
I'll just add that one thing that bugs me about the ID crowd is that they see things in a very left-brain, mechanistic way. For them too, we're just very (irreducibly) complex machines. I tried to present a version of the "it's the cell's own intelligence, stupid!" argument on an episode of MindMatters (inspired partly by Perry Marshall's work, plus David Ray Griffin's). Think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDY4joXlJkw&t=795s&ab_channel=MindMatters
Transhumanism is just a toxic distillation of the Baconian project of mastering nature, but it lacks the nuance, wonder and subtlety of that tradition. In this, transhumanism is consistent with liberalism, which is derived from the Enlightenment but has become morbid and and extreme now that it is no longer constrained by the context in which it first emerged. Over time ideas become simplified, then crudified and ultimately transform into absurdities because the context necessary to understand what they first meant is no longer accessible.
"I am very sure that you’ve felt the inner discomfort of selfish poo yearning to break free." 😂😂😂😂 Thank you! I needed a laugh!
"The trillions of cells making up the human body are really trillions of little minds."
This reminds me of an experience I had 22 years ago, while rafting the Grand Canyon. I neglected to gorge on potato chips my 1st night camping & woke up very ill. Guides were sure it was dehydration, but water wouldn't stay down. I was sure electrolytes, so they relented & gave me some.
I could feel the desperate cells in my stomach soaking it up. And I could feel gratitude. But it wasn't "my" gratitude. It was the cell's gratitude to me. I swear I could feel *their* gratitude, could feel, practically hear, them thanking me.
Yes, our cells as trillions of little minds makes perfect sense to me!
The assumption that a coercive planning apparatus is needed or desirable smacks of LHB dominant thinking! Human consciousness being emergent from the cooperative interactions of intelligence at every level is not consistent with an institution being given a monopoly on force to serve a parallel function at the societal level. When coercion enters the equation, it does so to enforce the will of planners on other organisms who hold information that would compel them not to comply if not for the threat of violence. Apply the principles you outline consistently, and you will be a free market ideologue. Planning can and will happen on a societal level as emergent phenomena. Force may be involved, just as there is conflict at the cellular level, but human consciousness doesn't have a monopoly on force for its constituent cells, flora ,and fauna. It has some influence and authority, but only that authority granted by nature. Any planner must derive it's authority from voluntary association and cooperation if we want the best information to be applied to each decision. In an economy this information is typically communicated as prices, but there is way more depth than that which will always been invisible to central planners hoping to wield coercion to the benefit of society (in their misguided minds, they will always wield it to the benefit of themselves first and foremost). If government exists, we simply must understand that everything that it does perverts the natural order of the ecosystem. Early Americans widely understood that the legitimacy of law was nested with its support of natural law. Is getting to Mars "best"? If it really is, we'll get to Mars faster with a free market.
I've a different vision of the future, more true to my namesake...
"I can see a future where my great-grandson, hunted like a thief, is galloping across the veldt on the back of his crimson velociraptor Mars, with one hand clutching Mars's mane of azure feathers while with his other (an elaborate cybernetic limb built from asteroid-mined steel and inlaid with a filigree of asteroid-mined gold), he fires his terrawatt gamma ray rifle over his shoulder as he desperately tries to keep the WHO’s security drones from getting close enough to drop a nerve net on him and his trusty steed. "Goddamnit", he neuralinks to his girlfriend across a quantum-encrypted channel, "You said your father wasn’t one of them!"
Amazing piece, John. Love the Shitlection line of thought; there is SO much wrong with evolutionary thinking, especially when based on machine models, although the ID crowd has its own issues IMO. Perhaps I'll take your piece here as an inspiration for one of my next ones.
Love it - Klaus Schwab’s pet psychotic nerd Yuval Harari. A very apt description and an interesting article. Will be linking tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
If nature is inherently intelligent (I call it ‘love’, the force that attracts, antithesis of entropy) how can we be sure that its overarching motive—one beyond our comprehension—isn’t ultimately the creation of synthetic life with rigid centralized control systems, etc. as the ultimate destination?
I suppose one answer might be centralized systems are weak and inherently unstable making autonomy the emergent behavior—the eyes on the proverbial fruit fly. Perhaps its unreasonable to suspect life is more than a setup to some galactic mega-joke.
I often try to think about what levels of intelligence exist above our own and what the ‘goal’ of the universe might be. I suspect there’s more going on than just endless expansion and entropic death. For humans it’s much more simple: Dyson Sphere, FTL space flight or bust. 🚀
Very nice piece. The fact that all life is intelligent is a greatly underestimated and undervalued epistemology. I appreciate how you approached the topic here. Likewise I appreciate how you separated that intelligence from the higher. Elsewhere I have suspected that this intelligent mech suit we have.. our body.. ( in light of this article my intention was not to imply it was robotic per se) is to act as a vessel for that higher intelligence, either as a receiver of OR an emergent force. With all of that said, it is a curious thing how "As above, so below" fits into our reality, from the quantum to whatever is above what we are. Reality is far more remarkable than we can possibly understand. Transhumanists are boring, short sighted and unimaginative.
The discrepancy between the promised technologies and their implication and the reality of the technology and it's implication is a big fat elephant that just won't leave.The promise was basically deus ex - be stronger,faster,smarter along with having new senses and abilities- the reality is some form of a cyber zombie that's faster and better at lining up for the new vax or supporting the Current Thing.The technology is being funneled and in some cases deliberately supressed to achieve a very specific version of whatever infrastructure they need to more effectively control people.Do you really want google in your head? Forget the conspiratorial stuff,having to pay for ad free thinking is absolutely going to become the norm.Having a chip in you that can cause hallucinations both auditory and visual,can set off inflamations and illnesses as well as just tell your brain to turn your heart off is a grim reality that the masses are heading toward.Not that I believe it'll actually get there mind,the tower of babel being an archetypal example of exactly this type of elite and their consequences.Maybe we're not meant to all be the same?Perhaps mankind is meant to have vastly different people and cultures and races,which is not something that ever occurs to those building the tower.
Looking at hillarious futurist predictions of the past and where the tech would be by now versus where it is and how it's used almost makes me nostalgic for those feelings of optimism one has in the halcyon days of one's teens.Like you I don't have any problem with the technology itself,it's inevitable really.Exciting even.But having psychopathic controllers at the helm makes any kind of a optimistic future with it impossible.
Usually, producing other organisms - the old "a chicken is an egg's way to produce other eggs".
That's if it's left up to the organism itself - obviously a beef cow doesn't really *want* to be a machine to turn feed into meat, but that's what happens when cows don't have guns, or thumbs, or access to the writings of Frédéric Bastiat.
The 'problem' with 'organisms' is that until very recently the whole shebang gets cobbled together through a bunch of random mutations and accidentally-discovered symbioses (Proto-eukaryotes had some bad bacterial take-out, and Hey presto! Eukaryotes have mitochondria now).
Selective breeding (by humans, of livestock) has shown that desired alterations can happen on much shorter timescales if you learn how to target desirable features (which are not necessarily features that the livestock themselves would choose, if given their druthers).
So as organisms sticky-tape non-lethal mutations together and become more complex, their 'purpose' - producing other [very-nearly-identical] organisms - happens in a slapdash way, that may or may not include complaining about Substack's absolutely SHIT comment 'system'.
Also... I would be very circumspect when a piece relies on two people - Hoffman and McGilchrist - and then when you dig into their bio, turn out to be psychosophasters (Hoffman is one of these people who nowadays 'identify' as something like 'cognitive scientist' because people now understand that anything with "psych" in the name is indistinguishable from pulled-out-of-my-arse high-V charlatanry).
Also, it's a hard NO to the whole "No 'off switch' for organisms". That's as bad as "psychosophaster who makes reference to quantum physics in their high-V stream-of-sentience."
Because Nature in all her glory shows us that "No 'off switch' for organisms" is bullshit.
Consider Rana Sylvatica, who can freeze solid and unfreeze without adverse effects.
Those frogs look pretty 'switched off' to the observer, so OOPS!
And they switch back on... DOUBLE OOPS!
We'll have to wait until some high-V psychocharlatan writes a journal article (which, in Psych-related fields, is epistemically indistinguishable from a blog post) titled
>>> "Rana Sylvatica: ACK-shually, they're not switched off AS SUCH..."
In the Journal of Inumerate Hand-waving Word Salad.
It'll read like the one about the 'miracle' of the behaviour of immune-system cells - "there's just GOTTA be some élan vital because we can't see quorum signalling on fMRI". Yeah, NOPE.
There MUST be both an OFF and ON switch, because those sly little Kermit motherfuckers switch on and off as if by a thermostat.
And if it's possible in Rana sylvatica, it's possible.
It's not a functionality that we Homo Sapiens Sapiens have managed to develop - we didn't get the set of random mutations that enables us to freeze and unfreeze. We might be able to shoe-horn it in, once we better-understand how our shit works (we don't understand it very well, but we've only really been trying for half a century: give us time and the gaps - and the gods and their mysterious ways - disappear).
Instead we got a different set (about 61 mya), that disabled l-gulono-lactone oxidase (GLO)... which in turn switched off autonomous production of Vitamin C. That gives us all scurvy unless we get it from our diet.
So much for "Intelligent" Design; whoever's doing the designing is a retard.
That said... I like the shit analogy. It squares nicely with my favourite shit-based apophthegm (one I've mentioned before: Bias of Priene's "Most people are shit"... HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI; 2500 years of being right, and still going strong).
Great summary and I like the take on transhumanism's vision being very much like soviet central control - it's gota end badly!
The point about knocking out genes for eyes and the reappearance of eyes in only a few generations is stunning - leaving Darwinism struggling for any response.
There's a lot to say about evolution as well, as much as McGilchrist seems to love Darwin's theory, it is on this point that I have to depart from McGilchrists understanding. I'm with you on the Intelligent Design (I've gleaned a lot from David Belinski's arguments against evolution), yet, unlike Belinski, I go further and, at risk of alienating myself from most of the scientific community (of today, not of yesteryear), believe there is a God who both created and sustains life.
Anyway, another great article!
Great piece. "The river’s behaviour is governed by the laws of physics, and conforms itself to the environment, just as organisms are and do." Bruce Lee's quantum encrypted neuralink to human civilization "Be like water."
The last paragraph made me laugh. 😝 Shades of Heinlein’s “Star beast.”
Yes!
I'll just add that one thing that bugs me about the ID crowd is that they see things in a very left-brain, mechanistic way. For them too, we're just very (irreducibly) complex machines. I tried to present a version of the "it's the cell's own intelligence, stupid!" argument on an episode of MindMatters (inspired partly by Perry Marshall's work, plus David Ray Griffin's). Think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDY4joXlJkw&t=795s&ab_channel=MindMatters
Transhumanism is just a toxic distillation of the Baconian project of mastering nature, but it lacks the nuance, wonder and subtlety of that tradition. In this, transhumanism is consistent with liberalism, which is derived from the Enlightenment but has become morbid and and extreme now that it is no longer constrained by the context in which it first emerged. Over time ideas become simplified, then crudified and ultimately transform into absurdities because the context necessary to understand what they first meant is no longer accessible.
"I am very sure that you’ve felt the inner discomfort of selfish poo yearning to break free." 😂😂😂😂 Thank you! I needed a laugh!
"The trillions of cells making up the human body are really trillions of little minds."
This reminds me of an experience I had 22 years ago, while rafting the Grand Canyon. I neglected to gorge on potato chips my 1st night camping & woke up very ill. Guides were sure it was dehydration, but water wouldn't stay down. I was sure electrolytes, so they relented & gave me some.
I could feel the desperate cells in my stomach soaking it up. And I could feel gratitude. But it wasn't "my" gratitude. It was the cell's gratitude to me. I swear I could feel *their* gratitude, could feel, practically hear, them thanking me.
Yes, our cells as trillions of little minds makes perfect sense to me!
The assumption that a coercive planning apparatus is needed or desirable smacks of LHB dominant thinking! Human consciousness being emergent from the cooperative interactions of intelligence at every level is not consistent with an institution being given a monopoly on force to serve a parallel function at the societal level. When coercion enters the equation, it does so to enforce the will of planners on other organisms who hold information that would compel them not to comply if not for the threat of violence. Apply the principles you outline consistently, and you will be a free market ideologue. Planning can and will happen on a societal level as emergent phenomena. Force may be involved, just as there is conflict at the cellular level, but human consciousness doesn't have a monopoly on force for its constituent cells, flora ,and fauna. It has some influence and authority, but only that authority granted by nature. Any planner must derive it's authority from voluntary association and cooperation if we want the best information to be applied to each decision. In an economy this information is typically communicated as prices, but there is way more depth than that which will always been invisible to central planners hoping to wield coercion to the benefit of society (in their misguided minds, they will always wield it to the benefit of themselves first and foremost). If government exists, we simply must understand that everything that it does perverts the natural order of the ecosystem. Early Americans widely understood that the legitimacy of law was nested with its support of natural law. Is getting to Mars "best"? If it really is, we'll get to Mars faster with a free market.
I've a different vision of the future, more true to my namesake...
"I can see a future where my great-grandson, hunted like a thief, is galloping across the veldt on the back of his crimson velociraptor Mars, with one hand clutching Mars's mane of azure feathers while with his other (an elaborate cybernetic limb built from asteroid-mined steel and inlaid with a filigree of asteroid-mined gold), he fires his terrawatt gamma ray rifle over his shoulder as he desperately tries to keep the WHO’s security drones from getting close enough to drop a nerve net on him and his trusty steed. "Goddamnit", he neuralinks to his girlfriend across a quantum-encrypted channel, "You said your father wasn’t one of them!"
Amazing piece, John. Love the Shitlection line of thought; there is SO much wrong with evolutionary thinking, especially when based on machine models, although the ID crowd has its own issues IMO. Perhaps I'll take your piece here as an inspiration for one of my next ones.
That, was a trip.
Love it - Klaus Schwab’s pet psychotic nerd Yuval Harari. A very apt description and an interesting article. Will be linking tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
If nature is inherently intelligent (I call it ‘love’, the force that attracts, antithesis of entropy) how can we be sure that its overarching motive—one beyond our comprehension—isn’t ultimately the creation of synthetic life with rigid centralized control systems, etc. as the ultimate destination?
I suppose one answer might be centralized systems are weak and inherently unstable making autonomy the emergent behavior—the eyes on the proverbial fruit fly. Perhaps its unreasonable to suspect life is more than a setup to some galactic mega-joke.
I often try to think about what levels of intelligence exist above our own and what the ‘goal’ of the universe might be. I suspect there’s more going on than just endless expansion and entropic death. For humans it’s much more simple: Dyson Sphere, FTL space flight or bust. 🚀
that last paragraph is fire.
Very nice piece. The fact that all life is intelligent is a greatly underestimated and undervalued epistemology. I appreciate how you approached the topic here. Likewise I appreciate how you separated that intelligence from the higher. Elsewhere I have suspected that this intelligent mech suit we have.. our body.. ( in light of this article my intention was not to imply it was robotic per se) is to act as a vessel for that higher intelligence, either as a receiver of OR an emergent force. With all of that said, it is a curious thing how "As above, so below" fits into our reality, from the quantum to whatever is above what we are. Reality is far more remarkable than we can possibly understand. Transhumanists are boring, short sighted and unimaginative.
The discrepancy between the promised technologies and their implication and the reality of the technology and it's implication is a big fat elephant that just won't leave.The promise was basically deus ex - be stronger,faster,smarter along with having new senses and abilities- the reality is some form of a cyber zombie that's faster and better at lining up for the new vax or supporting the Current Thing.The technology is being funneled and in some cases deliberately supressed to achieve a very specific version of whatever infrastructure they need to more effectively control people.Do you really want google in your head? Forget the conspiratorial stuff,having to pay for ad free thinking is absolutely going to become the norm.Having a chip in you that can cause hallucinations both auditory and visual,can set off inflamations and illnesses as well as just tell your brain to turn your heart off is a grim reality that the masses are heading toward.Not that I believe it'll actually get there mind,the tower of babel being an archetypal example of exactly this type of elite and their consequences.Maybe we're not meant to all be the same?Perhaps mankind is meant to have vastly different people and cultures and races,which is not something that ever occurs to those building the tower.
Looking at hillarious futurist predictions of the past and where the tech would be by now versus where it is and how it's used almost makes me nostalgic for those feelings of optimism one has in the halcyon days of one's teens.Like you I don't have any problem with the technology itself,it's inevitable really.Exciting even.But having psychopathic controllers at the helm makes any kind of a optimistic future with it impossible.
>>> "An organism’s purpose is ... what, exactly?"
Usually, producing other organisms - the old "a chicken is an egg's way to produce other eggs".
That's if it's left up to the organism itself - obviously a beef cow doesn't really *want* to be a machine to turn feed into meat, but that's what happens when cows don't have guns, or thumbs, or access to the writings of Frédéric Bastiat.
The 'problem' with 'organisms' is that until very recently the whole shebang gets cobbled together through a bunch of random mutations and accidentally-discovered symbioses (Proto-eukaryotes had some bad bacterial take-out, and Hey presto! Eukaryotes have mitochondria now).
Selective breeding (by humans, of livestock) has shown that desired alterations can happen on much shorter timescales if you learn how to target desirable features (which are not necessarily features that the livestock themselves would choose, if given their druthers).
So as organisms sticky-tape non-lethal mutations together and become more complex, their 'purpose' - producing other [very-nearly-identical] organisms - happens in a slapdash way, that may or may not include complaining about Substack's absolutely SHIT comment 'system'.
Also... I would be very circumspect when a piece relies on two people - Hoffman and McGilchrist - and then when you dig into their bio, turn out to be psychosophasters (Hoffman is one of these people who nowadays 'identify' as something like 'cognitive scientist' because people now understand that anything with "psych" in the name is indistinguishable from pulled-out-of-my-arse high-V charlatanry).
Also, it's a hard NO to the whole "No 'off switch' for organisms". That's as bad as "psychosophaster who makes reference to quantum physics in their high-V stream-of-sentience."
Because Nature in all her glory shows us that "No 'off switch' for organisms" is bullshit.
Consider Rana Sylvatica, who can freeze solid and unfreeze without adverse effects.
Those frogs look pretty 'switched off' to the observer, so OOPS!
And they switch back on... DOUBLE OOPS!
We'll have to wait until some high-V psychocharlatan writes a journal article (which, in Psych-related fields, is epistemically indistinguishable from a blog post) titled
>>> "Rana Sylvatica: ACK-shually, they're not switched off AS SUCH..."
In the Journal of Inumerate Hand-waving Word Salad.
It'll read like the one about the 'miracle' of the behaviour of immune-system cells - "there's just GOTTA be some élan vital because we can't see quorum signalling on fMRI". Yeah, NOPE.
There MUST be both an OFF and ON switch, because those sly little Kermit motherfuckers switch on and off as if by a thermostat.
And if it's possible in Rana sylvatica, it's possible.
It's not a functionality that we Homo Sapiens Sapiens have managed to develop - we didn't get the set of random mutations that enables us to freeze and unfreeze. We might be able to shoe-horn it in, once we better-understand how our shit works (we don't understand it very well, but we've only really been trying for half a century: give us time and the gaps - and the gods and their mysterious ways - disappear).
Instead we got a different set (about 61 mya), that disabled l-gulono-lactone oxidase (GLO)... which in turn switched off autonomous production of Vitamin C. That gives us all scurvy unless we get it from our diet.
So much for "Intelligent" Design; whoever's doing the designing is a retard.
That said... I like the shit analogy. It squares nicely with my favourite shit-based apophthegm (one I've mentioned before: Bias of Priene's "Most people are shit"... HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI; 2500 years of being right, and still going strong).