Whitechapel - H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) Mon, 20 May 2013 09:05:51 -0700 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/ Lussumo Vanilla 1.1.4 & Feed Publisher H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257201#Comment_257201 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257201#Comment_257201 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:34:17 -0700 Willow Bl00 Gnomedex on... Transhumanism.

Gnomedex has run for 10 years, is a social tech conference, and not in the "social media guru douchebag" way, but in the "we're altering our society with the technologies we use" way. Super super fun and interesting.

I found a picture!
img credit: Mr Noded

The discussion I gave is here, the prezi I used is here. I want to fill it out more about all the aspects of H+, so anyone can use any part of it to explain it. Please do offer your feedback.
(Prezi is also rad, especially for those of us who grew up looking at comics - you can see the whole storyline, and then focus on bits of it)

Follow-up questions, which I will post to Ze Blog (which I know is in dire need of themeing etc):
*how does this tie back into sustainability?
*is this a new movement, or just how we're adapting new tech to our bodies? is tool use still human?
*presented in a nonjudgemental way: are there any of these that scare you?
*if you could have an extra something, what would it be?
*Postgenderism, Transgenderism
*Is this approach acceleration? 100 years ago, we didn't think about going at Mac3. Already doing stuff we're not designed to do.
*Who is working on the Legal-Political front on these things?

edited because I found a picture ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257205#Comment_257205 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257205#Comment_257205 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:55:01 -0700 warrenellis
I would quickly note:

is tool use still human?

It's not exclusively human, but it's certainly so associated with the rise of humanity as to be indivisible from our classification, I would think.

We have never not been in a period of adapting new tech to our bodies. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257228#Comment_257228 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257228#Comment_257228 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:56:51 -0700 Willow Bl00
Right. Which is why I dislike the blanket argument of Donna Harraway followers, who claim any tool use makes you a cyborg. The question was one that came from an audience member, and I want to follow up about why these tools are Transhuman. Which is the question, really.
As "transhuman" is the stage between the two states of "human" and "post human," it makes it nebulous and difficult to define.

And considering how much I hate philosophy, this set of discourse sure does evoke a lot. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257229#Comment_257229 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257229#Comment_257229 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:06:28 -0700 warrenellis H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257232#Comment_257232 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257232#Comment_257232 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:10:38 -0700 Willow Bl00 H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257258#Comment_257258 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257258#Comment_257258 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:34:08 -0700 Artenshiur
I think the distinction may be easiest to make within the perspective of the user. A transformative tool may be, for example, something which quickly integrates itself into the user's sense of self. When I use my cellphone, I consider it an intermediary to the action. When I use an extra limb, it may be the case that I don't think of it as using anything at all, but rather extending my agency directly. I did the thing, rather than I used my arm to do the thing.

I'm not entirely satisfied with this separation, but I feel like it's going in the right direction. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257304#Comment_257304 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257304#Comment_257304 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:16:10 -0700 warrenellis H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257320#Comment_257320 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257320#Comment_257320 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:28:14 -0700 John Skylar
And that can apply to thrown objects too. Go bluetooth.

I think so far the tools that humans have produced have enhanced either our ability to sense OR our ability to create/destroy. Please tell me if there's a counterexample. Merge those disciplines and you transform the human. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257355#Comment_257355 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257355#Comment_257355 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:12:25 -0700 Fan It's not exclusively human, but it's certainly so associated with the rise of humanity as to be indivisible from our classification, I would think.

I think that the important differentiator isn't tools but language: story-telling, and writing.

We have the same bodies (DNA) now as we had 10,000+ years ago: what makes our lives different (no longer so "animal-like": i.e. "nasty, brutish, and short") is that we now have 10,000+ of history (including technology) available to us. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257362#Comment_257362 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257362#Comment_257362 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:32:20 -0700 WaxPoetic I think that the important differentiator isn't tools but language: story-telling, and writing.

I have always perceived language as a tool: it is what is used to communicate something internal (thought, want, need, warning) to something external (an other).

How it is used could be an element of argument establishing human-ness, but I am not well-equipped to develop that. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257378#Comment_257378 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257378#Comment_257378 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:23:14 -0700 256 I have always perceived language as a tool: it is what is used to communicate something internal
Interestingly, language is certainly, literally, transformative: The language that you learn changes the physical structure of your brain. This can even have effects in fields that are (usually considered) separate from language - people who speak tonal languages like Chinese are more likely to have perfect pitch than people who speak English, for example.

I wonder, then: For people born in the present/near future, what will be the effect of the "language" that they use to interact with the ubiquitous computing environment? This language is partially made up of commands in their native human language, but also visual/iconographic/touch/gestures that are unique to computers/to that computer.

is tool use still human?
It's not exclusively human, but it's certainly so associated with the rise of humanity as to be indivisible from our classification, I would think.

This is interesting to me because it conjures the image of nonhuman tool-using species as potential cyborgs. Which I suppose has been conceived and possibly even enacted before. But chimpborgs are still funny. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257402#Comment_257402 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257402#Comment_257402 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:16:41 -0700 lazarus corporation
Following on from @256's post saying that language changes the physical structure of your brain, and the recent research into the effect of language on cognitive processing and perception (one example being that Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue) then the idea that conscious evolution through technology will involve mechanical/electrical technology may end up seeming quaint, when the actual way to evolve humanity's perceptual or cognitive abilities is to devise a custom language developed especially for that purpose. We won't be dealing with prosthetic eyes, but prosthetic languages. Whether you could use such a language meme to cause changes beyond the cognitive has already been explored in SF by the like of Neal Stephenson (and doubtless many others).

Interestingly, the research indicates that when bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently too. So you could be armed with multiple languages to deal with different situations.

@Willow Bl00 - interesting presentation - I really enjoyed it. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257404#Comment_257404 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257404#Comment_257404 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:22:02 -0700 Artenshiur
The question of language combined with the question of interaction with machines is interesting to me. And it strikes me as a major factor in what technology we may consider transformative. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257427#Comment_257427 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257427#Comment_257427 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:14:29 -0700 Willow Bl00 be more.

Post-Human means we're no longer human - genetically, due to extensive gene therapy on a large scale; mechanically, if we leave our bodies (foglets).
So what's on the way, which is not human? Which is transformative?

Language, throwing, etc don't count because, like Warren said, they simply make us more of what we already are. These things augment us.
The issue is to break out of what we know, and create something which actually sets us on a different path. These things would transform us.

At least that's one take on H+. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257431#Comment_257431 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257431#Comment_257431 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:41:24 -0700 Artenshiur H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257460#Comment_257460 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257460#Comment_257460 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:14:59 -0700 Willow Bl00 H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257473#Comment_257473 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257473#Comment_257473 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:00:47 -0700 Artenshiur H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257492#Comment_257492 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257492#Comment_257492 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:15:20 -0700 Andre Navarro Then "more" has to be in relation to something. "More then human" is one tagline of H+ .. but what does that even MEAN?

To try and answer this, let me present my definition of "human" beyond the clear-cut biological sense.

Willow, you said in your presentation -- which is very interesting, by the way, and congratulations -- that if you could have an extra something, that would be extra time. But for what?

A lot of our time goes into remaining alive. We're used to that, so we only realize the effort that goes into it when we stop to think about it. Not only are we used to it, we take pleasure on doing things whose sole purpose is self-preservation.

We need to feed ourselves, to evacuate the useless parts of the matter we ingested, we need to sleep for a third of our lives, we must breathe constantly -- a lot of our energy and a lot of our time are spent on that.

Not to mention our body is full of flaws, such as pain. If I dislocate my shoulder, pain will let me know it happened, and it will also delay me from putting it back into place, not to mention the suffering it will cause when I finally do.

What defines a human? Every animal spends time on self-preservation. A human could feel like they're wasting it. We want more than just being alive. We want to know why we're alive. We want to explore and understand everything to its furthest. And why do we want to do that? Because we want to be happy. We want to prolong that feeling, but every time we experience it, our standards raise. Happiness gets old, so we must look for the new. And what makes one happy varies from person to person.

Let me use this to suggest a line between transhuman and posthuman. Say you're willing to let go of a lot of things to free up more time:

As a transhuman, you start ingesting a high-calorie pill with all the nutrients you need. It eliminates hunger for a day, and takes mere five seconds to ingest. Now you only use the bathroom to urinate (as water if of course still needed). Hemmorrhoids permanently cured. You use a machine that tells you which parts of your body are in need of attention or seriously injured, while disabling pain completely. Perhaps this machine makes said diagnosis appear in your retina. And so on and so forth.

As a posthuman, you leave your body and upload your mind into a foglet cloud. No need to eat, drink or sleep. No reproductive ability. Irreversible. But far easier to simply exist.

In other words: as a transhuman, you used your existing body as a blueprint and modified it into what is, to your interests, an improvement. As a posthuman, you discarded your existing body irreversibly. But you've reached the same goal by different means -- now you have more time.

If a human being is defined as a self-aware creature, evolved on Earth, and set apart by its curiosity and the pursuit of happiness -- then you could say both paths, transhuman and posthuman, have diminished your similarities to the rest of the animal kingdom, while freeing up more time to exercise the very aspects that separate you from it.

Does this make you "more than human" or simply "more human"?

Also, did any of this make any sense, and what did I overlook and get wrong?

(September 3rd edit: in retrospect, this post is too simplistic at places (to refer to "pain" solely as a flaw was ridiculous of me), fairly mad at others and excessively philosophical -- so overall I guess it's quite stupid. I do think about its subject quite a lot but I didn't write it down properly. In my defense, I'd been sleep-deprived for weeks when I wrote it and only now that I've had full eight hours of rest do I realize it.) ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257495#Comment_257495 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257495#Comment_257495 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:57:29 -0700 Val A Lindsay II
It would seem to me there would be an unbreakable link between humanism and the society they interact with in order to judge humanism. Am I wrong?

As far as tools go, perhaps 'phantom limb' would illustrate the boundary of the things that would expand from simple tool use to the transhuman state you speak of... ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257545#Comment_257545 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257545#Comment_257545 Sat, 28 Aug 2010 02:25:17 -0700 Fan We have the same bodies (DNA) now as we had 10,000+ years ago

Maybe that's not quite true: for example, there's the Russian experiment to breed domesticatable foxes; with has resulted in a breed of fox whose social behaviour to humans is very different, after a breeding program that only started in the 1950s (so, I don't know, maybe only about 15 generations). ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257577#Comment_257577 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257577#Comment_257577 Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:34:54 -0700 John Skylar Maybe that's not quite true:

It's almost definitely not true. The last 10,000 years have been a period of profound evolution for humans. Not in terms of our body plans, but definitely in terms of certain genes that are expressed in our brains. "Race" variations are also pretty young, but they're also basically superficial.

We're a genetically young species. I won't be surprised if we have an adaptive radiation sometime in our future. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257584#Comment_257584 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257584#Comment_257584 Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:41:20 -0700 Jon Wake
If we're going to talk about the difference between transformative and extending tools, the question cannot be about the tool in and of itself, but about its impact on society. There is a simple reason for this: there are many tools which are barred from public use, but which have radically altered society. For example, the world after the nuke is a different environment than the world before the nuke. We may look at ourselves and our lives as essentially unchanged, but the political and social structures that resulted from this technology have changed the way governments interact with each other irreversibly. We are inextricably linked to society, and thus a change on one level has unpredictable effects.

That, however, is a somewhat disingenuous broadening of the term. I will narrow my search options. It isn't the use of tools by people that is of interest to transhumanism, nor is it the impact of tools on society, it is the interaction between tool and user. Moreso, it is the interaction of an individual or small group to a tool, rather than a population. In that way, Transhumanism has much in common with humanist philosophies, placing the actions of the individual as central to the betterment of society. Which is good and noble.

This issue is that technology follows its own vectors. This isn't some wooly headed 'meme' throwaway, like saying 'technology evolves' (I'm looking at you, Kevin Kelly), its a simplification of a very simple truth. Technology spreads faster than the knowledge required to use that technology does. This is because language takes a lot of time to convey complicated ideas, whereas anyone with a lick of sense can think of a use for a screwdriver, even if it isn't for screwing things in. Humans adapt to the tools around them, and when those tools fall short in their utility, either abandon the tool or hack it.

Tools solve problems, and in doing so, redefine the problem itself. This is the intrinsic back and forth that has followed humanity since (if some of the articles I just read hold up) literally before the beginning of the hominid line. In point of fact, it may be the reason we are a clever lot as is. But what this means is that the end use of a tool may be utterly unpredictable from its initial inception-- and to the concern to people, may have disastrous effects on society, wholly unintentionally. Case in point: global climate change, failed nation-states, and Robber Baron Capitalism.

The question I put to the Transhumanists -- how do you ethically account for unintended consequences? ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257587#Comment_257587 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257587#Comment_257587 Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:02:55 -0700 Fan The last 10,000 years have been a period of profound evolution for humans ... in terms of certain genes that are expressed in our brains.

"Citation required"? What evidence/authority were you paraphrasing when you said this? Can you point me towards more about this topic? ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257590#Comment_257590 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257590#Comment_257590 Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:37:09 -0700 John Skylar "Citation required"?

A quick search of NCBI's PubMed reveals the following recent open-access paper:

Entitled, "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution." This paper focuses mostly on the evolution of the skeletal and dental systems of our species in the last 10,000 years. There are other papers that deal more with neurological evolution that I have read and could probably find for you, but I believe we're mostly just talking about the idea that there's been evolution in humans in the last 10,000 years.

If you will direct yourself to figure 1, you will see that the ascertained age of selected alleles peaks at around 8000-5000 years ago, which is comfortably within the last ten thousand years by my estimate of the age algorithm's accuracy.

We are still exploring our genetic space as a species. Technology is a relatively new influence on our selection, as is modern medicine. Speaking about our subspecies in particular, which is between ten and five thousand years old, the influence of these things on our normal genetic evolution is minimal thus far. They're whippersnappers by two orders of magnitude (100 years vs. 10,000).

If you wait another 10,000 years and then look back, the effect will probably be even clearer. Remember that even 10^4 years is a proverbial drop in the bucket for genomic evolution. Our genes are patient. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257794#Comment_257794 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257794#Comment_257794 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:05:06 -0700 Fan H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257799#Comment_257799 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257799#Comment_257799 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:44:19 -0700 John Skylar
Whitechapel: PLEASE FEEL FREE to email me at the address in my account profile should you ever need to be pointed in the direction of accessible biology. I am not half as smart as my credentials would suggest, but I'm acclimated enough to the culture of research to at least send you sources that make the understanding step a lot easier. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257809#Comment_257809 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257809#Comment_257809 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:34:56 -0700 Ninewhilenine83
It's the same with all academia. You have to spend 3 years learning to decode the language successfully, at which point they ask you to either contribute or fuck off. I work in music theory at postgrad level, and no-one except other academics have any idea what I do, and even then only a small handful. Open source academia was a great idea apart from they made up more words and made it harder to read without an accompanying wiki... etc etc. ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257825#Comment_257825 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257825#Comment_257825 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:20:23 -0700 Fan H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257832#Comment_257832 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=257832#Comment_257832 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:40:32 -0700 warrenellis
(link) ]]> H+ hits the..main stream? (outside of a commercial sense) http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=259177#Comment_259177 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8811&Focus=259177#Comment_259177 Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:40:58 -0700 Fan
That article is impressively lucid for a non-specialist reader: I understood in the first 3 paragraphs of page 3 what I hadn't understood in the whole of the other article cited previously (about whether there's mutation, how much there is, when did it happen, and how they can tell/guess when it happened).

It also has an impressively long list of recent mutations, which is what I had asked about, including mental as well as physical ones. ]]>