Technophobia goes off the Depp end in Transcendence [Movie Review]

boing
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Mankind without the meat sounds a lot like hell to me.

Of course, mankind with the meat is pretty hellish too sometimes: nasty, brutish and short. Red in tooth and claw. Humans can be, and frequently are, more animalistic than any animal, more monstrous than any fictional monster. But: of the two (meatless humanity vs meatsa meatsa humanity) the former seems so much worse to me. I can’t even get my head around the cold, weiner-shrivelling horror of such a possibility of sentience, conscience, totally separate and separated from human sensation and physicality, from what it is to be human, from humanity itself.

Some people think the purpose of mankind is to one day become aliens, extra-terrestrials, grays, etc. Or: to evolve (or engineer themselves) away from “normal” bodies (or bodies period) and into the realm of purer (or scarier still, pure) intellect. Whatever.

We’re clods of dirt. Minerals and chemicals and some energy, with some cool and bogus thrown in for good measure, and somehow the whole of us became much more than the sum of our parts. And this bigger clod of dirt we’re standing on is where we belong, for as long as we belong. Anything else is just…wrong.

Call me provincial, but if it’s a choice between space migration / life extension / “The Stars My Destination” (or even some kinda Tron “Ghost in the Machine” / Ubik existence) versus that of fresh air, wind, being hot, or cold, or sometimes being tired or in pain, as well as being possibly dead at any moment, I’d still prefer the latter.

I prefer quality over quantity. Not just for myself, but for mankind.

I foresee a day when, thanks to the ever-proselytising “Science is the New Religion” Technophiles and their blind acolytes, mankind will eventually run, Yosemite-Sam-like, off the metaphorical cliff of existence, stand there for a moment thinking “hmm, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all” and then plummet to their collective doom.

When mankind drops down to an acceptable population (50 million worldwide? 5 million?) things will be back to normal (yes, yes, just in my opinion) and we’ll have a real chance for the future. A sustainable, carefully stewarded future. Until then, anything goes. And probably will. A wrecked and devastated environment, drones, the NSA, an ever-and-more-efficiently-surveilled populace, eventual mandatory DNA ID cards, and many other yet-unimagined horrors await, as The Powers That Be grasp at more and more invasive, drastic, anti-human straws, desperately trying to manage/control/herd 7 billion, 10 billion, 15 billion people.

Posts like some of the ones above make me look forward to a day when we might again find ourselves in tattered animal hides, squatting by our respective campfires, and wondering if the next day (or the next moment) will be our last. Again, possibly cold, possibly hungry, sick, or well, healthy, or diseased, aged or not, but looking up at the stars and thinking to ourselves “Beautiful. But here is better.”

My views on the hereafter I’ll keep to myself. But while we’re still breathing? Immanence > Transcendence

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If you do say so yourself, considering you joined just to post this, under the author’s name.

If you’re going to shill, at least have the courtesy to explicitly point out that you’re shilling.

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But what if they never cease to be you, never really leave you as a fully separate entity? Physically separate, maybe, but still in contact with the “mothership”? Certainly, this smells like becoming sort of a Borg Collective, creating and destroying parts of self at will and in continual flux (which, after all, is already happening in our bodies on cellular level), but… why not try?

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Apparently Frankenstein is the only narrative available to Hollywood on the technological future.

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I thought Oblivion was generally OK. When people got blasted by drones, it looked almost exactly like night vision footage of someone getting tagged by the 30 mm cannon of an Apache gunship.

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I always thought that it is the sentience that acts as the determinant. And that the material factors are just the platform the sentience runs on. Why such insistence on the current form?

Wrong? Ummm… why?

But what to do with those who do not comply with your vision of what’s good for them? I am perfectly content with not forcing you into my version of the future. You can stay on this stupid rock, but don’t block my way to the stars.

It may sure look that way at the beginning. You know, the scramjets need some initial speed for 'em to kick in…

“The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.” – Susan Shwartz

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You can download your body into a grave, but you cannot upload consciousness.

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True, as of April 20 2014. (It is a good habit to date claims that something cannot be done.) I would not be so certain in longer-term projection.

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I didn t mean it in terms of technology but in terms of philosophy, and for that you need no date (i.e. for synthetic knowledge). Consciousness in that regard is no “data”. I know some believe it, but I believe that not everything is data, – no mysticism intended.

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I was just telling someone the other day that it seems as if television and movie science fiction is fifty years behind print science fiction. And this seems like yet another example.

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I have oft opined that the moving image is not a particularly good medium for SF.

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The nature of consciousness is not sufficiently understood to go in further depth now. Just let’s say that philosophers had millenia to come up with something more than unprovable babbling, so now it’s time for them to hand the playing field over to somebody with proper imaging systems and other instrumentation.

(The main obstacle for philosophy to be useful is the absence of mechanisms for weeding out untenable claims.)

I would dare to call in doubts that not everything is data. We can consider data synonymous with information. Everything can be considered to be matter/energy (two forms of one thing), and an information about its spatiotemporal configuration. Not even nebulous things like consciousness can escape this trap of being bound into configuration of matter; splatter the brain around and consciousness stops.

I would claim that the hypothesis that consciousness is linked with the configuration of matter in brain (and the related processes that keep changing it) is rather solid, based on the results of events (e.g. traumatic brain injuries) leading to sudden changes in its configuration and the consequent partial or total loss of performance. Whatever the base of consciousness is, whether purely electrochemical or with added quantum effects, it is more than likely to be encoded in the structure of matter (or, a form of data/information). No need for further “magic sauce”.

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