You wrote:
“The scientific evidence for the former can be denied only by those with closed minds; with regard to the latter, which is outside the present boundaries of science, it is well to remember the well-known aphorism, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” ”

Yeah, just tell yourself that next time you see a bus bearing down on you when you are crossing the street….My bet is that you quicken your steps.

I am a card-carrying transhumanist, a member of both Extropy Institute and WTA. I have the impression that you are objecting not so much to transhumanism in general (which I see as the conviction that advanced technology will help in improving human nature and greatly expanding our mental, physical, perhaps even ethical abilities) but rather to rationalism as applied to brain science and analysis of consciousness, with your attendant rejection of the materialistic assumption regarding human mind (=mind is the subjective aspect of the physical brain).

Your contention that transhumanism is a dead end appears to be then prompted mainly by your rejection of rationalism as applied to the mind, yet as I wrote above, transhumanism is not reducible, or even crucially dependent on the success of rational explanation of the mind. Even if it did turn out that ESP, psychics and ectoplasm are real, technology would still offer great hopes for improving humanity. Therefore, your categorical rejection of transhumanism appears to be based on a misinterpretation of the meaning of the term.

This said, it is true that many transhumanists, including myself, are strict rationalists regarding the mind. For me, as a practicing neurologist and scientist, the material basis of human thought is a matter of everyday experience rather than theorizing, so of course I am siding with the neurophysiologist and AI researcher, against the psychic, and mystic.

Time will tell who is right. Maybe I will be able to tell you the truth after my uploading.

Rafal

First of all, I did not post a link to my own books as “scientific evidence”–the link to that term goes to an Amazon “Listmania” list that includes books containing scientific evidence that I recommend, none of which I wrote!

This is just another religious statement: “I believe in what I choose to believe and I am sure your view will be proven wrong in the future”. Substantiate it. Scientifically. Or admitt it’s nothing but an irrational opinion.

I posted it in the “Commentary” section, which I judged to be an acknowledgement that it’s merely my opinion! However, surely not all opinions not validated by scientific evidence are “irrational,” let alone “religious.”

At one time, many things now understood by science were dealt with only by religion. Putting aside the beliefs of the ancients, as recently as the 19th century belief in life on other planets was widely promoted by clerymen on the grounds that “God would not have made a useless world.” When I wrote my book The Planet-Girded Suns: Man’s View of Other Solar Systems (1974), which was for young people, my editor objected to the book’s implication that all the arguments from centuries before the 20th were religious in nature, and I had to point out that this was in fact the case–not only was there was no scientific evidence for the mere existence of extrasolar planets, let alone for life on them, but scientists believed that such evidence would always be impossible to obtain. Even when I wrote the book, no extrasolar planets had been discovered. Today, the question of whether there may be life on them is still widely debated — but on scientific grounds, not religious ones, because we now know that past conceptions of the boundaries of science were too narrow.

I personally do not have any religious convictions about continuance of the mind after death. The fact that many people do does not prevent me from considering the possibility that this, like other things formerly discussed in terms of religious metaphor, may someday become accessible to scientific investigation. In my view, the goal of science is to understand the total range of universal reality, not to define reality in terms of its present capability for gathering evidence and dismiss what doesn’t fit as inherently “religious” and therefore unworthy of acknowledgement.

As you say, “The point is, if we don’t know something now, it should not stop us from trying to learn.”

I certainly have no objection to the view that advanced technology will help to improve human capabilities, so long as that outlook does not close the door to scientific investigation of human capabilities that are not physically based. I do not mean that mystic and/or metaphoric explanations of those capabilities should be accepted, and I’m aware that many scientists are turned away from that whole area of human experience by the vast amount of nonsense published that purports to explain it. But serious study of the so-called “paranormal” (which of course, if it exists, is not in any way supernatural) reveals that data concerning that area cannot be simply swept under the rug on grounds that silly explanations for it have been offered.

I do object to equating the word “rationalism” with “materialism.” I do not reject rationalism, which according to the dictionary is “a view that reason and experience rather than the nonrational are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems.” Rather, I object to the unproven assumption that we cannot eventually explain non-material aspects of mind–which presently can be shown to exist through statistical methods, but not explained–by means of reason. Reason is wholly dependent on premises, from which it directly proceeds. If I have misinterpreted transhumanism’s premises, then my opinion of it is unfair; but all I have read about it leads me to believe that materialistic premises about the mind are basic to it and that by promoting this outlook, it discourages the questioning of these premises by the people best qualified to investigate alternatives.

Can we not develop technological means of extending human capabilities without adopting a worldview that narrows the potential scope of scientific discovery?

The fact that I’d just as soon not be hit by a bus does not logically lead to the conclusion that I pretend certainty one way or the other on the question of whether minds have any form of non-material existence, since even people with religious convictions about heaven (which I myself do not have) usually try to avoid premature death.

On the other hand, I suspect you are younger than I am, and as far as that goes, that most transhumanists are. People approaching old age, whether or not they believe this life is all there is, often begin to realize that a time may come when the prospect of eternity on Earth–whether in a biological body, an artificial one, or a supercomputer–would be intolerably boring. I, for one, can’t imagine
wanting to be uploaded; I’d rather bet, even without knowing the odds, on some form of existence a little less confining.

For millennia the majority of the human race has believed that the mind is more than a biological machine

That doesn’t make the belief right. For millennia the majority of the human race believed a lot of things we now know to be false: that solar eclipses involved the sun being eaten by a god, that the earth was flat and at the center of the universe, that disease was caused by evil spirits. Collective belief is not truth.

Is the mind more than a biological machine? I don’t know. I don’t think it is, but I don’t know. However, I do know that it either is or isn’t, and whether everyone on the planet believes one way or the other has exactly zero bearing on the answer. The laws of nature aren’t democratic.

I don’t understand how an uploaded state is "confining". On the contrary — it could bring vast new possibilities that would (for all interesting purposes) not just be the "eternity on Earth" some are afraid of.

Virtual worlds can be much more varied and much more fun than this one. More importantly, uploading would allow more direct access to your brain processes, making it possible to choose not only what you want to experience but who you want to become.

As large as the amount of interesting experiences is that can be had by a mind of human intelligence (not in an ever older, less vital and more restricted life, but for one who stays young), augmented intelligence should create much more complex, varied and pleasurable things to do. Becoming significantly more intelligent than humans are now may open new areas of thought to us, in the same way that humans can enjoy science and chimps can’t.

Transhumanism does not make much sense seen as a way to get more of the same dreariness, with a few gadgets. If anything, transhumanism shows that technological progress does not just mean more games to play on your mobile phone, but challenges our assumptions on what "life on Earth" or "life as a human" means (for the better, if handled wisely). Mortality is only one such assumption. In my opinion, the truly interesting part is exploring the space of possible minds far beyond the human-like.

If physics allows living (and therefore growing) forever, why risk losing an infinitely interesting existence for a small chance to enter an afterlife or spiritual world for which there is no evidence, and whose nature can’t be known in advance?

Since the universe does not appear to have been designed by a benevolent being, such an afterlife might as well be hellish (boring, inhuman) as heavenly. The best way to avoid hell is by not dying. :-)

If, on the other hand, physics does not allow living forever, then you will experience this hypothetical afterlife anyway. Why not live as long and fulfilling a life as possible first?

To those of us who don’t believe what’s natural is automatically desirable, death from old age is as premature as death by being hit by a bus. In that sense, Anonymous Hero has a point.

Although most transhumanists believe there is nothing beyond the ordinary material world (rightly so, in my opinion), there is nothing in the philosophy of transhumanism that requires it. Augmenting human bodies and brains makes good sense whether or not phenomena such as ESP exist. What you’re arguing against is not transhumanism, but a belief that happens to be shared by most transhumanists (myself included).

I don’t see transhumanists arguing parapsychology research should be banned — I think it will not lead to much, but this doesn’t mean I’m shutting myself off from areas of human knowledge. In fact, the best way to learn more about the paranormal, if there is such a thing, is to become much more intelligent, and the best (only) way to become much more intelligent is through technological augmentation.

If important transhuman technologies such as AI and uploading can’t work, then that’s more serious, but no real argumentation was given as to why materialism is wrong and why and how this will cause these technologies to fail.

Even if minds are more than just machines, it’s not obvious that this "more" can manifest itself only in biological substrates. If the human brain uses noncomputable processes at some important level, it will probably be possible to build machines using the same processes. A small change in direction such as that doesn’t make the original path a dead end.

I don’t understand why many consider transhumanism repugnant. People admire those who invent cures to solve diseases; those who save others and themselves from premature death; those who try to decrease suffering; those who advance human knowledge and understanding; those who strive to give people more freedom and possibilities; those who ‘defeat’ the nasty, brutish aspects of the human mind in themselves and others; and so on. Transhumanism is just the continuation of these efforts by other means, and to greater heights.

“Virtual worlds can be much more fun than this one” is surely debatable — how many people do you know who would consider virtual sex as good as the real thing? :) Certainly most of us value physical contact with nature, the sensual enjoyment of sunshine and food and the touch of loved ones (a main point made in Paul Levinson’s Realspace, which I reviewed here last week). To many, being permanently cut off from these would seem “confining,” though I discuss another sense of the word below.

I do agree that longer a longer lifespan, if not burdened by the disabilities of old age, might be desirable — what I object to is the idea of material immortality, which is a stated aim of transhumanism. I do not think even increased intelligence would produce an “infinitely interesting experience,” because the amount of input data available to an embodied mind, whether biological or machine-based, would not be infinite.

Combining long life with interstellar travel would help, of course. Any machine or machine-based civilization conceived by us on Earth would be, by definition, bound by the premises of what we know on Earth; we have no means of pre-conceiving the truly alien. Contact with alien civilizations would justify longer lives than would otherwise be endurable.

Incidentally, a little-known fact of history is that around the time of Newton, when the idea of inhabited planets of other stars was extremely fashionable among the intelligentsia in England, poetry describing souls visiting other planets after death appeared frequently in the popular press. (Especially Newton’s soul. People could not believe that so great a man as Newton would not have the opportunity to see those planets, which of course were assumed to be forever inaccessible to Earth-born mortals.) This conception of the afterlife is quite different from the common image of Heaven, and is rarely mentioned in modern books. When I learned about it some years ago, I asked some older personal acquaintances, who weren’t space enthusiasts, if they’d ever heard if it. To my surprise, several said that though they’d never heard of it, they had pictured the afterlife that way personally as children! I don’t know if it’s common now that we envision starships, or if people who know they can’t personally go to the stars still have such a picture.

I do know that very few people other than religious fundamentalists (who despite their high profile in the media, are a minority among Christians) believe in a conventional heaven or hell. The afterlife is generally viewed as a state of being perhaps best defined, by analogy, as another dimension with different rules. It is generally expected that in this state of being there is access, perhaps infinite access, to knowledge that is not known, and in principle cannot be known, on Earth (or elsewhere in the universe as it is perceived in our present state of existence). What scientist does not wish, underneath, that all the answers — not merely those a machine could find through analysis of existing data — could someday be personally obtained?

By “confining” I meant confined to a situation in which there is no access to any states, or dimensions, that neither human minds nor machines designed in terms of human assumptions can imagine. The thing about machines is that they are built and the builders, even if previous generations of machines, necessarily proceed on the basis of premises. Science itself is dependent on premises, as I’ve said before. But in another state of being the very premises might be altered, thus permitting levels of knowledge that could never be attained in terms of old premises.

Maybe no such state exists. On the other hand, maybe it does. If we deliberately bind ourselves to machines we will never find out.

But I don’t really believe that, because I suspect that if minds are not wholly material, they would not stay bound to machines! They would enter whatever other “dimension” exists anyway, when ready to do so. (And if they are wholly material, then there’s no other state they can exist in.) Thus I am not any more worried about being trapped forever in a machine than I am about becoming a spirit walking around in chains like a ghost in a horror story.

So why wouldn’t I want to be uploaded and get the potential benefits either way? Why didn’t Heinlein agree to cryogenic preservation? Because by hedging one’s bet as to the nature of the human mind, one would deny one’s own convictions about what it is to be human. And people just don’t do that without evidence; it’s psychologically traumatic to do so even where evidence exists! There is at present no hard evidence on either side of this issue — advocates for each may consider the odds of the other being valid “small,” but there are no actual grounds for such an estimate; we can only express opinions. That’s why neither transhumanists nor opponents of that philosophy will ever succeed in making converts.

No, collective belief doesn’t prove an idea is true, but it does indicate that what’s behind the idea should sooner or later be investigated. Science often proves a widely-believed explanation of a phenomenon to be wrong (and this is as true of scientific explanations as of earlier non-scientific ones) — but it rarely if ever finds that there was nothing to be explained.

If throughout human history, in all cultures, there has been a prevalent belief in the existence of aspects of the mind or soul apart from the physical body, then in all probability “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” The explanations people have had for this aspect of reality are, in my opinion, metaphors — metaphors being the means human minds employ to deal with things they don’t understand. I do not think any of these metaphors will turn out to be literally true, any more than the idea that disease is caused by evil spirits is true. The question is, what’s the foundation of the metaphors? We have no evidence whatsoever for saying there isn’t one.

The “biological machine” model of the mind is also a metaphor. It’s a useful one for practical scientific work — metaphors exist precisely because they are useful. But like all metaphors, it is based on an unverified belief — the belief that what can be physically observed is all there is to reality. Is this true? I agree with you wholeheartedly that “it either is or isn’t, and whether everyone on the planet believes one way or the other has exactly zero bearing on the answer.” And that includes the beliefs of scientists about things not specifically proven or disproven.

I agree with most of what you say — as I said before, I’m not against attempts to develop the technologies advocated by transhumanists. What I feel is a dead end is the philosophy of transhumanism, a philosophy that holds that the human mind is nothing more than material and that some form of utopia could be brought into existence by technologically augmenting the human body and/or permitting people to remain forever in a predefined physical form. This philosophy (not the technological advances themselves) leads science, and the general public, to ignore all the rest of reality, to rule it out of consideration, and will therefore slow if not halt the expansion of science into other areas of investigation, even without a specific ban on exploration of such areas.

Historically, science has progressed not only by learning more and more in the specific fields it first investigated, such as astronomy, physics, and medicine, but by gradually expanding its scope into fields less easily investigated. Molecular biology and cybernetics are among the most recent examples. Scientific work in psychology has barely gotten off the ground; theories in that field have been primitive and inaccurate, but it’s recognized as a legitimate field of study. Social sciences are not yet very scientific, though the advent of complexity theory will, I think, bring about progress in them. But parapsychology is struggling; only a few scientists are courageous enough to buck the opposition and devote their working lives to it, and lack of funding is of course a formidable barrier to its progress. If transhumanism as a philosophy, with its commitment to a focus on material “perfection” of the human race, dominates the 21st century, then increased funding, and therefore increased respect for parapsychology, is not likely to materialize — thus it will be left by default to people unqualified to deal with its data scientifically. I want to see science keep widening its knowledge of reality, not shrink back within old boundaries.

As to why many people consider transhumanism repugnant, it’s because unconsciously if not consciously, they perceive that the transhumanist agenda fails to take the “whole person” into account. And incidentally, the issue of the unconscious mind, which is something I haven’t gone into here but consider crucial, appears to be ignored by transhumanists and AI enthusiasts alike! This is a case of going off half-cocked without consideration of a fundamental aspect of humanity that’s known to exist, but which is by no means understood yet. It has been recognized for more than a century that a large part of the human mind is unconscious; how then could uploading consciousness into a computer produce the equivalent of a human being?

You insist on calling those books “scientific evidence”. They are not scientific evidence. Scientific evidence is independently reproduceable, verifiable, gives measureable results. If it’s scientific, it’s usually published in peer-reviewed journals. Otherwise it’s unscientific speculation.

If you believe that transhumanism is a dead-end philosophy you essentially have the following options:

1. Ignore it. If it’s really wrong, in time it will be proven as such.
2. Keep talking and be ignored. There are lots of people who talk for a living. You need to really stand out to be heard.
3. Fight it. Don’t just talk, because talk is cheap. Prove it with your own money. Finance scientific research into paranormal, or form a non-profit which will do the same. All you need to show is independently verifiable results that cannot be explained within materialistic science. Publish it in a respectable peer-reviewed journal. Even a smallest such result would be a revolutionary change in the understanding of the world. Humanity will be eternaly greatful to you. Transhumanist philosophy will be destroed as a small collateral.

By the way, you keep reposting large chunks of messages over again (about Heinlein, about believing in something for a long time and this validating it etc.). It’s great that you know how to use Copy/Paste, but I doubt you can impress anyone here with such advanced computer skills.

Any sufficiently advanced virtual world is indistinguishable from base-level reality — since the experience of "physical contact with nature, the sensual enjoyment of sunshine and food and the touch of loved ones" is something that happens in the brain, an uploaded brain should be able to experience these just as intensely, given the right inputs. It’s generally not productive to think of far-future computers, or life inside them, as being necessarily clanky, sharp-cornered and mechanical, or purely abstract. Living in a computer does not mean living in a text adventure. In that respect, I find your comment elsewhere on uploading and the subconscious strange, too — as I understand it, there’s no way to leave out the parts that work subconsciously and still be left with a working human brain, and I’ve never seen this proposed in the context of uploading.

In fact, I think there’s a good chance we’re already in a computer emulation (simulation-argument.com), which would mean that what people think is "the real thing" has actually always been "virtual sex" (ha! :-) ).

As for infinite interestingness, it’s true that any mind that we can conceive of is finite and can experience only finitely many things. Any mind that does not grow unboundedly large will either die or become stuck in an infinite loop. This seems to me to be an excellent reason to grow without bound, if lady Physics smiles on us, as well as one of the reasons why immortalists are necessarily transhumanists.

Goedel’s theorem guarantees there’s always something new to discover in mathematics, I think; besides, there’s always room to interact and to create things, which is just as interesting as discovery.

Those who, like Heinlein, give up the rest of their lives because it would be "denying what it means to be human" are making an irreversible decision based on purely symbolic reasons. I won’t stop them if they really want to, but I don’t think it’s the wise choice.

You evidently have not read any of the books on my list, some of which contain numerous references to papers in peer-reviewed journals, and which go into the issue of replication in some detail. Unlike the results of most experiments in physics, those of experiments with talented humans cannot be individually replicated at will, any more than a baseball player can be expected to get the same number of hits in every game he plays. Therefore, the method now used to measure independent verification in parapsychology is statistical meta-analysis, which is used in all behavioral, social and medical sciences where specific individual studies can’t be precisely replicated. If you don’t know what meta-analysis is, look it up! And if you don’t trust statistical evidence at all, there’s a good deal in physics that you can’t trust either.

I suggest that you readThe Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, Ph.D. or Parapsychology, the Controversial Science by Richard Broughton, Ph.D. before you pass judgment on the data being obtained in a field about which you’re uninformed. (These authors are respected researchers, not professional writers.)

you need to show is independently verifiable results that cannot be explained within materialistic science. Publish it in a respectable peer-reviewed journal. Even a smallest such result would be a revolutionary change in the understanding of the world.

I wish that were the case!
If “even the smallest such result” could change most people’s understanding, there would have been a major revolution in science long ago. However, there are too many people who don’t want to look at the results. They don’t want to have to change their understanding of the world. So they don’t read the relevant journals or the books that cite them, and thus preserve the comfortable (to them) illusion that only mystics and charlatans believe in phenomena that can’t be explained by materialistic science.

I don’t know what kind of browser you’re using that’s showing you any of my comments more than once. I have never reposted any portion of them, although I have referred to some topics in different words.

As bio-engineering and other forms of invasive technology are used to modify us the term “human” is going to become increasingly called into question. I think you can look at the term in its absolute and relative sense. The absolute sense would be a comparison with one of us with a dog for instance. Aside from sharing some genes dogs don’t posses many of physical/mental qualities with humans. So if we were to visit the island of Dr. Moreau it would make sense to say that there would be a point where a person transitioning into a dog would no longer be human. Then there is the relative sense, as in the example of our biological decendents, that we recognize homo-erectus or Neanderthal as human but not one of us, that is, not modern human. Regarding the term “transhumanism” I consider Sylvia’s remarks as quite correct in the former sense and don’t believe that Transhumanists would disagree. Strickly speaking they mean going beyond human in the latter or relative sense, in other words how we are now. There is no question matters such as these can get muddled as in any debate as different sides seek to stake out their position with the first casulties of the polarization being the issue’s nuances. This will become more apparent as forces who believe our current form is the most advanced and must be preserved against any change as they will be using the terms “human” and “non-human” in the absolutist sense.

My second remark addresses Sylvia’s primary concern regarding Transhumanism’s tendancy to see the source of our consciousness and humanity to be based on materialistic reductionist principals as opposed to on some higher irreduciable quality. This is the same issue we in the West have been debating since the time of ancient Greece. There are different matters at stake dependening on your beliefs of course. If you believe in a soul you are committed to the “something greater” side or there is no such thing as an afterlife. Sylvia’s objections I believe come from a gut emotional response, “are neurons and neurotransmitters all that I am as a person?” I can appreciate her feelings but they nevertheless reflect a lack an understanding of the issue. It doesn’t really matter what the source of our creations and behavior are for, yes Sylvia you are right, that is a matter of science to determine which of the positions is the correct one (or show another solution). However, if it finds consciousness is in fact the result of a unique chemical neurological mechanism combined with experience then the reality is it has always been that way even when we believed different. Which is to say it changes nothing of what we have done and accomplished simply our understanding of how we did it. The only problem is when we want to look at consciousness as going to a magic show that some how revealing the tricks and how they are done destroys the mystery and wonder the performance invokes. That’s a personal preference. As for myself knowing how the tricks are done and still able to see them work only enhances my sense joy and awe.

You evidently have not read any of the books on my list

Of course I did not. Why would I waste my time reading speculations, pretending to be science? Why would I buy the books and support those people with my money if I do not believe in their cause?

Therefore, the method now used to measure independent verification in parapsychology is statistical meta-analysis,

Meta-analysis is nothing but a fancy term. There is statistics. It’s a hard science. You may call a subset of it “meta-analysis”, but it’s still a hard science. Either the statistics of an experiment(s) is significant, or it is noise.

cannot be individually replicated at will, any more than a baseball player can be expected to get the same number of hits in every game he plays.

True, but a number of good baseball players playing a season can score a relatively predictable average number of hits per game. The number for the next season can be predicted.

which is used in all behavioral, social and medical sciences where specific individual studies can’t be precisely replicated.

Precision is not required. You need to replicate it in a statistically-significant way. Medical science knows experiments involving thousands of individuals. That stitistics is pretty solid and produces predicatable results.

If you don’t know what meta-analysis is, look it up! And if you don’t trust statistical evidence at all, there’s a good deal in physics that you can’t trust either.

Please don’t teach me how to conduct research in Physics. Thank you.

I suggest that you readThe Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, Ph.D. or Parapsychology, the Controversial Science by Richard Broughton, Ph.D.

No, thanks. But I would read their papers if they are published in Science, Sci Am, Nature or even a decent second-tier peer-reviewd journal. Please post here when it happens. I’ll be waiting.

If “even the smallest such result” could change most people’s understanding, there would have been a major revolution in science long ago. However, there are too many people who don’t want to look at the results.

I will look at the results if they pass through peer-review. As often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The claims are extraordinary.

The Parapsychological Association is an elected affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). See its

website for abstracts of papers from the peer-reviewed journals of the field.

I suggest that you read An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning by Professor Jessica Utts,
Division of Statistics, University of California at Davis; and also her paper
Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology,
published in Statistical Science, 1991, Vol. 6., No. 4, 363-403. The latter includes comments and her response to them.

The first chapter of Dean Radin’s book is online. (If you don’t want to read it, perhaps others here will.)
In that chapter he states, “Starting in the 1980s, well-known scientific journals like Foundations of Physics, American Psychologist, and Statistical Science published articles favorably reviewing the scientific evidence for psychic phenomena. The Proceedings of the IEEE, the flagship journal of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, has published major debates on psi research. Invited articles have appeared in the prestigious journal, Brain and Behavioral Sciences. A favorable article on telepathy research appeared in 1994 in Psychological Bulletin, one of the top-ranked journals in academic psychology. And an article presenting a theoretical model for precognition appeared in 1994 in Physical Review, a prominent physics journal.
“In the 1990s alone, seminars on psi research were part of the regular programs at the annual conferences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Statistical Association. Invited lectures on the status of psi research were presented for diplomats at the United Nations, for academics at Harvard University, and for scientists at Bell Laboratories.”

Note that the term “parapsychology” is widely misused by the public to include all sorts of nonsense, so there is no easy way to find reputable scientific material on the subject by searching the Web with Google.

I’m interested to know whether you propose doing away with biological life altogether. If existence within a machine is as wonderful as you believe, and sex is only something that happens in the brain, then presumably no one will choose to have a body and no more babies will be born. Putting aside what happens to the experiments with less-than-perfect results (for surely uploading is not going to have a 100% success rate when it is first offered to the public), what about the intermediate period when some people have bodies and other people don’t? Lovers, I should think, would have to arrange to be uploaded simulataneously or else experience a good deal of grief over the loss of contact with each other. Or will love, as distinguished from sensation and intellectual exchange of thought, also be considered obsolete?

Then there’s the question of what to do about animals. Anyone who has owned a dog or a cat knows that they have minds of their own, albeit not the equivalent of human minds. My cats would grieve if left behind, and I would not want to give them up. Are we to have virtual pets, with virtual minds enhanced during uploading so we can communicate with them? But then there wouldn’t be much point in creating a lesser mind than the optimum, so I guess the concept of animal companions will die out — just as the concept of babies will.

As to the unconscious mind, I admit that my premise is that there’s more in it than got there through repression of once-conscious material — I am more of a Jungian than a Freudian (though I don’t agree wholly with either). We really don’t know anything yet about the operation of the unconscious mind. However, transhumanists so often refer to “uploading consciousness” that I assumed they meant it literally, and did not expect to take along the non-rational depths that so often prove disturbing.

Yes, indeed, it is as you say “the same issue we in the West have been debating since the time of ancient Greece” — and my point is that I don’t think the debate is over, whereas transhumanism assumes, without any proof, that it has been won by believers in materialist reductionist principles. I don’t deny that I have an emotional response to the issue, as I do to all issues on which I have strong opinions; but I don’t think it’s any greater than the obviously strong emotional stake many people seem to have in defending the reductionist principles on which the philosophical agenda of transhumanism depends.

I don’t in the least want “to look at consciousness as going to a magic show” and I don’t think “revealing the tricks and how they are done” would destroy any mystery and wonder. On the contrary, I would like to see science learn more about how the tricks are done than can be learned by looking at only those aspects of the human mind that we can so far perceive explanations for. The point I’ve been trying to make is that to ignore evidence for “tricks” (such as psi capabilities) that reductionistic premises cannot explain — to pretend this evidence doesn’t exist in order to bolster the belief that we’re somewhere near to understanding the mind and can ultimately reproduce it via technology — is to set a goal for science, and for humankind’s future, that is not high enough.

As you say, if science does find that “consciousness is in fact the result of a unique chemical neurological mechanism combined with experience, then the reality is it has always been that way even when we believed different.” I surely don’t disagree with that. But the reverse is also true: if chemical neurological mechanisms are not the full explanation of the mind, then the reality has always been that there is more to be investigated — and should we not aim toward learning more than we can now envision, instead of telling ourselves that we have already found the fundamental answer to the mysteries of our existence?

Sylvia, thank you for the response. In reply we are on the same page. With regard to your point regarding true believers in the Transhumanist movement I see their close minded-ness either as a function of an agenda, personal or public, or as a function of their individual psychology and not necessarily a matter of ignorance or mis-understanding as we tend to presuppose. We who are more open minded have a great difficulty in fathoming the desire of those who seek the sactuary of the “Truth” whatever the issue. However, until we are able to modify personality predispositions then we are just going to have to accept them as part of the human experience.

Enjoy,
Robert Wasley

>For millennia the majority of the human race has
>believed that the mind is more than a biological
>machine, that it extends in some inexplicable way
>beyond the individual body both in space (ESP) and
>in time (continued consciousness after death). The
>scientific evidence for the former can be denied
>only by those with closed minds;

Ah, yessss.
Since you give some links with pretended well known/established scientists that have researches in the field of parapsichology, you come with the conclusion: those that dare not to accept the stupid idea that there’s life after death are "close-minded".
Do you realise how stupid do YOU really look just by stating this ?
Where in all those links have you come with this incredible stupid conclusion ????????????
Come here and NAME a single scientific prove for that. Anything ? Of course not (you won’t find it, since there’s nothing to find).

No, there ISN’T life after your death, don’t full yourself anymore. And things like telepathy won’t prove it, whether this capacity proves real or not.

Perhaps my sentence wasn’t clear; although I thought what “former” and “latter” referred to was plain enough, you have confused them. What I said was:

“… the mind is more than a biological machine, that it extends in some inexplicable way beyond the individual body both in space (ESP) and in time (continued consciousness after death). The scientific evidence for the former can be denied only by those with closed minds; with regard to the latter, which is outside the present boundaries of science…” (Boldface added.)

“The former” refers to “space (ESP)”, for which scientific evidence exists, as stated in the references. As I said in the portion you didn’t quote, “the latter,” which refers to the “time (continued consciousness after death)” portion of the sentence, is outside the present boundaries of science and I have never claimed that there is any evidence for it.

I agree with you completely that evidence for telepathy doesn’t prove life after death, and in fact is completely irrelevant to it. Moreover, I believe so-called “evidence” from information obtained in seances should be attributed to ESP and not to alleged communication with “spirits.”

I do not pretend know whether there is life after death or not. And you don’t know, either! There is as little proof for the statement that there isn’t as for the speculation that there is. Again, it’s a question that the science of our era cannot answer.

I think Sylvia’s arguement that Transhumanism ignores the paranormal is a misinterpretation of what the average Transhumanist believes.

I like to think of myself as a pretty open minded kind of person, but I’m also a very rational person. Do I believe the mind can be reduced to the brain? Yes I do.

Do I believe machines can have “minds” in this sense too? Yes I do.

Do I believe in the paranormal? Yes I do.

Essentially, my gut belief is that it’s not reductionism at all, but explanation. I believe very strongly in the paranormal, and I also believe very strongly that the mind can be reduced to the cause and effect of the brain.

My general outlook on life is; if it doesn’t make sense, you don’t understand. If you don’t understand it, you need to learn about it. If you learn about it and it seems impossible, then you need a new theory to describe the world.

In other words, I believe very strongly in paranormal phenomena, I believe in ESP and UFOs and all other such things (unless they’re completely bogus lunatic ramblings). I believe that just because they can’t be explained now doesn’t mean they can’t be explained.

As to the functions of the mind, yes I think it’s all just cause and effect, but does that necessarily mean that you are losing the wonder and surprise out of life? Hell no! I’ve found, personally, that knowing how the magic trick worked only enhances the experience, and that’s what I believe Posthumanity will do for those who embrace it.

Many people argue that Posthumans will be these soulless machines who reduce everything to numbers and equations. Well if everything can be reduced to numbers and equations (which I believe it can), then so be it. Knowing the earth wasn’t the center of the universe didn’t take away the mystery and marvel of gazing into the night sky, it enhances the experience to know just what may be up there.

In any case, I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about, but I do believe that science and magic are mutually exclusive. To explain the trick is just to acknowledge that it can be done.