December 12, 2010

from PreventDisease Website

Transhumanism is the name of a movement that claims to support the use of all forms of technology to improve human beings.

It is far more than just a bunch of harmless and misguided techie nerds, dreaming of sci-fi movies and making robots. It is a highly organized and well financed movement that is extremely focused on subverting and replacing every aspect of what we are as human beings - including our physical biology, the individuality of our minds and purposes of our lives - and the replacement of all existing religious and spiritual beliefs with a new religion of their own - which is actually not new at all.

According to Ian Pearson, a British futurist, death will be a thing of the past by 2050.

Pearson is one of many futurists, cybernetic experts and artificial intelligence researchers whose thoughts are converging on the same basic idea:

Why not upload everything that's in the brain - everything that makes a person who they are - into a computer and then download it again into a new body?

 

Many critics of Transhumanism claim the movement will eventually create a self-replicating breed of artificial or cybernetic life.

"There is an incredibly dangerous potential for transhumanism research to create beings which have no memory or programming for emotional attachment or empathy which would be disastrous for human beings," said Robotics Engineer Tomas Jelic.

One of the key concepts of old school Transhumanism was the elitist pseudoscience of Eugenics, or “racial hygiene“, which is a concept that still exists today in the modern, shiny, high-tech version of what is adoringly called Transhumanism, Human+, or H+, by its cult followers.

The modern mutation of Transhumanism claims to only support “voluntary eugenics“, which sounds much more benevolent than mandatory sterilization and euthanasia of undesirable humans, doesn’t it?

But, if you have any sense at all, you will probably realize that this ethnic cleansing of the gene pool (“improving the species” and “improving human genetic qualities”) simply cannot and will not ever happen if it is voluntary.

We should all understand that ideas such as “voluntary eugenics” will not be voluntary anymore, if and when the people who believe in these radical ideas get political and financial power.

In fact, they already do have substantial wealth and power, and are working very hard to impose this Transhumanist agenda on our world - whether we like it or not.

Transhumanists believe they are working toward a new and improved existence, leaving everything we have known in the dust bin of history, welcoming a new “Golden Age” of superbeings. They want to become an entirely new species, transcending what we are as humans, using radically advanced technology to achieve their goals.

They want to achieve brain uploading within a few decades. They see the preliminary steps happening before 2020 and that's just 10 years away. If there are unexpected breakthroughs with quantum computers the time line will be shortened considerably.

Some are not so ambitious; they're satisfied with the idea of virtual immortality. In that scenario everything that's an individual is uploaded into a digital avatar and survives 24/7 within a permanent, theoretically eternal, Internet.

An organization called The Digital Immortality Institute (DII) is researching the possibility of doing just that. DII has determined the three things necessary to achieve digital immortality are:

• guaranteed Internet access

• insure the identity integrity of the avatars for each individual user

• make sure the personality, memory, everything that makes up the person as a unique individual, has been uploaded into the digital facsimile before the actual person dies...

A member of the new transhuman movement (beyond human), scientist Anders Sandberg believes uploading minds and downloading them again into new bodies is a technology that's imminent.

He believes it will happen because of Mankind's desire to overcome aging and death, as well as solving the problems associated with overpopulation.
 

What is Mind Uploading?

Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device.

The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably. The simulated mind is assumed to be part of a virtual reality-simulated world, supported by a simplified body simulation model.

Alternatively, the simulated mind could be assumed to reside in a computer inside (or connected to) a humanoid robot or a biological body, replacing its brain.

Whole brain emulation is being portrayed as a "logical endpoint" of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields. Under the guise of brain simulation and medical research, it is being discussed in artificial intelligence research publications as an approach to strong AI.

But among futurists and within the transhumanist movement it is an important proposed life extension technology.

Another transhumanist, AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky is convinced the technology must be developed quickly before a group or government with evil intentions does it first. He sees artificial intelligence as the key to unlock the immortality door. But it must be done in the right way for if it's not, dire consequences

Some like 80-year old Marvin Minsky, called the father of artificial intelligence, creator of artificial neural networks and the co-founder of the AI lab at MIT, believes the general masses haven't a clue about how to handle immortality, nor do they deserve it.

From his ivory tower perspective he believes that scientists need the extra time that immortality can provide, while the rest of humanity should be satisfied with normal lifespans.

Minsky waves aside any ethical considerations and argues that scientists are above such things.

No restrictions on the research and applications, no regulation of any kind should be countenanced by the scientific community.

"Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want. You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people," Minsky adamantly declares.

Pragmatic Morality

The Transhumanist idea that they call Pragmatic Morality, is simply a recycled and renamed version of the oldest deception in the world - that there is no good or evil.

Here is how this concept applies to the beliefs of the cult of Transhumanism:

“Ethics and morals must serve, or at least not stand in the way of, boundless self-actualization. They should be tools and guidelines for successful living, not instruments of senseless repression. Like the flesh, traditional morality is something to be overcome.

 

There is no ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’; just efficiency and inefficiency; intelligence and stupidity; winners and losers. There is only rational self-interest, and those too timid and ignorant to pursue it.

 

This simple yet profound realization forms the bedrock of an empowered worldview, and is a key step towards achieving enlightenment and transcendence.”

Selling Transhumanism to the Masses

“The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior… of groups in such a way as to support the… objectives.”

“Various techniques are used, by any set of groups, and aimed to influence a target audience’s value systems, belief systems, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior.”

This is often referred to as,

“winning hearts and minds“, or similarly, “Capture their minds and their hearts and souls will follow.”

Metacommunication is a natural human communication process, which is as simple as saying, “I love you”, while you are smiling - communication on two levels. Throw in a hug and there are three levels of communicating this positive message.

All communication consists of (at least) two levels.

• First, there is the “content level” of what is being said, literally.

   

• Second, there is the level that Gregory Bateson calls metacommunication, which is the underlying message or tone of the communication, which can be as simple as a facial expression.

We often recognize this as being the “tone” of someone’s voice, or how something is being said.

So, you have what is being said, and how it is being said. The tone is actually the “command” portion of communication, because it is designed to instruct or position the receiver (or victim) of the communication to interpret the message in a certain way.

Bateson’s communications theory can help reveal the interaction operating behind the message.

Every communication, he claims, has both a report [the actual message] and a command aspect [tone]. While the report conveys information about a state of affairs, the command positions the receiver to adopt a particular attitude towards the report and (leads them to) respond in a certain way. The command element of the message is a metacommunication about the context of the message - the nature of the relationship in which the information is exchanged.

The point where this becomes falsified metacommunication in mass media is when they include a primary false message in an advertisement or music video, which is designed not only to sell the product, but also to influence the viewer’s attitudes and beliefs.

There are many layers of communication in movies, videos, advertising and news media that we usually don’t even realize on a conscious level.

The term, falsified metacommunication, was coined by anthropologist Richard Herskowitz. It can be understood, in part, using the simple example of a con-man:

He shakes your hand, smiles at you and tells you nice things… as he steals your money.

It is a strategy of deliberately distracting you from his real purpose or goal by using friendly, charming deception. It is saying one thing, as a way of distracting the victim with deception to make them feel comfortable with the situation, in order to do another thing - to achieve the real goal, which is stealing your money.

The transhumanist movement (in various layers of government who control media) use this type of communication very effectively to spread their primary intended message, that humans are not good enough the way we are naturally, and we need to be altered with technological devices and reprogrammed with radically different ideas in order to better ourselves.

Once nanotechnology advances to a level where human beings can be cybernetically transformed without consent, the survival of homo sapiens will be a threat of extinction. This will eventually be done against our own will according to radical transhumanists.

This idea is dangerously flawed and it is a complete dehumanization of our species, as well as being a very troublesome vision for the future of humanity.
 

Sources

• How to become immortal - Upload your mind

• Transhumanism, PsyWar and B.E.P.’s “Imma Be”

• Transhumanist Resources

• Nanomedicine