Transhumanist Free Will

Even if you think debate over human free will has been conclusive (to say the least) or not agree in aphorisms as definitive judgements on the matter, Hank Pellissier’s “Free Will Does Not Exist – Should it be a Transhumanist Enhancement?” brings a refreshing debate on what would ‘enhanced’ human beings do about their possibility of free will.

“(…) We don’t have free will because human physiology isn’t wired that way. (…)

It is true that certain factions still believe in free will – Religionists and Libertarians – but I’m not in either camp. I’m an atheist social progressive.

Having established my opinion on free will, let’s proceed…(…)  Should 100% Free Will be a Transhumanist Goal? (…)  I believe free will isn’t available,but it could be attained, at least partially, perhaps through excruciating disciplines… or – definitely – via emerging transhuman technologies.

Returning to the present time, let’s examine the suffering caused by our enslavement to our outdated neurochemistry, which evolved to protect us from pre-civilization menaces. Let’s divide our investigation of the consequences into three categories:

Body –  Many people (…) enslaved to physical addictions that render them helpless. (…)

Emotion  – Humanity is cursed with negative feelings that injure us with internal pain and agony. (…)

Thought  – Our minds often flit spasmodically from one obsession to another, exhausting us with their randomness and superficiality. (…)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these problems were eradicated?

Imagine an existence as Free-Will Transhumans, who decided 100% of the time what we wanted to think, feel, and do.. (…)

We’ll begin with options presently available, and continue from there into futuristic, far-out, fantastical possibilities.

Today’s Techniques and Technology  – Control of one’s thoughts and feelings can be improved via meditation. (…)

Pharmaceutical Control of our Biochemistry –  “Paradise engineering”, advocated by philosopher David Pearce of HedWeb.com, has “abolition of suffering” as its goal. (…)

Memory Erasure and Alteration + Injection of Joyful Invented Memories  – Our neurological response to situations is largely determined by memories of similar events. (…)

Rewiring Our Brains, with Wires – Our mental activity currently depends on largely-out-of-our-control neurochemical reactions….”  read full article

Will the future be more of the same in sexism?

Rose Eveleth’s Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists? published in The Atlantic discusses the relations of having a male skewed crowd of futurists and what to expect of the future.

Are men to reproduce current social sexist skews?  If so, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as unfolding of today’s cultural vices?

Then, looking at a possible explanation of why women are not so preset among futurists – is it an old educational/income bias – or women nonconformist stance towards current sexist society prevents them from seeing men’s brave new world?

In this case, it may be exactly what future calls for.

 

 

Spontaneous thoughts processes study

Published in ScienceDirect, “The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes” researchers use neuroimaging analysis on spontaneous thoughts.

Cognitive functions in mind-wandering states links to brain activity in both default mode network and not directly related regions with comparable consistency.

Quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies bring light to neural correlates.

“These meta-analytic results indicate that DMN activation alone is insufficient to adequately capture the neural basis of spontaneous thought; frontoparietal control network areas, and other non-DMN regions, appear to be equally central. We conclude that further progress in the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of spontaneous thought will therefore require a re-balancing of our view of the contributions of various regions and networks throughout the brain, and beyond the DMN.”  check the full paper

And the whole earth was of one language… (Genesis 11:1)

Reserachers Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of MIT published a “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages“.

Words grammatically related tend to be closer to each other in sentences.  Across all languages, in what can be a case of a linguistic universal.  Linguistic universals are predicted by theories such as Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky and applied in many natural and formal languages.

Key novelty here is ‘Large-scale evidence’.  Since Noam Chomsky (among other linguists) language models and hierarchy studies apply theoretic universal properties.  More data and application of language parser made it possible to gather evidence of dependency length minimization.