"I’m calling for a transition away from the view that we are simply *survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes*"
Well-said. The related threads to this is often underexplored in society - what are our other base instincts beyond survival? I think of self-expression as another natural and powerful instinct and it seems to play a more important role in feelings similar to this.
I see so much overlap in which this natural desire for "self-expression" coincides with a world that is greener, wetter, and is fundamentally rooted in biological life. I think it's something about the natural chaos or serendipity that complex bio-systems can provide that seems to encourage and facilitate this losse "self-expressive" parts of ourself.
Thanks Asad! You're getting to the root of my point. In many ways, biology is a pattern leading towards growth and expansion outwards. In this way, there is less to reconcile between what our cells want for the world and what many humans aspire to!
Ah, that's amazing! Glad it connects so directly - it feels so obvious but there's a serious lack of this type of discussion publicly from the biology side. Michael Levin is one of the other researchers that's caught my eye who's work makes a similar direct argument.
Excellent post. There is so much potential will the combined impact of increased computing power, lower energy costs and improvements in biological sciences.
Do you have any thoughts on how the current funding structure of our institutions helps/inhibits work towards your stated goals? Do you see any significant blocks or inflection points that philanthropies or other groups should be funding beyond the typical funding mechanisms?
Thanks Tom. I'm rooting for New Science, and have written for them in the past.
I'm generally a fan of all of the new experiments in funding structures and institutions happening right now. Common examples beyond New Science are the Arc Institute, Arcadia, Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and others.
As a practicing scientist, I can attest to the increasing bureaucracy associated with the grant system. It will be good to have some competing models and alternatives.
I'm also cautiously optimistic about Web3 "DeSci" projects helping to make things more fluid. Projects like are funding millions of dollars of actual research projects, which has to be acknowledged.
Hey, I thought this was really clear writing. I’m not really convinced by these reasons to focus on biological life though; are there reasons to prefer biological life that aren’t aesthetic and axiomatic? A focus on biotech would definitely open up avenues to combat scarcity, but so would benevolent AGI or smart digital minds.
My view is that traditional transhumanism is mostly good and correct, but that doesn’t mean we should all drop what we’re doing and work on AGI. There’s useful work to do in other sciences in the medium term that would help improve life a great deal.
I've heard effective altruists place "reduction of suffering" or a similar sentiment as their fundamental axiom—a cornerstone that is surprisingly challenging to build an airtight philosophical defense for, but that the community is worth building a philosophy and belief system around.
Similarly, on deep aesthetic preference, as a biological being I want to help biological life flourish and expand. I'm comfortable with this as an axiom.
Transhumanism has come to mean a lot of things. In the Kurzweil sense, I'm not sure how many people are still wedded to the view that we are approaching some technological event horizon in this century—it's a really hard thing to reason about. In the sense of continuing to aspire to develop technology and accelerate progress, sounds good to me!
I think biological progress is really enticing and valuable, and there are so many forms and functions that we could be reaching for. But for whatever reason AI has captured everyone's imagination, even to the point of exclusion. That is, by thinking about and being fascinated by AI, we are somehow as a society incapable of admitting that biological progress is also interesting. Maybe this is partly because the internet is made by programmers and we programmers are thrilled by the prospect that our skills could be so directly applicable to the future (AI) and less something that we're not skilled on (biology). I am curious if you have any insight into this cultural attention block.
One thing that we could be doing is more human enhancement via the germline:
Leaving aside the merits of meat vs machine, this seems like a strange perspective of the evolutionary process to me. As Nick Land put it:
"It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"
"I’m calling for a transition away from the view that we are simply *survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes*"
Well-said. The related threads to this is often underexplored in society - what are our other base instincts beyond survival? I think of self-expression as another natural and powerful instinct and it seems to play a more important role in feelings similar to this.
I see so much overlap in which this natural desire for "self-expression" coincides with a world that is greener, wetter, and is fundamentally rooted in biological life. I think it's something about the natural chaos or serendipity that complex bio-systems can provide that seems to encourage and facilitate this losse "self-expressive" parts of ourself.
Wish there was more research on the subject!
Thanks Asad! You're getting to the root of my point. In many ways, biology is a pattern leading towards growth and expansion outwards. In this way, there is less to reconcile between what our cells want for the world and what many humans aspire to!
Ah, that's amazing! Glad it connects so directly - it feels so obvious but there's a serious lack of this type of discussion publicly from the biology side. Michael Levin is one of the other researchers that's caught my eye who's work makes a similar direct argument.
Excellent post. There is so much potential will the combined impact of increased computing power, lower energy costs and improvements in biological sciences.
Do you have any thoughts on how the current funding structure of our institutions helps/inhibits work towards your stated goals? Do you see any significant blocks or inflection points that philanthropies or other groups should be funding beyond the typical funding mechanisms?
See: https://newscience.org/
Thanks Tom. I'm rooting for New Science, and have written for them in the past.
I'm generally a fan of all of the new experiments in funding structures and institutions happening right now. Common examples beyond New Science are the Arc Institute, Arcadia, Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and others.
As a practicing scientist, I can attest to the increasing bureaucracy associated with the grant system. It will be good to have some competing models and alternatives.
I'm also cautiously optimistic about Web3 "DeSci" projects helping to make things more fluid. Projects like are funding millions of dollars of actual research projects, which has to be acknowledged.
Welcome back, Elliot!
Thanks Dudu!
Hey, I thought this was really clear writing. I’m not really convinced by these reasons to focus on biological life though; are there reasons to prefer biological life that aren’t aesthetic and axiomatic? A focus on biotech would definitely open up avenues to combat scarcity, but so would benevolent AGI or smart digital minds.
My view is that traditional transhumanism is mostly good and correct, but that doesn’t mean we should all drop what we’re doing and work on AGI. There’s useful work to do in other sciences in the medium term that would help improve life a great deal.
I've heard effective altruists place "reduction of suffering" or a similar sentiment as their fundamental axiom—a cornerstone that is surprisingly challenging to build an airtight philosophical defense for, but that the community is worth building a philosophy and belief system around.
Similarly, on deep aesthetic preference, as a biological being I want to help biological life flourish and expand. I'm comfortable with this as an axiom.
Transhumanism has come to mean a lot of things. In the Kurzweil sense, I'm not sure how many people are still wedded to the view that we are approaching some technological event horizon in this century—it's a really hard thing to reason about. In the sense of continuing to aspire to develop technology and accelerate progress, sounds good to me!
I think biological progress is really enticing and valuable, and there are so many forms and functions that we could be reaching for. But for whatever reason AI has captured everyone's imagination, even to the point of exclusion. That is, by thinking about and being fascinated by AI, we are somehow as a society incapable of admitting that biological progress is also interesting. Maybe this is partly because the internet is made by programmers and we programmers are thrilled by the prospect that our skills could be so directly applicable to the future (AI) and less something that we're not skilled on (biology). I am curious if you have any insight into this cultural attention block.
One thing that we could be doing is more human enhancement via the germline:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin/
Join us (or don't):
https://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap
You may also be interested in the Bison Sphere Manifesto ( https://www.palladiummag.com/2020/04/01/the-bison-sphere-manifesto/ ).
I found your post from https://stephenmalina.com/post/2023-01-11-viriditas-dialogue/
Leaving aside the merits of meat vs machine, this seems like a strange perspective of the evolutionary process to me. As Nick Land put it:
"It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"