Playing Catch Up

The name of this blog is indeed “Pop” Transhumanism, is it not, implying I’m supposed to know something about popular culture? To my shame, there are epic gaps in my monstrous compendium of entertainment knowledge. I’m taking steps to correct some of those. Namely: BattleStar Galactica and its prequel series Caprica; Star Trek: The Next Generation; Transmetropolitan; Y: The Last Man; Bostrom and Savulescu’s Human Enhancement; Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget; some Thomas Sowell, L. Frank Baum, and I’ll probably pick up Mass Effect 1 & 2.

Additionally, Red Dwarf and Ghost in the Shell are getting a second going through.

Stuff on deck includes Stephenson’s Diamond Age, Brin’s “Uplift Series,” are in my reading cue, and my netflix cue contains Metropolis, THX:1138, The Lawnmower Man, and Machine Girl. I have a stack of JET and Bioethics articles I’m burning through, I’m reading back issues of the godforsaken disaster that is The New Atlantic, and am going to be tackling Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia as soon as possible.

Did We Just Have Sex?

Apparently, that question is more debatable than one might think. A Kinsey Institute study on what a person thinks “had sex” means shows that, well, that phrasing isn’t very exact:

The study involved responses from 486 Indiana residents who took part in a telephone survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research at IU. Participants, mostly heterosexual, were asked, “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was …,” followed by 14 behaviorally specific items. Here are some of the results:

• Responses did not differ significantly overall for men and women. The study involved 204 men and 282 women.
• 95 percent of respondents would consider penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) having had sex, but this rate drops to 89 percent if there is no ejaculation.
• 81 percent considered penile-anal intercourse having had sex, with the rate dropping to 77 percent for men in the youngest age group (18-29), 50 percent for men in the oldest age group (65 and up) and 67 percent for women in the oldest age group.
• 71 percent and 73 percent considered oral contact with a partner’s genitals (OG), either performing or receiving, as having had sex.
• Men in the youngest and oldest age groups were less likely to answer “yes” compared with the middle two age groups for when they performed OG.
• Significantly fewer men in the oldest age group answered “yes” for PVI (77 percent).

I want to know what the missing percentages of PVI actually think sex is. Maybe it’s a bunch of Foucault wannabees with a “if everything is sex, than nothing is sex” attitude. I’ve had this debate with friends over what “hooking-up” actually is, but I thought “had sex” was explicit. Goodness.

Screw The Jet Pack, Gimme Nano-Dentistry

It’s 2010 folks. We have robot vacuums, get our eyes fixed with lasers, Richard Branson has a personal spacecraft, and anyone who uses Google Chat or Skype has a video phone. Whether or not it feels like the future to us, this is somebody’s future. Philip K. Dick would be screaming and running around in circles, yelling, “I predicted that, and that, AND THAT.”

I just spent a bit of time talking with my sister, who lives in Seattle, via the wonder that is gchat. We talked for an hour, for free, in full screen color. We showed our cats to one another (pets are a universal language) and talked about the various medical procedures we’d had/were about to have. We used the glorious technology of the internet, personal computers, and video cameras to chit chat about the weather, I kid you not.

Both of us have to go to the dentist, and I know I’ll have to at least have a cavity or two filled, and they’ll have to fix my little permanent retainer to keep my lower front teeth from going full-blown hillbilly on me. It blows my mind that even though we live “in the future” I still have to worry about them filling my rotting teeth with metal. Or if I have a headache and they don’t know why, they inject you with a compound that makes your blood glow so you can be bombarded with X-rays by a CT scanner. In danger of proving Louis C.K.’s motto for the early 21st century true, I wish I didn’t have to use amazing technology to complain about the parts of my life that haven’t caught up yet.

A Hero: Roger Ebert

If you haven’t seen the deluge of “Roger Ebert is awesome and moving” posts on the internet about his Oprah interview, here is all the good stuff from Gawker.

Often we ask, “Why does it take tragedy for us to notice these great people?” The reason is that it is not tragedy but crisis, that beautiful fusion of danger and opportunity wherein the choice to persist or to succumb highlights and underlines the qualities latent in a human being. It’s why our favorite stories all involve a crisis, and our favorite heroes are forged in the hottest crucibles. Ebert was always a great man in the making, but cancer was his kiln and fired him into a work of heroic art.

Transhumanists, like nearly everyone else on the planet, are obsessed with human nature. Unlike others, we are obsessed with it because some believe we are in constant danger of undermining or ruining it with the technologies and ideas transhumanists support. I believe human nature is orders of magnitude more resilient than proposed by the Fukuyamas and Kasses of the world. Each of us constructs a self-identity based on what we’ve been given. For Ebert, his voice was not his self because it just was, but because the man talked and talked and talked. He tells stories about how no one could shut him up and the very fact that there was enough pre-recorded audio for his artificial voice to be made is proof of that. Alternatively, a man like Stephen Hawking has done guest appearances on The Simpsons and Futurama with his “artificial” voice, because it is the voice he has had for the bulk of his life.

Ebert has been, in effect, reborn through his disease, rediscovered by the media and public at large, in no small part to the Esquire article chronicling his life. I am very, very excited to see what he does next.

The Incredible Transit Map

Apropos of the last post, why I am a design buff is stuff like this body map from Sam Lomen:

[via Gizmodo via Behance via StreetAnatomy via TheDailyWhat]

Ignorance As Realness

I have never understood the “real men are simple” while women, intellectuals, and other elites are unnecessarily complex. An example from the DogHouse:

I’m an armchair design buff. I love typefaces and color schemes and knowing the difference between esoteric design styles and complex color theory (like why brown and pink look great together, but not brown and red). Somehow this negates my having a penis, and the more complex set is clearly unnecessarily so. This is exemplary of how people elevate elective ignorance. “Blue is blue” except when it’s not. Teal and turquoise are clearly different. And why is this a gender thing? Last time I checked, every kid in school preferred the 64 colors box of crayola crayons to the 8 color box. Or maybe feminism is responsible for this.

Crap like this is why Ron Paul is in the same party as Dick Cheney and why Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Sarah Palin are more well known than Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek among “limited government” types. Because everything gets lumped together under a guise of populist bullshit. Stop cowering behind your ignorance by making it seem like being more specific and informed is somehow frivolous.

Cultural Selection

Don’t you love it when something you’ve been harping on is supported by hard evidence? Biologists are discovering that culture is affecting evolution at the genetic level:

The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood.

Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome. Presumably the extra nutrition was of such great advantage that adults able to digest milk left more surviving offspring, and the genetic change swept through the population.

This instance of gene-culture interaction turns out to be far from unique. In the last few years, biologists have been able to scan the whole human genome for the signatures of genes undergoing selection. Such a signature is formed when one version of a gene becomes more common than other versions because its owners are leaving more surviving offspring. From the evidence of the scans, up to 10 percent of the genome — some 2,000 genes — shows signs of being under selective pressure.

And the working definition of “culture” in this article is “broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology.”

Why Do We Accept Aging?

When I was in undergrad, a professor asked our whole class a strange question. The question was strange because it seemed totally out of context, but I think he had a point, so I present it here as a worthy thought experiment.

“Lets say that I have in my hand, right now, a pill,” he said, holding up an invisible tablet between his thumb and index finger. “This pill, if you take it, will make you ageless. You will not age or suffer the diseases of aging if you take this pill. You can still die, commit suicide, etc, but you will not age. There is, however, a catch. The catch is that you don’t get to think about this decision. You have to choose right now, will you take this pill. Alright, if you would take this pill, raise your hand.”

My hand, tentatively went up. This all occurred before I was interested, heck, had ever heard of transhumanism, mind you. The professor was notoriously difficult (by that I mean stubborn and odd, not smart and challenging) and I had little reason to want to incur one of his rants, but my hand went up all the same. I was the only one in the room, and whether he noticed me or not is irrelevant. His point was not that people want to age and die but that we naturally distrust such offers. It simply sounds too good to be true.

Our brains are trained, over time, to understand what a reasonably possible benefit can exist for a given price. A free pill that has no side-effects and no Twilight Zone caveats (you have to be alive, can’t die so are tortured, etc) seems more impossible than the idea of anti-aging itself. The problem is that this protective aspect of our mind can become over excited, so we stop believing certain solutions are ever possible. To cure, or even significantly reduce the damages caused by aging, are such an epic benefit that it seems our minds will actively manufacture problems, because the benefit must have some sort of epic cost associated.

So we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good. But I think there is one other reason. Imagine we suddenly discover we can cure aging. It’s simple, cheap, universal, and we manage to quickly adapt society to deal with an undying population. All of the impacts described by bioconservatives don’t exist, anti-aging is a glorious and beautiful time and everyone lives for centuries.

The cost is the realization that every death was preventable. That billions of people have been, in effect, tortured for decades by nature and because we could not change it we described it as beautiful and honorable. The crisis in our collective psyche would be something of unparalleled magnitude. Our species is a master at making virtue of necessity, but what becomes of our virtue when that necessity ceases to be? Does it cease as well?

How To Make Sex Better

Sex, on its own, in the wild, natural and unadorned, is still complicated. Don’t believe me? Look at a peacock or a bird of paradise. Salmon die after they procreate. Sea slugs penis joust. Now throw in evolved human biology, history, culture, technology, and science and you have a real disaster on your hands.

But sex isn’t alone in being affected by these things. But for everything that isn’t sex, we apply “lifehacks” to increase our productivity, organization, mood, and leisure time. We read monthly manuals on what to eat to lose weight, how to stay fashionable, what entertainment we might like, and news about our favorite hobbies. Yet we constantly mystify sex. Our culture treats it as this untouchable, morally ambiguous, thing-that-is-not-mentioned that EVERYONE talks and thinks about. We are at the beginnings of an era wherein sex and sexuality will become both more liberated and more complex than any previous era by orders of magnitude.

Transhumanism, as a philosophy and the technologies it embraces, may offer us a chance to finally take some of the stress and mystery, and hence create more enjoyment, over this taboo part of our lives. When Ben Goertzel and I had our little exchange on sex (he mostly ignorned my critique and tsk tsked me), I said “If sex is messy and imperfect, we need to improve it, not get rid of it.” here are my suggestions on how to do it.

1. Better matches: It is always impossible to guess what discoveries will occur in the future, but science has been confirming over the past century that both sexuality and gender are more of a spectrum than a binary. You know how politics is better plotted on a grid than a line? Well, sexuality is best plotted in a kind of hypercube. Sexuality is more like taste in music than it is an either/or situation, with thousands of combinations and often very eclectic interests. Now consider this: imagine a Facebook app that takes the voluminous knowledge of OK cupid, Match, or E-Harmony, combined with psychological research and an enormously powerful algorithm that is designed to help you understand your sexuality. In short: a Pandora or Netflix or Amazon “you might like this” of dating and relationships. It might even suggest a whole genre shift: “you like partners that bite, pinch, and slap, you should try: Bondage!” Instead of worrying about whether or not your profile picture is right, you can focus on being yourself.

2. Safer: There is already a vaccine available for HPV, it isn’t impossible that other strains of both viral and bacterial STIs could be vaccinated against. The stigma that protection oneself against STIs means one is sexually reckless (a paradox, given that a person taking preventative measures is likely to be a good decision maker in general) is going the way of the dodo. A combination of vaccinations, regular testing, antibiotics and barrier methods, if used in large enough numbers, could effectively create a herd immunity. We eliminated small pox, measles, mumps, and polio, we can get rid of STIs.

3. Reproductive Choice: To make something a choice, it has to reasonably something you control. Reproduction, as it stands, is hard to control, despite all the options.  The Today sponge, which went of the market temporarily, is available again in the US. Lots of different forms of long term hormonal birth control are available. IUDs are now far safer and better designed. Condoms are cheap and prolific. There is some truly great news on the horizon, however: the male pill. Despite the clamor of men’s magazines and the apparently hilarious joke that men are reckless morons, every guy I’ve talked to would love to be able to take a male pill. Why? Because most of my friends are smart and realize the awful consequences of accidentally getting someone pregnant. The male pill lets men take a much bigger role in pregnancy prevention and ads a huge aspect of redundancy to birth control. And better control means fewer accidental pregnancies, the central goal of both the pro-choice and pro-life movement.

4. Science Knowledge: A common complaint is that porn causes unrealistic attitudes about sex. A common joke is that young boys look at naked natives in National Geographic to get their jollies. Perhaps the undiscussed middle ground – TLC and Discovery Channel shows on human sexuality – could provide a fruitful place of learning. I know a lot of people (myself included) who learned how all the plumbing and hardware worked, while satisfying their curiosity and need for titilation, by watching science shows. Having the birds and the bees narrated to you by David Attenbourough is a glorious thing (it also makes Planet Earth even more erotic). Knowledge is sexy.

5. More Intentional: I posted about “tinkering with libido” some time ago, but it’s really an astonishing idea that bears repeating. Presuming well-made, low side-effect drugs, one could actively control one’s libido. Long day at work? Pop a libido suppressor and keep saucy thoughts from distracting you. Finally heading home? Take a libido enhancer and be very excited to see your significant other by the time you come in the front door. As Megan McArdle pointed out in a brave post on pedophilia, there are some sexual desires that are taboo, but still natural and uncontrollable. Schizophrenics, the mentally disabled, severe autistics, and a range of other conditions would be greatly eased by a reduced sex drive. Alternatively, those on anti-depressants or social anxiety drugs often lose sex drive, canceling out one of the major benefits of their medication. Libido control, and many of these drugs are in the works, would do wonders for many.

These are just a few ideas working with what we have and what we could accomplish in the near future. In the long term, ideas are absolutely mind bending. Synthetic skin could allow a person to amplify nerve endings all over the body, making every sexual experience otherworldly. Anti-aging might radically alter just how long our “hedonistic” youth is while simultaneously letting us have long term monogamous relationships that don’t have to suffer from the libido dampening effect of aging. Telepresence and virtual reality could help make long distance relationships easier and less taxing. Radical but safe and effective body modifications might allow for entirely new forms of sex and sexuality and gender to emerge.

As with everything transhuman, the goal is not to reduce the very things that make us human, like our sexual drive, but to open them to new and exciting possibilities. The goal isn’t to guide sex and sexuality towards some version of perfection, but instead to create orders of magnitude more options, to allow better control and safer conditions. Transhumanism is about diversity and choice, why not bring that to sex? Sex can be mystical and is perhaps ultimately ineffable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it better with technology, knowledge, and freedom.

Ludwig Van Never Did Anything Wrong

I just saw A Clockwork Orange last week for the first time. How timely:

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable. As one critical commentator said, they will probably “go into adulthood associating great music—the most bewitchingly lovely sounds on Earth—with a punitive slap on the chops.” This is what passes for education in Britain today: teaching kids to think “Danger!” whenever they hear Mozart’s Requiem or some other piece of musical genius.