US says no to nanotechnology

Remus said:
They seem to be completely bind on how dramatically something like that could alter human civilisation, we would practically stop being human altogether actually:|
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So? Why does that matter? Your line of thought confuses and upsets me.

Remus said:
Hopefully I won't have to see that future...
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I fail to understand how anyone can be afraid of change. If we can do such things in the future that is bloody marvellous.
 
It's not our bodies that make us human.

That's why we're different from animals.
 
Eejit said:
That's why we're different from animals.
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Well...no, we're not. :p

The idea that we're somehow on a different plane to the beasts is, frankly, medieval. "Different from animals" doesn't work because the category of "animals" varies enormously, and we are in it.

Our bodies make us everything.
 
Rushing headfirst into groundbreaking technological change which will alter the very fabric of life itself in ways we can't even predict is even more irresponsible than saying we shouldn't go there at all. Especially as it's not exactly a secret that society always takes time to catch up with the changes, the technology isn't assimilated into society naturally. In many ways, we still haven't found ways of dealing with the technological society we live in today. Our way of life has negative effects on all of us.
Ironically the same people that are whining about global warming now would be saying much the same things about the industrial revolution 150 years ago. Where's your foresight?
 
Here?

You seem to be leaping to some manner of conclusion here. Maybe. Because, you see, while the poll was simply on the issue of whether nanotechnology - any nanotechnology - was morally acceptible, nobody on the 'other side' has suggested that nanotech as a platform, or indeed any other technological platform, should be allowed to grow unrestricted. I am drawn, perhaps unwisely, towards a comparison with atheism/theism: to claim nanotechnology is "morally wrong" will brook no use of the forbidden fruit at all, whereas to claim it is not morally wrong allows, as with the label of a-theism, a rather broader range of perspectives, from "LET'S UPLOAD NOW" to "obviously we should be very careful."

I absolutely agree with your warning, but I got the distinct and bizarre impression it was intended as a counter-argument to a viewpoint that nobody had so far expressed.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Here?

You seem to be leaping to some manner of conclusion here. Maybe. Because, you see, while the poll was simply on the issue of whether nanotechnology - any nanotechnology - was morally acceptible, nobody on the 'other side' has suggested that nanotech as a platform, or indeed any other technological platform, should be allowed to grow unrestricted. I am drawn, perhaps unwisely, towards a comparison with atheism/theism: to claim nanotechnology is "morally wrong" will brook no use of the forbidden fruit at all, whereas to claim it is not morally wrong allows, as with the label of a-theism, a rather broader range of perspectives, from "LET'S UPLOAD NOW" to "obviously we should be very careful."

I absolutely agree with your warning, but I got the distinct and bizarre impression it was intended as a counter-argument to a viewpoint that nobody had so far expressed.
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I kind of got the impression that most of the people arguing on behalf of nano-technology had no caution on the subject. Idealism untempered by realism.
 
What, like theotherguy reasonably disputing Grey Goo hysteria, and all the people trembling about us becoming 'less human'? :p

If anything, it is those in this thread who are opposing human augmentation who may be guilty of "idealism untempered by realism."

To be philosophically idealistic would be to enshrine human experience as an ideal - the essence of "what it is to be human." A realistic and unflinching gaze might reveal that there is little basis for assuming any such thing.
 
repiV said:
I kind of got the impression that most of the people arguing on behalf of nano-technology had no caution on the subject. Idealism untempered by realism.
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It wouldn't matter whether we were cautious or not, this wouldn't change the moral implications. And we don't need to be particularly cautious ourselves as we're not undertaking it. Whoever is performing the research would be taking those precautions. But that's just stating the obvious. It's like saying "Oh, sure, build a Nuclear reactor, but don't forget your safety devices!". Although this might have been useful advice for Chernobyl.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Well...no, we're not. :p

The idea that we're somehow on a different plane to the beasts is, frankly, medieval. "Different from animals" doesn't work because the category of "animals" varies enormously, and we are in it.

Our bodies make us everything.
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Ok, different from the other animals.
Biologically we're not much different, behaviourally and with regards to intelligence and the degree to which we manipulate our environment we are. Which is what I was saying, it isn't our bodies that make us unique, it's our minds.
 
But I do not think that is true. I have argued this once before:

Whales play. Elephants paint. Chimpanzees use tools and they socialise. By the standards of human behaviour they seem to do far more than what is simply necessary for survival; a crab is one thing but a bonobo or a killer whale, both species possessing highly complex social and co-operative rituals, is quite another. The idea that animals are fundamentally on a different level than us is, as I said, medieval - or at least Enlightenment.

Maybe we can observe such behaviour in animals not because they are as high as us but because we are as low as them. True story: once there was a woman who suffered a very specific brain injury: from the point of the accident onward, she could never forget a single speck of sensory detail. She remembered everything. During the period of her study she described it to medics as being horrible, a curse, saying she'd give anything to be able to forget again. The brain is capable of remembering it everything it takes in. But it won't. Somewhere far far up the family tree, something - be it God or evolution - realised that over-recall was counterproductive to the propogation of thinking beings (many animals have good memories too). It did not work. It was not viable.

When I was in school I wondered why social groups worked the way they do - why people are more loyal to their friends or more slavish to their cliques and why they are automatically hostile for outsiders. The easy conclusion was that this was an evolutionary hangover. Mankind is fundamentally a pack animal, a social animal, and that's the way packs work: they band together against anything outside them because it is mutually beneficial for the future of their genes. The sad fact was, my trite and adolescent brain conceded, that millions of years later we were still ruled in part by instincts.

The readers of Darwin were faced with the horrifying possibility that art, thought, and society were all ultimately products of animal evolution. It's not reductionist, certainly not any more than the doctrine of the 'soul'; indeed, the relatively simple statement "we are products of evolution" falsely condenses a near infinitely complex field. The book and volume of the mind staggers with upward vertigo to think of all the ways this relationship might manifest: how might all the aspects of our consciousness and civilisation, even that self-examining intelligence, that scrutiny of our own existence - are we evolution out of control? Have we outstripped the natural rate of change? - be a manifestation of the way in which our brain, even the animal brain full stop, has been biologically constructed.

I won't even begin to discuss social construction. You and your body are fluid, subjects in process. On quantum, biological and - for lack of a better word - spiritual levels, you are dying, wombing, birthing every second. You're made of stardust, and your cells are a spreading fire, and just as none of us are literally the same person we were ten years ago, neither is a mind the same mind from one second to the next. However the fuck it happened that we came to think (if thinking is what we do), it's necessary on occasion to face up the reality that we are animals too. No worries. Modern theory still hasn't entirely got to grips with the implications of the death of God. I doubt that any of us have.

So maybe in the end we don't have the choice: it's not in our nature to stay depressed for long. It's not productive.

And after all, it's all quite wondrous in its way.
 
repiV said:
I kind of got the impression that most of the people arguing on behalf of nano-technology had no caution on the subject. Idealism untempered by realism.
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science rarely ****s up on its own. we should be careful when deciding to go mass producing stuff, thats usually when things start to become dangerous.

Druckles said:
It wouldn't matter whether we were cautious or not, this wouldn't change the moral implications. And we don't need to be particularly cautious ourselves as we're not undertaking it. Whoever is performing the research would be taking those precautions. But that's just stating the obvious. It's like saying "Oh, sure, build a Nuclear reactor, but don't forget your safety devices!". Although this might have been useful advice for Chernobyl.
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chernobyl was first and foremost a political and human mistake, the technology would work adequately if the ones in charge wouldn't start measuring their penises at the time.
 
Whales play. Elephants paint. Chimps use tools and socialise.

We can make fire. We invented the wheel. We have developed writing. We have split the atom. We explore space. We can rearrange the very genetic code we are all made up of.
We are more than them.
 
We also are them.

I don't dispute that the human race has accomplished far 'more' (whatever that is) than the stragglers who stuck around in trees, but I object to the idea that this is down to some fundamental difference in our intelligence or manipulation. We are not at all alone in the things that we do; to an extent it's a difference of degree, not of type. And what the hell is "our minds, not our bodies" supposed to mean? Our minds are part of our bodies. That fact shapes the very way they work. There is no soul-tentacle extrusion octopus that is our actual thinking complex.

The response may have seemed grandiose, but it was written for another topic on a faraway forum, but was appropriate here; I did not feel like letting it go to waste.
 
Sulkdodds said:
But I do not think that is true. I have argued this once before:

Whales play. Elephants paint. Chimpanzees use tools and they socialise. By the standards of human behaviour they seem to do far more than what is simply necessary for survival; a crab is one thing but a bonobo or a killer whale, both species possessing highly complex social and co-operative rituals, is quite another. The idea that animals are fundamentally on a different level than us is, as I said, medieval - or at least Enlightenment...
[SNIP]
...However the **** it happened that we came to think (if thinking is what we do), it's necessary on occasion to face up the reality that we are animals too. No worries. Modern theory still hasn't entirely got to grips with the implications of the death of God. I doubt that any of us have.
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Good post, Sulk, summed up a lot of what I think about humanity, esp. the bit about the death of God. Too many people dismiss the notion of God, or any kind of overarching supernatural force, without thinking about what that entails for us as a species.

What it entails is that there should be no intrinsic property of humanity that separates us on a fundamental level from the rest of the animal kingdom. Sure, we have the capacity to reason (or at least we tell ourselves we do), but that must consequently be a product of some quirk of our physiology, and not some magickal stream of force from the Holy Spirit which might enable us to do a shoryuken should we succeed in tapping into it properly.

And having accepted our fundamental sameness with animals, that opens up a whole field of other questions. Among them: what makes a human life more valuable than that of a crab? Could there ever exist an organism that is to us what we are to bonobos/bonoboes/bonobi? Could nanobots be utilised to improve the organic mechanism which produces our intelligence? Would a human who had been 'improved' in this way be a higher form of life, due to their increased sentience? (Yes, those last two questions are my half-arsed stab at remaining on-topic)
 
I think the primary barrier between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is the fact that we have self-awareness and can overide instinct with judgement.
 
Atomic_Piggy said:
I think the primary barrier between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is the fact that we have self-awareness and can overide instinct with judgement.
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Chimps, elephants and dolphins are all self-aware and capable of reasoned judgment.

What really separates us from animals is the degree to which we can use our mental faculties, our vast ability to use tools, and our robust grasp of language.
 
I think nanotech and genetic modification are the best route forward for mankind.

Remus said:
This is something I strongly agree with. I've seen plenty of documentaries where they promote the possibility of making genetically modified humans specifically designed for different environments. For zero gravity, for living in a highly radioactive environments etc. This really pisses me off. They seem to be completely bind on how dramatically something like that could alter human civilisation, we would practically stop being human altogether actually:|
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Yes because being able to survive in different environments totally doesnt make sense and shreds our humanity. That doesnt make sense to me at all.

I think you and cheo have a strange view on what humanity is. Its not our pissing and shitting bodies. Its not our fragile limbs made of bone and flesh. Its not any physical part of ourselves. Its our ability to think, reason, and feel emotions. Being able to live on mars or in zero gravity or underwater or in radioactive environments wont change a damn thing with our humanity.

I even feel that the day we can rid ourselves of these disgusting and inefficient meatbag bodies will be a massive milestone in the evolution of mankind.
 
Krynn72 said:
I think you and cheo have a strange view on what humanity is. Its not our pissing and shitting bodies. Its not our fragile limbs made of bone and flesh. Its not any physical part of ourselves. Its our ability to think, reason, and feel emotions. Being able to live on mars or in zero gravity or underwater or in radioactive environments wont change a damn thing with our humanity.

I even feel that the day we can rid ourselves of these disgusting and inefficient meatbag bodies will be a massive milestone in the evolution of mankind.
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tru dat :borg:


seriously, i'm not joking :thumbs:
 
Krynn72 said:
I even feel that the day we can rid ourselves of these disgusting and inefficient meatbag bodies will be a massive milestone in the evolution of mankind.
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You outright disgust me.


Also, I find it funny how the "esteemed" members of this little clique of anti-humanism believe that simply because a number of people are against something, that scientists will not research it.
 
It always puzzles me how America wants to be seen as the pinnacle of technology and discovery, especially when it comes to military matters.

Nanotechnology is the way of the future, even with the potential for military applications, and if you don't research and develop now, you will be left in the nanodust.
 
Cheomesh said:
Our species should change like it always has, by forces around us, not ourselves.
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Yeah, see, I'm not getting what the difference is between 'forces around us' and 'ourselves', here.

Evolution happens based on the environmental factors that force change on us. This includes biological factors. What you're essentially doing is arbitrarily privelleging certain factors over others; that is, you are priveleging the factors that are the result of only certain vectors of chance over the factors that emanate from others.

It's okay for a (NON HUMAN) animal or a rockslide to force evolution on us - understand that's a vast kind of synecdoche there - but not okay for a war or a science lab. It's a completely arbitrary distinction.

All natural evolution is also forced evolution. All evolution takes place because of material circumstances. Why do men in labcoats get exempted?
 
This pissed me off. NANO tech can make us not worry about so many simple things in life yet they ban it? wtf!

RELIGION? ARE YOU ****ING KIDDING ME?

No way am i believing this, they will keep researching it just not showing or telling the people.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Yeah, see, I'm not getting what the difference is between 'forces around us' and 'ourselves', here.

Evolution happens based on the environmental factors that force change on us. This includes biological factors. What you're essentially doing is arbitrarily privelleging certain factors over others; that is, you are priveleging the factors that are the result of only certain vectors of chance over the factors that emanate from others.

It's okay for a (NON HUMAN) animal or a rockslide to force evolution on us - understand that's a vast kind of synecdoche there - but not okay for a war or a science lab. It's a completely arbitrary distinction.

All natural evolution is also forced evolution. All evolution takes place because of material circumstances. Why do men in labcoats get exempted?
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Agreeed, 100%. There is no difference.
 
BAWWWWWW

Our species should change like it always has, by forces around us, not ourselves.
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BAWWWWWWWW

What? Seriously, what? That makes no sense- humans haven't had to seriously worry about anything since we started building small huts and made sharp sticks. Lern2evolution, lul.

Oh, maybe you're right though, Cheomesh. Comon guys, go outside and open your necks to the nearest large predator you can find. Bears, venomous snakes, rabid dogs; obviously we need to concentrate on our evolution skill so we'll level up faster.
 
Burn your houses, demolish your tv's, computers and radios.
Go live in caves, doggy-style your bitches and populate the planet with monkeys.
 
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