Tag: transhumanism

Transhuman Olympics

Throughout repeated attempts at reform, one thing has become clear: the IOC will not save us. It is an institution rotten to its core, and incapable of serious change. Rather than more protests and petitions. It’s now time to exit. I recommend a new kind of Olympics without the World Anti-Doping Agency. In short, I propose an Olympics with no drug testing. Incremental improvements to the current state of drug testing are simply not an attainable solution. The notion of anti-doping as a path to fairness must be abandoned entirely. Instead, we should celebrate a drug-enabled Olympics that would outcompete the original in terms of viewership, athletic accomplishment, and cultural legitimacy. The Transhuman Olympics would do more than improve the playing field for international athletics. It would sublimate geopolitical rivalries into a competition that is not merely harmless, but actually productive. In essence, leveraging the popularity and notoriety of the Olympics as a way to fund development into improved pharmaceuticals, alongside improved equipment, prosthetics, and medicine with general prosocial uses. The true aim however, is even more basic and foundational. We need to remind humanity that progress is still possible. Not by mere milliseconds and millimeters, but by literal leaps and bounds. We need to demonstrate decisively over and over again that human civilization is improving on undeniable axes. And we need to do it in a public arena.

Transhumanist platform

if you are looking for 21st century, as opposed to 19th or 20th century political platforms.

The Transhumanist Party and Zoltan Istvan’s US Presidential campaign is politically-
centric. It aims to support voters with future-inspired policies that will enrich America and
the world. We believe science and technology can solve most of the world’s problems.

  1. Implement a Transhumanist Bill of Rights mandating government support of longer lifespans via science and technology
  2. Spread a pro-science culture by emphasizing reason and secular values
  3. Create stronger government policies to protect against existential risk (including artificial intelligence, plagues, asteroids, climate change, and nuclear warfare and disaster)
  4. Provide free education at every level; advocate for mandatory preschool and college education in the age of longer lifespans
  5. Create a flat tax for everyone
  6. Advocate for morphological freedom (the right to do anything to your body so long as it doesn’t harm others)
  7. Advocate for real-time democracy using available new technologies
  8. End costly drug war and legalize mild recreational drugs like marijuana
  9. Create government where all politician’s original professions are represented equally (the government should not be run by 40% lawyers when lawyers represent only 10% of the country’s jobs)
  10. Significantly lessen massive incarcerated population in America by using innovative technologies to monitor criminals outside of prison
  11. Strongly emphasize green tech solutions to make planet healthier
  12. Support and draft logistics for a Universal Basic Income
  13. Reboot the space program with significantly increased government resources
  14. Develop international consortium to create a “Transhumanist Olympics”
  15. Develop and support usage of a cranial trauma alert chip that notifies emergency crews of extreme trauma (this will significantly reduce domestic violence, crime, and tragedy in America)
  16. Work to use science and technology to be able to eliminate all disabilities in humans
  17. Insist on campaign finance reform, limit lobbyist’s power, and include 3rd political parties in government
  18. Create a scientific and educational industrial complex in America instead of a military industrial complex. Spend money on wars against cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—not on wars in far-off countries

What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span, creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals, like ending suffering. If I had to come up with specific criteria, however, I’d suggest the following 3: 1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific. LASIK eye surgery, internal defibrillators, and prosthetic limbs are all examples. The key difference is that these modifications would either result in a return to initial quality (as in LASIK) or enhance/augment the original condition. Landmark moment: When a runner with prosthetic cheetah blades competes in the traditional Olympics and wins a medal. 2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease. Concepts like “aging well” and “golden years” would be as counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as “diseasing well.” I have no idea what the consequences would be socially, but you can bet things like “midlife crises” and “adult learning” would take on entirely new meanings or become meaningless. When we have a generation of people expected to live to 150, that’ll be a good sign this is on the way to happening. 3. The recognition of an individual with citizenship and/or personhood and the criteria for that recognition would change dramatically from the status quo. Rights discourse would shift from who we include (i.e., should homosexuals have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans. A good litmus test for flexibility is: how would we incorporate an intelligent alien race into our rights/ethics system?

Concepts like “aging well” and “golden years” are as counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as “diseasing well”.

Ice Man

Wim Hof should be dead for doing the following: running a half-marathon in the Arctic Circle in his bare feet, climbing the Everest in his shorts, and diving under the ice at the North Pole. Here’s a fascinating story about a 48-year-old Dutchman nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his uncanny ability of withstanding fatally freezing temperatures:

Normally, when a person is exposed to freezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, the body goes into survival mode, as its liquids begin to freeze.

Frostbite sets in, and in order to save the major organs, the body sacrifices blood flow to the extremities, cutting circulation from the fingers, toes, ears and nose to keep the blood flowing to the organs necessary for survival.

If not treated immediately, the damage to these extremities is irreversible. The other danger is hypothermia, an abnormally low body temperature. At 0 celsius, body functions start shutting down, and once that starts, you could be dead within minutes.

But Hof stayed in his tomb of ice for 72 minutes. Then, the ice was poured out of the tank, and Hof emerged, his skin still pink.

“He’s not moving, he’s not generating heat, he’s not dressed for it, and he’s immersed in ice water. And water will transmit heat 30x faster than air. It literally sucks the life right out of you. And yet, despite all those negative factors, Wim Hof was very calm, very comfortable the entire time that he was immersed in that water

scan that guys dna already