I'm a student at The New School researching bio-hacking and transhumanism and want to hear your story!

Same, I want to go for as many machine parts as possible. In fact, I’d be a robot if I could…

Yeeeaahhh, neeshamfury is talking about biohacking as in buying supplements and buying red light therapy kits and buying books about breathing and buying quantified self health trackers. Biohackers Assemble will be a conference of snake oil salesman hawking their wares. Biohacking in that sense is not related to grinding

Here’s a thread where I asked them about it.

This is not the way.

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That entire thread is a mess. Especially the one near the bottom where they were trying to validate their own definition of biohacking without actually providing a good concrete answer. So much kooky nonsense so little evidence.

Oh dear

A while ago we tried talking to that community about grinding and so many of them were hostile and angry. Just as you just said, snake oil self-help salespeople. They didn’t all seem to be that way, but at our estimate about 70% were openly hostile towards any digital integration in the human body. Weird considering that they’re happy to go to extreme and incredibly dangerous lengths using chemicals to modify their bodies relative to what we do.

I would imagine it’s mostly a psychological issue that they aren’t aware of, like what results in the uncanny valley and when you bring up ethical questions about chimeras like in this video. Tricky problem, but we gave up on talking to them there. At the very least when people have questions about digital implants and cybernetics and grinding, there are some people in that subreddit that redirect people to DT and the r/grinders subreddit.

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Yeah, that’s the only reason I keep an eye on Reddit at all

I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s the spiritual elements and the anti-science sentiments

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That was definitely there. But there seemed to be other people that just didn’t like it and refused to explain why, almost as if they didn’t know why the thought of it made them uncomfortable and they didn’t want to ask themselves the question. They just wanted to say no and shut down the conversation.

~ Jamie

It goes against “the natural order” (aka god’s plan) to implant technology. They purposely take alternative medicines and unregulated supplements because they don’t trust Big Pharma, who they think is trying to force unnatural poisons on us. Being irrationally resistant to tech implants is a logical extension of that mindset.

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Sure, but there are also people that have similar physiological reactions without being religious at all. I know this because used to be like that myself. It’s totally possible to simply be ignorant and dislike something intensely without understanding why, and the discomfort can lead to you not wanting to know why you dislike it.

I’ve learned to intentionally go against those kinds of natural inclinations and to try to better understand why I have such a reaction. Whether it’s some kind of phobia, or the uncanny valley, or just something that I find makes me uncomfortable, I examine and attack those feelings because I know that they can be illogical and lead to poor decisions.

It’s taken me most of my life to understand that what I do in this regard is extremely rare. Most people do not look further than their own nose. They have a reaction to something and look no further. They need no additional reason to do something other than their natural inclination. I’ve tried to show people the need for more mindfulness, but in my experience and in the experience of every psychiatrist/psychologist we’ve ever had, more than 90% of people do not want to know (I include religious/spiritual explanations because these require faith rather than science). For some reason that so far escapes me, the vast majority of human beings are willfully ignorant of their own ignorance, and I have yet to find an evolutionary explanation for this.

~ Jamie

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Humans exited evolution a few decades ago. Being intelligent is advantageous up to a point (for understanding fire and developing agriculture/animal husbandry) but beyond that we exit the evolutionary loop as individuals and enter it as a society. Individual behavioral choices have very little to do with survival now, because everyone else is picking up your slack. People are at their leisure to be dumb.

Much of our media involves apocalypse scenarios, where we romanticize going back to days where we actually had to work to survive. Without that drive though most people don’t pursue anything beyond their immediate comfort. The pursuit of knowledge and sussing out the truth is a labor intensive process with little to offer a selfish individual whose needs are met.

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How very classically human :slight_smile: To think we, even as a society, are outside the bounds of evolution, is hubris. Your concept of selection is far too narrow. We still randomly mutate, and selective forces still operate at scale. This is just yet another phase of evolution… it looks a little different from what’s gone before, but it is very much evolution. Even when gene editing becomes the norm, is that not a selective force? There is no natural selection vs artificial selection, it’s just selection… and it will continue to shape the future of the universe for a very very long time.

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I agree with you in concept. I think in “most people” minds (lets be honest, we are a niche slice of the population that has a specific/biased view point, just for the fact we are here, on this forum) “artificial” refer to human making the change in the mutation.
A lot of people get upset when we are talking about doing it to the human genome, and calls it “un-natural”. But what most people forget is that we are doing it on a daily basis and have been for thousands of years … When we started selecting crop for agriculture (about 8.000 BC) we manipulated the genome of plants to work better for us, we were/are “artificially” selection and guiding evolution; And we would not be able to feed our planet without those modified crop …
Applying this to the human has been attempted and lead to massive genocides … I don’t think we can stop it from happening, but we can try to do it in a smart way to prevent the war of the past.

I guess my only point is 1) we are not the only species that has manipulated the genomes of other species through selective processes… insects actually do this quite a lot, through symbiotic partnerships, enslavement, or outright genocide… and 2) whatever we do as individuals or as a species is not outside of nature because we are borne of it and whatever actions we take are simply part of the evolving tapestry of what is “natural”. Even the creation of new, albeit temporary, types of atoms in the lab… this too is all part and parcel of the natural order.

To me, it is the same thing as the chemicals argument. To say humans are somehow outside of nature is to say “I only eat natural food, not stuff with chemicals in it”… which is, of course, one of the most idiotic things a living organism could ever utter.

To consider humanity as outside of nature puts your average joe on par with a god or deity, a concept I think laughable at best.

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Just listening to something that said humans and flat worms were this way, until medical intervention.

Dude cured his asthma with em supposedly.

“Symbiotic partnerships” immediately makes me think of the Venom movies

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Yes

I’ll tell you what the next step of evolution is: machines. They are our brainchild, and they’ll soon better us in every way. We ugly bags of mostly water will soon be made obsolete by our mechanical children: either we’ll realize it and gracefully step aside, or the machines will take over forcibly to prevent us from fucking up their world. Either way, it’s the end of the line for the haphazardly-designed meat-based human model.

image

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Hmm… I don’t think it’s “their” world, and it’s not the world of humanity as well. The world belong to all it’s inhabitants, I guess :slight_smile:
And I’m a bit afraid that a world that kinda “belongs” to machines will end up being very depressing, unless machines develop a sense for beauty and all the wonderful “unneccessary” stuff around us.

And I might be a minority here, but I love being in this body, love being in nature and enjoying life with all senses nature gave me. I feel connected to this world in a way I can’t (yet?) feel towards machines :woman_shrugging:

Of course the world belongs to humans. Who else? :slight_smile:

And it’ll belong to the machines just like the world today belongs to the young, and we older folks are just here for the ride. Our world is in the past, theirs is today. The machines are our offspring. They’re the next form of humanity. They’ll be the young humans of tomorrow and it’ll be their world.