Discussion and Debate on Transhumanism - C.B. Robertson and Gennady Stolyarov II - Transhumanist Party Enlightenment Salon

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party Virtual
Enlightenment Salon. My name is Jannati Stolierov Second, and I
am the Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party. Here we
hold conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers in longevity, science, technology, philosophy,
and politics. Like the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment,

(00:23):
we aim to connect every field of human endeavor and
arrive at nu insids to achieve longer lives, greater rationality,
and the progress of our civilization.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
All right, hello everyone, welcome to a debate. I am
joined by Jannati Stoliov the second, who is an actuary,
a writer, and the chair of the American Transhumanist Party,
which we are going to talk about a little bit. Jannati,
would you like to introduce yourself a little bit.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yes, indeed, thank you very much, and I'm looking forward
to our exchange today. My name is Jannattie stolier Off
the second and I have been the Chairman of the
US Transhumanist Party since November two, thy sixteen, so I
have led this organization for over eight and a half

(01:17):
years of what is now a ten and a half
year existence. I am a transhumanist, and I have been
a transhumanist all my life, essentially ever since I learned
about death. I recognized the injustice of it, as I
think most kids do. The difference between me and other

(01:40):
children is that I never stopped recognizing the injustice of death,
and I could never accept the common cultural rationalizations, justifications,
excuses perhaps for human mortality, and said, I tried to

(02:00):
figure out ways by which humankind could overcome death. But
it was in two thousand and four, so now twenty
one years ago, that I became an explicit transhumanist. That
was when I learned about transhumanism as a philosophy, and
my first exposure to explicitly transhumanist thinking came in the

(02:25):
form of the writings of doctor Aubrey de Gray on
his old Cambridge University website, where he outlined his SENS
programs stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and it
is a damage repair approach which identifies the seven principle

(02:47):
causes of aging related damage, the seven principle types of
damage that can be potentially reversed through the application of
emerging technologies. And it was then that I realized this
is feasible within my lifetime if humankind devotes enough energy

(03:10):
and resources to this task. And then also not long thereafter,
I learned about the philosophy of extropy extrapy being the
opposite of entropy, through the writings of Max Moore, another
key transhumanist thinker, and then I read The Singularity Is

(03:31):
Nearby Ray Kurtzweil, and over time I became exposed to
other transhumanist thinkers, including David Pierce, David Wood, and her Sandberg.
And these thinkers have shaped my view of the world.
In large part they inspired me to chart the course

(03:54):
of my life outside of my actuarial career. So what
do I do with the rest of my time? And
I've written articles, I have my publication, The Rational Argumentator.
I also wrote this book, It's Death Is Wrong, the
world's first no longer the only book on indefinite life

(04:15):
extension for kids, but it was the first book back
in twenty thirteen, and in it I relate my own
story how as a kid I refuse to accept mortality
and I try to inspire the next generation to become scientists, technologists,
advocates who can help us overcome this greatest of all problems.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I was smiling as you told your story there, because
my amateur interest is, like you, I have a day job,
I'm an electrician, but my amateur interest is in the classics,
and the hatred of death is literally the oldest story
we have in Gilgamesh, this struggle to find some solution

(04:57):
to this problem, and one could argue that it's a
key theme in my favorite set of texts, which is
Homer's Iliad in particular, not as much the Odyssey, but
the Iliad, this longing for immortality, though there it's it
is achieved by death, so there's some interesting complexities there.
But let's do this is going to devolve into a

(05:20):
debate at some point because I you know, I have
listened to some of your videos, now you've listened to
my podcast against Transhumanism. But I do think it's fun
to start to start on the points of agreement. There's
a public intellectual, I guess named Bolaji srina Vasan. I'm
sure I'm mispronouncing that who has asserted that the future

(05:42):
of American politics is less going to be Republicans versus Democrats,
and it's more going to be transhumanists versus anarcho primitivists.
I think that's such a more interesting frame because you
have actual esthetic ideals that people or striving for rather
than the Republican and the Democratic Party are not really

(06:06):
like ideological platforms so much as they are just infrastructures
built for political power that can adopt any number of positions,
including each other's positions if we cross decades that seem
to only be interested in power. So to have something
like anarco primitivism and something like transhumanism saying note here

(06:26):
are alternative ideals of what we want human like to
be like feels like an improvement in the political metapolitical conversation,
which is cool, and I tend to side in the
direction of the anarcho primitivists. But I really like technology.
I think technology is really cool, and I think the
opposition to technology goes back to an opposition to techne

(06:50):
to skill and craft itself, which is also a part
of who we are. To use technology and craft to
accomplish our goals is part of what it is to
be human. But then we get and I'd like you
to ask you maybe to start on this. Why is
this ideology called transhumanism? Because what you've described is a

(07:13):
very I would say beautiful and admirable love of life,
you know, like I like this, I want this to continue.
We could call that life extensionism. We could call that
biological immortalism. We could be like greenland sharks or whatever.
Why is it called transhumanism? And my understanding of the
answer to that is that while immortality is one of

(07:36):
the goals of transhumanism, it's not the only goal. And
the driving goal of transhumanism is to become what Nick
Bostrom calls posthuman. Is that your position? And can you
tell me a little bit about what your position is
on posthumanism?

Speaker 3 (07:54):
So I am actually a transhumanist, but not a posthumanist.
So I don't don't use the post human terminology, even
though some transhumanists do. But if you look at the
prefix trends, the Latin prefix trands. Of course, today it's
so grievously misunderstood that people think anything with the prefixed

(08:19):
trands has to do with gender. And I have to
ask them, well, did everybody who work on the Transcontinental
Railroad change their gender? Does transcending mean changing one's gender?
Does transforming something mean changing its gender?

Speaker 4 (08:35):
No?

Speaker 3 (08:35):
So the prefix trands has actually several meanings in Latin.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
One is can I interrupt for a second, just as
a point of empathy, I wrote a book that had
a subtitle about transgenerational ethics, and I got so much
good natured mocking from my friends on that point. But
I share your frustration on that.

Speaker 4 (08:59):
Indeed, indeed, so.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Trans could mean beyond, so to transcend to go beyond,
or trans could mean through, as in the example of
the Transcontinental Railroad, the railroad goes through the continent. So
when one looks at the term transhumanists or transhumanism, one
can understand it as both going beyond the historic limitations

(09:30):
of humanity but also achieving some better outcomes through one's humanity.
And if you think about what humans have been doing
for the entirety of our species' existence, we have been
striving to go beyond the status quo, to go beyond

(09:51):
our present condition, whether that be by harnessing fire or
stone tools, or developing writing or building cities, or creating machines,
or pioneering medical approaches to curing diseases and lengthening lifespans.
All of that has already been practiced for centuries, and

(10:12):
in some cases for millennia or tens or hundreds of millennia.
So if that's the case, then transhumanism is a manifestation
of a profoundly human tendency, which is to use our
humanity and our human drives, our human faculties to go

(10:35):
beyond the limits of our humanity. So what are those
limits historically and still today. Unfortunately, mortality is one of them,
the susceptibility to disease, to frailty. But that's not the
entirety of it. And this is where you pointed out
transhumanism isn't just about overcoming death. We're also faiked with

(10:57):
tremendous material scarcity. We're faced with various existential risks, like
an asteroid could hit the Earth and wipe out higher
orders of life, or we could have a supervolcano erupt
we could have a variety of cataclysms, and some of
those cataclysms could even be man made. Nuclear war, in

(11:18):
my view, is the greatest existential risk in the foreseeable future,
and nuclear war is a man made existential risk, but
it stems from these very primeval tendencies of the human psyche,
tendencies toward conflict arising out of irrational emotions out of

(11:39):
cognitive biases that can sometimes ensnare even the most intelligent humans,
and transhumanism seeks to overcome those as well.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
So that would it be fair to say that transhumanism
seeks to change and alter human nature itself in a
way that makes it feel free to correct this if
I'm incorrect here, but to make it more rational.

Speaker 5 (12:08):
More rational, more aligned with reality, the objective well being
of humans and hopefully the objective wellbeing of other sentient
life forms, to the extent that we discover them, or
create them, or uplift them, whatever we do.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Our ability to empathize with others, other humans, others, sentientdentities
would also improve as we remove the deleterious limits of
what has historically been human nature. Now, I do think
human nature is not fixed, It is contingent. It is

(12:49):
contingent on what we are able to do. So Stephen
Pinker documented this extensively in his book The Better Angels
of Our Nature. He showed that historically, more primitive societies
have tended to be much more violent, and they've had
other practices like normalized rape or slavery, which was ubiquitous

(13:12):
throughout the ancient world, and yet those practices have largely
at least been driven underground, and the moral frameworks that
every civilized society operates by anywhere in the world would
reject those kinds of practices. So we have made progress,
and I think our human natures are different in certain

(13:36):
key ways from our primeval ancestors. But we also have
a way to go. And I think our physical limitations
fundamentally prevent us from being the best humans that we
could be. So transhumanism doesn't seek to eliminate humans or
get rid of our humanity. It seeks to preserve us

(13:58):
as individuals and the best parts of our humanity while
removing those deleterious parts.

Speaker 4 (14:05):
That hold us back.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Right, Okay, so my understanding is more or less correct, then,
as far as what becoming posthuman entails, not just in
terms of immortality, but also eliminating those parts of our
psychology that are that violate the proposed trajectory of the

(14:29):
progress of civilization, more or less can I could.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Say that now if you want to use the term
posthuman for it, I think that would be a semantic matter.
I think those beings would very much still be human. Indeed,
they would be us. So I propose that we, as
individuals become those beings, whether you call them posthuman or
augmented human, or better human or freer human, those beings

(14:54):
would be us individually.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Well, I ask, because first of all, can I ask
if if you would consider yourself to be a utilitarian? Not,
as far as ethics are concerned, So.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
I wouldn't call myself a utilitarian because utilitarianism tries to
intercompare utility across individuals. So utilitarianism often operates by the maximum,
the greatest good for the greatest number. But I am
not comfortable with sacrificing any individual for the purported good

(15:30):
of others, of any other number of individuals. So for me,
the individual is the paramount, indivisible unit of morality, and
an action cannot be moral if it imposes the voluntary
harms on individuals, at the very least without compensating them

(15:53):
for those harms in some way that they would find suitable.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Okay, fair enough, I think The reason you utilitarism jumps
to mind when you describe this is if we are
aiming for a trajectory of improving the human condition, including
the human psyche, including what we should want you shouldn't
want revenge, you shouldn't want to rape your neighbor and

(16:18):
all that. Then that implies the sort of imposition of
an objective outside notion of good that is above and
which supersedes the preferences of the individual. So utilitarianism seems
to be in line with that.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
Well, I do think there is an objective good. Now,
that objective good, to paraphrase ein Rand, would come with
a question good to whom and for what? And I
would say, you can't impose some particular, let's say, course

(16:56):
of action on somebody unless it is to prevent that
person from harming others. So, for instance, in the transhumanist
vision of the future, we would not force technological improvements
or any sort of technology upon people who are not
willing to accept it. So the Amish would be allowed

(17:18):
to live in their communities and accept or reject any
technologies they'd see fit. Now it's interesting, though, because the
Amish are not technolodites. They just have a very deliberative
approach toward what technologies they do accept. But they do
accept a lot of modern medicine, and they will go

(17:40):
to hospitals to treat and cure certain diseases that would
have killed their ancestors because they don't see that as
contrary to their teachings. So in the future, there would
be a great diversity of choices. People could mix and
match technologies, they could choose to adopt some emerging technologies
and not others. So this would be a future of

(18:02):
individual hyper empowerment and hyper pluralism. And in my view,
that is aligned with a broader objective good, because a system,
or a society or a universe that is aimed toward
an objective good will try to maximize the flourishing of

(18:23):
every individual and give every individual the choice and the
opportunity to pursue his her it's their own path. Even
if I would pursue a different path, I'm not going
to force my way onto others, right.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
I like that idea from you mentioned existential risk, and
perhaps we'll get more into that later. From an existential
risk perspective, diversity of lifestyles is a point of resilience
for the species, which is just kind of cool, and
it's also just neat to have the here's here are
these people doing that thing. Here's the Amish who like

(18:59):
this technology, but that there's the Taliban over there. They
don't like modern music, but they love aks, so they
can do their thing over there well.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
As long as they don't harm others. So could we
convince them over some amount of time? It wouldn't be easy,
but instead of invading their country, could we show.

Speaker 4 (19:19):
Them a better way?

Speaker 5 (19:20):
Right?

Speaker 3 (19:21):
I know this seems very optimistic from today's standpoint, but
the old ideal of the shiny city on a hill
actually comes to mind. And there is a city like
that behind me in my background. I call it the
city of New Anti Death. Yes, thank you. So could
we show people in other societies an example of what

(19:42):
are some ways in which life could be better and
then give them a choice except those ways they're not?

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Well? The question of harm is an interesting one. It's
a classic challenge to libertarians, and dovetails into another question,
which is how exactly do we measure this object to
of what is objectively best for people? Because from the
Taliban's perspective, they might look at American cities, the homelessness,

(20:11):
the poverty, the drug addiction that is, to them, the
byproduct of freedom which allows for vice, traps and baits
into hazard and things of this nature, and say the
American government is imposing harm on its people. They need
to be liberated. And this was indeed the experience or
something like the experience of Osama bin Laden purportedly. Now

(20:34):
what he views as a harm, you know, we would
say is freedom and some individual choice. And what we
view as harm in ushtan Wally and in the very
severe religious rule of the Taliban, they would view as piety,
virtue and looking out for each other. The rate of

(20:56):
drug addiction and homelessness is substantially lower in Cobbled today
than it is in my home city sort of of Seattle.
So like there is a there is a if we
are to respect the individual, there is a subject, a
subjectivity in terms of what we consider to be good

(21:21):
that I think gets Really it doesn't challenge at all
the project of transhumanism you're you're describing as a sort
of private enterprise. Here's Brian Johnson trying to you know,
live longer. He's got an eighteen year old's erection or whatever. Cool.
But as soon as it becomes a political project, and

(21:44):
it for just to bring the audience up to this,
the three tenets of your political platform are, if I
remember correctly, life extension, secular human values as far as culturally, politically,
and prioritizing existential risk. Is that correct?

Speaker 4 (22:04):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (22:05):
Essentially those are the three core ideal the US transhumanist party.
And I will say there is an objective set of
prerequisites to human survival and flourishing. So the Taliban are
not wrong when they say that being homeless is not
good for a person, or abusing drugs is not good

(22:26):
for a person, even though they would sell that person
those very drugs. That's how they funded a lot of
their operations. But I would say the key question is
what set of incentives, systems, prerogatives allow individuals the maximal

(22:49):
opportunity to flourish. And it's certainly not living under a theocracy.
If you consider from the standpoint of in what society
does technology develop the most rapidly to enable overcoming the
physical barriers to flourishing? In what society could homelessness actually

(23:10):
be solved?

Speaker 4 (23:11):
Okay, I would say we.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Have the technological means to solve homelessness, we need the
proper incentives to do it. And transhumanists are all in
favor of, for instance, massive expansions of new home construction,
including through emerging technologies like three D printing.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
I want to challenge you on this one, and I
think this could lead to an interesting conversation the second
part of your platform, secular human values. I am, and
I understand this is a somewhat eccentric position. I don't
believe there are such things as values which are not religious.
And I think the history of science in the West

(23:53):
is a byproduct of two things in combination. First of all,
the hero cult Socrates and you could do. You could
do a worse hero cult than with Socrates as a center.
This idea of learning for the sake of learning, and
the pursuit of knowledge without the belief that you possess knowledge.

(24:13):
That that's what the spirit of Socrates is the center,
the motivating moral driver behind science. And then that got
accentuated by certain medieval Christian ideas about natural theology and
God reveals himself through nature, so we're going to study nature,

(24:36):
so that's how we get closer to an invisible God
or whatever. I don't think you need that to get science.
We already had the beginnings of it in the Greek
world without that. But I do think that is actually
a byproduct of religion in the broader sense. I'm not
a Christian. I'm not a monotheist at all. I don't
I don't think that's frankly that interesting. But I'm curious

(25:04):
what your idea of secular values entails.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Yes, though, secular values and the second or ideal of
the US Transhumanist Party, which by the way, says the
Transhumanist Party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed
and animated by reasons science and secular values. So the
reason that science also clarify the secular values a bit.

(25:30):
But really, the secular values do not mean there is
no religion or people in the society are not religious
at all. It just means that a particular religious framework
is not used to impose in voluntary constraints upon people. So,
for example, a secular society could have freedom of religion,

(25:53):
and somebody could be a Christian, somebody could be an atheist,
somebody could be a polytheis, somebody could have your religious views,
and yet they're all bound by common laws, common standards,
and protections as well that are independent of their individual

(26:14):
religious views. So a secular society does not give a
special status to somebody for being of a particular religion
or not and in a secular society, it's even possible
to disagree with the ideological foundation of that society and
still have one's rights respected.

Speaker 5 (26:35):
So in it.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
But the rule of law itself comes from religious ideas
and religious theory. It is the respect for the rule
of law is essentially maintained by ceremonial magic. Judges in
courtrooms wear black robes and swing gavels, and we have
special you know, badges and sanes NEOs, and everything is

(27:00):
done in this hyper formal way, and we all take
it seriously as a result of that. By magic, I
don't mean like actual like hocus pocus. I mean basically
psychological principles of what people take seriously and so forth.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
But well, I think to respond to that, the refect
for the rule of law can stem from purely practical
or pragmatic considerations. As an if we all agree to
this common framework, that's better than each man being a
judge in his own case. And John Locke wrote about
this because he recognized that humans have these kind of

(27:39):
the biases or emotions, they're always going to be predisposed
to rule in their favor. And if everybody does that,
then it's just a matter of might makes right. So
one could think of hypothetical humans who make the decision
to be bound by laws entirely from an enlightened self

(27:59):
intro us perspective. Now, in practice, could these ceremonial elements
be persuasive to some people? Sure, and again from a
purely pragmatic standpoint, if putting somebody in a uniform makes
it more likely that they will be listened to in

(28:20):
enforcing the laws, then that could be a reasonable decision
to make. But somebody doesn't have to necessarily say, oh,
this has some sort of special or supernatural kind of significance.
It could be a purely pragmatic calculus. I actually suspect
early religions were founded in sometimes entirely pragmatic contexts like

(28:48):
this was recognized as a framework that could lead to
greater cohesion of a particular tribe, and some clever individuals
device some stories or some rituals that kept the people
attached to that vision, and of course, over the course
of generations, that could have transformed into genuine belief, including

(29:09):
among the elites of that tribe or community or civilization
as it developed. But really the point of secular values
is somebody doesn't have to believe in that specific framework
in order to have their rights their ability to function
in that framework be respected. So, as I was going

(29:30):
to say, in a transhumanist society and anarcoprimitivist could come
in and as long as they don't attack anybody or
try to destroy the technologies of that society, we would say, well,
you're allowed to believe as you do, You're allowed to
live as you do, and to criticize us and disagree

(29:51):
with us and propose your own ways of being, but
we have these ground rules.

Speaker 4 (29:56):
Here.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
I was chuckling because there is an account from Cicero
of the second emperor of Rome, Numa Pompilius, who apparently
designed that The Romans were apparently very bloodthirsty at the time,
and so he designed a very elaborate set of religious
rituals that required a lot of time and had a
lot of ceremonies, basically just to keep them busy so

(30:20):
they would go and invade people. So we have accounts
of that. But I do think that religion, it might
do that in some cases. It clearly has in some cases,
but I think it at a deeper level. Religion and
the sacred stories, the myths which aren't necessarily untrue. They

(30:42):
can be not literal, but they are sacred stories. They
are special stories that give meaning and direction and valuation
because in the absence of some story from it. And
I wasn't trying to pin you as utilitary, but so
in so far as we're talking about objective metrics for

(31:05):
flourishing or not, the utilitarian framework kind of jumps out.
And in the absence of stories that give direction to
our suffering, most people throughout history have eventually come to
the conclusion that the suffering outweighs the pleasure and that
life is actually not worth it. And you see hints

(31:26):
of a not just an anti natalist, but an anti
mortalist sentiment to creep in in like the Wisdom of
Silenus in the Greeks, or the Book of Ecclesiastes in
the Bible. You know, you know, more blessed are those
who have not yet been born, for they have not
seen the evil that is done under the sun and
so forth. And so it is these stories of the

(31:50):
and like to put it in the sort of concrete terms,
you know, millions of Americans multiple times a week go
to the gym, myself included, to work out absence some
kind of story of a trajectory of growth. That is
just pain that are subjecting themselves to. But stories can
give meaning to that pain, that can actually make it positive.

(32:14):
And so I think there is a danger in being
too rational and too objective in what we consider good
in life to be. And I think the ultimate trajectory
of rationalism as applied to the human animal. We have
to ditch these myths, We have to ditch these hero cults,

(32:36):
We have to ditch religion and the supernatural. And so
I don't believe in the supernatural myself, but some people do.
Is this anti mortalist position stories.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
I don't think that we should discard our tendency towards
telling stories, or enjoying stories, or enjoying narratives. In fact,
I think one of the greatest problems of the postmodern
age is the deconstruction of too many narratives. Now, some
historical narratives have been problematic, and they needed to be challenged.

(33:11):
But the problem is the postmodernists challenged not only the
problematic narratives, but the narratives that did inspire people and
give people meaning and give people motivation to pursue great things.
This is where transhumanism can actually come in and remedy
that problem as the next paradigm after postmodernism, in that

(33:35):
we could have better narratives, We could have narratives that
relate to our concrete situation.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Right, you're devetailing into one of my favorite bits of
transhumanist writing, which is Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon Tyrant,
which is very mythic in its I mean, it is
a myth essentially. And then you get Carl Sagan's demon
Haunted World, which uses very mythic imagery to describe what
science is in the face of darkness and the unknown

(34:06):
and so forth. But the point of me bringing this
up is it wasn't intended to be this crazy tangent
of my own thought. But the challenge it imposes to
this idea of secular values and a separation of church
and state, even because at the end of the day,
what the state is is force, and it uses this

(34:28):
force to arbitrate disagreements and it will it is guided
by the values of that society. If it's not, it's tyranny, right,
So it always imposes its essentially religious beliefs, and you know,

(34:49):
America's guiding religious ethos has been a sort of civic
religion of democracy and this myth of a nation of
the people, by the people, for the people, which is
why Hans Hermanhappa's book Democracy of the God That Failed
has such I mean, that's that's a very potent title

(35:13):
because it does get at what democracy is to many people.
And then when we saw, you know, the cycles of
media stories about that where everyone is saying such and
such as a threat to our democracy. That is that
is religious language, essentially, and if you challenge that religious language,
it might not be supernatural, but you can get yourself

(35:35):
in a lot of trouble politically and legally if you
challenge the orthodoxy of the state. So that the ideal
you you talk about having essentially a private project of like, look,
we're going to expand you know the possibilities of human life.
We can have people living this way over here, We're

(35:56):
going to create a framework that everyone can live the
way they want. I don't know if that's possible within
a single political state, because that has to be bound
together by a shared story, by a shared mythos and
ethos that follows from that mythos. And the question is
what is the mythos underlying the transhuman focus on science

(36:21):
progress potentially immortality. If it is not the hero cult
of Socrates, is it the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant
or what is the guiding ideal story?

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Well, I think the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant is
a great story because it does have this ripping quality,
and it does, in very powerful illustrations show the deeper
aspirations of the transhumanist project. And I am not averse

(36:55):
to more such stories being written. I'm not averse to
historic myths and stories being repurposed or reinterpreted in a
transhumanist light. So I have a short story that I wrote.
Yeahsory is a good example. A short story that I
wrote called Sisyphis Vindicated, which is the story of Sisyphus

(37:18):
in the underworld being sentenced to roll the boulder uphill
and then it keeps rolling down and he finds a
way to make the best of his predicament, and the
story is about what he does with this task that
actually leads him to overcome the gods who sentenced him

(37:41):
to this ordeal. So it is I think fitting to
craft such stories. But I think the difference between a
dogmatically religious society and the secular society is that a
secular society will say out right, yes, these are you
may find some usefulness in them, you may find some

(38:05):
purpose in them, recognize that they are myths, and deploy
them as such. So it's not against deploying the myth.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
So when I say the word myth, I mean it
in the Greek sense of it, of it being a
sacred story. When you say myth, do you mean just
a story or do you mean just like? Do you
mean something else by that?

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Well, it's a story that conveys some sort of deeper meaning,
some sort of more enduring significance.

Speaker 4 (38:38):
But when reading a myth, one.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Recognizes that the events described therein were not necessarily factual.
Maybe they had some grain of truth in them, but
were embellished throughout the ages or altered in order to
convey that deeper meaning. So a myth, I would say,
is fundamentally fiction. It could have elements of historical fiction,

(39:06):
but it's fiction aimed toward a deeper purpose, and either
intentionally constructed or retold throughout the ages to be directed
toward that deeper purpose. And again I don't think that's
bad per se, and it's fine even for people who

(39:27):
are atheists to enjoy mythology, to enjoy say Greek mythology
or Norse mythology. Or here are some more controversial statements,
Hebrew mythology, Christian mythology, Buddhist mythology. The only reason why
these are more controversial statements is because the religions that
deploy these myths are still extant. So in three thousand years,

(39:53):
let's say Christianity morphs into something else and doesn't call
itself Christianity anymore, just as a hypothetical, yeah, then you
could say, well, I enjoy looking at the Christian mythology
of the first two millennia.

Speaker 4 (40:10):
See something like that, right.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
I think that this matters in so far as these
myths are not just stories we enjoy as hobbies, because
they shape you mentioned before, the caveat to your society,
not just yours. Too many people's idea of a free
society is so long as we're not doing harm. But
that's a big asterisk, because it is from these myths

(40:36):
that we get the idea of what constitutes harm. And
like a more close at home example of this might
be when someone like Richard Dawkins says, you know, bring
up your child religious is essentially child abuse that is
shifting from One could say it's shifting from an opinion

(41:00):
into something more like a legal standard, and you can
I mean, it's not. It is literally just one guy's opinion.
But to call something child abuse is similar to saying, oh,
something is domestic abuse in like the context of a relationship,
or like it is appropriating legal terminology of something that

(41:23):
should be prohibited harm. If harm is prohibited if from
a libertarian perspective, the initiation of force. If you can
define what forces, then you can control all kinds of things.
And this is like in the Fable of the dragon tyrant.
Nick Bostam is so clever in the way he brings

(41:45):
forward the religious scholars saying, it is the nature of
the dragon to eat us, and it is in our
nature to be eaten, as if these opinions are just
a kind of Stockholm syndrome associated with death. But if
that doesn't work, then you could say, well, these religious
people that are persuading other people not to pursue immortality

(42:10):
are doing harm. And from a mathematical perspective, that would
be correct, just like the very terrifying mathematics behind existential
risk can say, as Nick Bostrom did at one of
his TED talks, that it might be wise to allow
several hundred million people to die if it reduced the

(42:34):
existential risk of some threat by three percent. You know,
because all of humanity being eliminated is incalculabily be incalculably
worse than all but two hundred of humanity being eliminated.
It's not just the difference of two hundred people. In
that context. There's something more absolute and final, as you

(42:58):
say in your know Why Death Is Bad videos from
sixteen years ago. There's something final to extinction. But what
that justifies legally begins to get very scary, and so
who's to decide. I'm sorry I opened a bunch of
cans of words there.

Speaker 3 (43:20):
Yes, so I want to make sure I emphasize this.
I don't think Bostrom is arguing for the intentional elimination
of hundreds of millions of humans just so that yeah, continue, Yeah, yes,
I think the situation in which you would have made
such a statement would be something like, well, if we

(43:44):
deploy safeguards against existential risk, it would be a good idea,
even in the worst situations, to make sure that at
least some humans survive, Like if there's some calamity that
befalls the Earth, like an asteroid impact of the size
that eliminated the dinosaurs, for instance, wouldn't it be good

(44:05):
to have colonies off world. Wouldn't it be good to
have really good shelters, say underground shelters, in the event
of that kind of impact or nuclear war or any
other planet wide catastrophe, so that at least some humans
could survive. And I think he was saying, well, qualitatively speaking,

(44:27):
a disaster where most people are wiped out but the
human species continued is less bad than a situation where
all human life is wiped out. I would say, yeah,
that's a no brainer.

Speaker 4 (44:39):
That is less bad. Now, we don't want either.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Of those situations, and I want to prevent.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
Any death right.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Well, apologies for bringing up that digression a little bit,
because that was a digression. But the main point I
was trying to get to was that these stories that
we tell dictate what is harmful, and like, if you
believe in the story of Islam, for example, then what's
going on in the Free Society of America is of
course objectively more harmful. Objective within their framework that we

(45:12):
can get into what is objectivity, perhaps because I am
I am an objectivity skeptic when it comes to moral
value questions. But the story that we tell with either
the fable of the Dragon Tyrant or the story the
myth of progress, And again I don't mean myth in
the denigrating sense we have. I think on the left

(45:36):
is guided by the myth of progress, and the right
is guided by the myth of the Golden Age. And
I subscribe more to Nietzsche's myth of eternal return, that
we're kind of in the same psychological place again and again.
But like those, these stories dictate what we consider to
be harmful. And so it wouldn't someone who is challenging

(46:03):
the project of immortality be committing harm.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
No, not necessarily, because there are facts. There are not
just myths or stories. Facts exist as well, And what
is involuntarily harmful to a biological organism is pretty specific.
So various physical perils can destroy or disrupt an organism.

(46:31):
Biological processes, diseases, aging, those are all involuntary harms. If
somebody makes sound vibrations in air, I don't have to
alter my behavior on the basis of those sound vibrations.
Maybe those sound vibrations are interesting to me, and maybe
I choose to adhere to what they're communicating according to

(46:56):
my interpretation of them. But there are so many layers
between a speaker saying something and the recipient of that
communication taking an action that in most cases I would
say it's not harm to hear an idea. Now, there

(47:17):
could be situations like if there's a demagogue inciting a
mob to violence, and the people in the mob have
been riled up and predisposed already to let their guard down,
so they are disinhibited from following the orders of that demagogue.
It could be that the demagogue himself isn't looting or

(47:41):
burning or killing people, but he's definitely calling on others
to do that. So incitement is not free speech in
any cases. Right, right, exactly, exactly. But John Stuart Mill
also had a very expensive definition of what free speech is,
and he pointed out that hearing views contrary to one's

(48:02):
own can be beneficial in many situations. One, if you're wrong,
then you find out that you're wrong too. Of course,
if you're right, you figure out better ways to express
the true ideas that you hold and defend them against challenges.

(48:23):
So I think in most cases it's not correct to
assume that other people can just be passively influenced by
those who hold incorrect views. And it may even be
better for a society from the standpoint of the correct
views winning out, to allow the incorrect views to challenge.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (48:47):
No, I.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Like that position myself. I think the point about what
determines harm goes beyond that, beyond speech, And perhaps I
was too limited. Maybe a better example of this would
be corporal punishment, you know, spanking and things like that

(49:11):
with kids. Not terribly long ago and still in some societies.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is a
very high Asian population. Corporal punishment is very popular, even
wealthy parents from certain parts of East Asia. It's considered

(49:33):
almost neglect astrisk, you know, emphasis on almost to not
incentivize your children to behave better and to get better
grades and so forth. With the threat or reality of
corporal punishment in the United States, many subcultures within the
United States consider that to be abuse, warranting the removal

(49:58):
of children from their parents. So that's not a matter
of speech, but a matter of belief in what constitutes harm. Now,
some people have interpreted the verse from the Bible, you know,
spare the rod, spoil the child as condoning that. Of course,
it's a shepherding metaphor about guiding people, not hitting them.

(50:19):
But the interpretation existed prior to the Biblical verse. Probably
you know that it's good to you know, show them
or whatever. I have mixed feelings on the two because
I've seen, you know, children grow up in both contexts
and do well, and children grow up from both contexts

(50:40):
and do poorly. I'm not sure I see a strong
correlation one way or the other myself, and I'm sure
some people will bring up or try to bring up
data on it. But what's considered harmful still has a
subjective quality. And you mentioned there are certain facts that
we bring up here. This is where like human skeuillotine

(51:05):
keeps coming back, where the fact of our current existence
is that we die. We are not biologically immortal. But
the aspiration that you're describing for transhumanism is to overcome
this fact and to change the facts. And so that
ideal does not come from the facts. It comes from

(51:29):
something above and beyond the facts. It comes from something
like a beautiful story of us, you know, beating this
this dragon. Yeah, well, the.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
Story can inspire, but we could also simply like our
current state of.

Speaker 4 (51:48):
Existence and want it to continue.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
So a common illustration that transhumanists of life extensionists will
provide is, let's say you wake up tomorrow and your
life is pretty good, You're able to achieve all your goals,
enjoy the experiences you enjoy, and you're asked the question, well,
would you want to repeat this for another day? And

(52:13):
you're going to say yes unless you have some sort
of like mental imbalance. But if you say yes on
that day, then on the next day you wake up
and again you get to live life the way you want.
Are you going to say yes to prolonging it another day?
And if you do, let's say this continues for one
hundred years. Let's say this continues for a thousand years.

(52:35):
As long as you at that time are able to
say yes, I'm enjoying the experience of life, you're going
to say yes to the question should I prolong it?
And transhumanists are trying to make that choice available to
people irrespective of arbitrary time limits. Again, we're not going

(52:58):
to force that choice upon individuals, but yes, you need
to address the facts of reality. You need to address
the biological facts that lead the human organism to age
and decay and become more susceptible to diseases over time,
which really does depress the experience of life. But if

(53:21):
you could overcome those then the new set of facts
would lead people to say, yes, I embrace life. So
to consider what leads people not to embrace life. It
is suffering, which you mentioned, It is infirmity, it is pain,

(53:42):
It is the inability to do what one would like
to do or what one used to.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Be able to do.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
But what if we could remove all of those problems,
And we would have to in order to dramatically extend
human lifespan, because you can't really go so much beyond
today's record holders the super centenarians by extending six span,
you have to extend what's called health span and the

(54:11):
span of biological youthfulness in order to extend total lifespan.
So that's what we are seeking to do. And I
think the motivation to want to live can stem from
a variety of factors. I think they are often for
an individual, interrelated and mutually reinforcing. So from my standpoint,

(54:33):
as a transhumanist. I want as many of those factors
to be in play as possible for a given person
so that they make the decision of their own free
will to pursue their own life extension and to help
others get.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
There as well. Yeah, I feel I think as you
would feel as you described it, watching like the Amish
do their thing, watching people pursue life extension technology and
you know, brain alteration stuff to change the human experience.

(55:09):
I think it's I think it's more than just interesting.
I think it's really cool. I think there's a special
place of honor for scientists who experiment on themselves, who
have their own skin in the game. My favorite scientist
is a guy named Justin. Oh god, his name is
escaping me. Now it's something like Schmidt, it's not.

Speaker 4 (55:28):
But he.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Decided very arbitrarily that what the world needed was a
numbered ranking order of the relative pain of insect stings.
So he, being a good scientists, acquired all the insects
and stung himself multiple times all over his body to
create a chart. And it's like that there might be

(55:55):
a repeatability problem with that study, but if you find
some who follow him up on that, but it's it's
cool that that happens. I guess my concern is the
framework that says this is good, and it's so good
that we're going to change human nature and what we

(56:22):
consider to be, you know, good or bad. We're going
to eliminate the tribalism add on in the human brain.
We're going to eliminate the capacity for violence. We're going
to eliminate these things. To me, those things are not
just crucial to our survival, but they're actually intrinsically enjoyable too.

(56:43):
It is fun too, and a great pleasure to be
a part of the team. It is violence is enjoyable.
I don't say this as a like a soldier who's
been like fighting overseas, and I've never been in a
fight with someone I didn't like, If that makes sense.
I guess it's more like full contact sparring than like
fighting properly. But martial arts and combat sports is enjoyable.

(57:09):
And the history of suicide and of warfare throughout history,
to me, indicates that there are some things that people
think are so important that they are worth dying for,
or at least risking death for, or actually dying in
the case of suicide, not to say that suicide is
a great decision in ninety nine percent of cases, but

(57:33):
it's clearly expresses a way people feel, and there might
be some utility not just for the species, but even
for our own line in having these instincts and having
these desires. And it seems like to me rationality is

(57:55):
not just superior brain power. Rationality is internal consistency with
a given set of axioms. It's just grammar or mathematics.
So the value of rationality always comes back to how
could or your initial axioms? And I don't know that

(58:16):
we have a solid set of axioms in secular humanism
or in the myth of progress, or really anywhere else
for that matter.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Well, I will say, first of all, in my view,
suicide is wrong in one hundred percent of cases. So
in any situation, I think opting for the continuation of
one's own life rather than depriving oneself of it, is
a superior choice. I also think if people did not

(58:53):
choose to die for something, if everybody refrained from making
that choice, we would have no war. By definition, pretty
much we would have no war. So wouldn't that be
a better world where the number one cause of human

(59:14):
inflict to death disappeared. So I do think that there
are tendencies that are unbalanced detrimental. Now does that mean
I'm opposed to all group cohesion or teamwork, No, but
I think there should be a place for the constructive

(59:38):
manifestations of those inclinations without the destructive ones. So I
don't have a problem with say, martial arts or combat
sports being practiced as sports, as exercise, as ways of
engaging with others. I wouldn't support gladiatorial combat to the

(59:59):
death though, because of the consequences. So one needs to
think of consequences, and indeed, I think implicitly to a
large extent, society throughout history have gradually undertaken that path.
What are professional sports today? Why are there so many

(01:00:20):
football fans in the United States or soccer fans everywhere
else in the world. They can even get quite rowdy
and riotous at times, But in the past, these would
have been opposing factions that would have actually fought one
another to the death. Indeed, even in the Eastern Roman

(01:00:40):
Empire when they held chariot races, there would be factions
like the Blues and the Greens, which tried to wield
real political power and they fought each other in the
streets and at one point tried to overthrow the Emperor
Justinian the First. Because that was a transition era from

(01:01:01):
the time period of gladiatorial games, which had been abolished
or had fallen out of favor by that point in time,
to the more current era of professional sports, these chariot
races were something in between, and the old bloodthirst still remained.
But channeling people into more benign activities that express those

(01:01:26):
impulses may be a viable intermediate strategy. What are video
games or computer games, for instance, They are of course
different genres. I prefer the turn based strategy games, but
some people prefer the first person shooter games. And if
the first person shooter games actually mean they take out

(01:01:46):
their tendencies on the computer generated monsters and they don't
take their pitchforks and storm city hall or engage in
armed violence in the streets, that's a major improvement from
the standpoint of everybody else's well being. Some technology can
help with those tendencies. I'm not suggesting we re engineer
our brains right away, so I'm not telling people go

(01:02:09):
out and get a neurlink implant right now. I am saying,
over time, with the aid of technology, sometimes external technology
that reconfigures our incentives.

Speaker 4 (01:02:19):
We should try to.

Speaker 3 (01:02:23):
Make the best of our human natures, express the better
angels of our nature, and channel any potentially destructive drives
into innocuous or benign directions.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Mm hmm, Yeah, I get where you're coming from, and
it makes sense within the sort of rationalist enlightenment frame
of someone like Stephen Pinker. What then, do you make
of the fact that throughout all of history people have
been so willing to fight wars and to not just

(01:02:59):
kill others, but to risk death themselves, often in a
suicidal like charge of the light brigade kind of way.
And I know that, you know, in modern times, as
in like within the last twenty five hundred years or so,
it's been largely you know, city states directing their people
to go and fight. It's but before that time, before

(01:03:21):
the age of civilization, we were just as dominated by wars.
It was just intrafamilial wars or intra business wars. We
had blood feuds, and arguably you mentioned your opposition to
death began with a sense of injustice towards death. And
maybe we'll close on that because we've been going for

(01:03:41):
an hour. But before we get to that, I think
the entire idea of justice and indeed objectivity seems to
be it seems to have been invented in order to
curb this blood feud tendency which was so ubiquitous and
is the the consistent horror of the ancient world. And

(01:04:08):
so we we we civilization did do away with blood feud,
but now we have these world wars that killed just
as many people. I actually found out earlier today that
someone I had met and strangely went to Ukraine to
fight died over there.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
That's such a tragedy.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
I have tried to dissuade people from going to Ukraine
and fight, by the way, But yes.

Speaker 4 (01:04:37):
You're correct that the you're correct that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
The primitive blood feuds, the intertribal skirmishes were actually worse
than the wars that subsequent societies and civilizations fought on
a proportional basis. They actually claimed more lives. So if
you had say, two tribes of one hundred people each
fighting one another, and fifty people from each tribe were killed,

(01:05:03):
that's a fifty percent death rate. No world war even
remotely approached that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
All you all, you need to do to verify this
is look at the uh look at the mortality rate
difference between people who are in street gangs and people
who are not in street gangs today. Yes, and I
think you have a rough proxy of what life back
in that time might have been like.

Speaker 4 (01:05:28):
Yes, absolutely, but but.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
But the the the point I was trying to get
is that the existence of the blood feud seems to
indicate that there is a belief that some things are
not just worth killing for, but are worth dying for,
and that a world. I'm not a libertarian, but to

(01:05:51):
take for a moment, I'm going to put my libertarian
hat on and put a mess praxiological frame on this.
Does their choice proxiologically to define their subjective preference in
that moment?

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Well, it's interesting because one should consider why people in
those very primitive societies were incentivized to make those choices.
It's because, in Thomas Hobbs's words, life was nasty, British
and short. So if they didn't die in an intertribal skirmish,

(01:06:31):
chances are they might not even survive the year because
the predator would get them, or a disease would get them,
or they would stumble and fall on a rock and
die because there wouldn't be any medical care for the
wounds that they received from that. So there were so
many different causes of death. Life was so precarious and

(01:06:53):
so short. Typical life expectancies were in the late teens
and the Paleolithic era. So these people felt like, well,
they were already on the end of death, they could
already die tomorrow, and fighting against another tribe, well, that
could be an opportunity. The other tribe could have resources.
Instead of hunting game or foraging, which could take a

(01:07:16):
long time, they could just take what the other tribe
had and if anybody could die tomorrow. Praxiologically speaking, I
think they just thought that the goods they could obtain
from risking their lives outweighed the risk itself, and otherwise
their lives would be nasty, British and short anyway. So

(01:07:39):
as civilization progresses, people have more to lose for war,
and they have to be manipulated into war by the
city states, by their governments, by ideologies, sometimes by religions,
and they're still reluctant to go to war. And I
would say as societies become more prosperous and more technologically advanced,

(01:08:02):
there would be more resistance to worker We already see
this in the civilian populations of the Western countries. Even
though Western countries still wage wars, sometimes directly sometimes by proxy,
most people want nothing to do with the wars, and
the way city the United States can wage wars today
is number one, it has to be through proxies. Boots

(01:08:24):
on the ground are very unpopular now. And number two,
most ordinary people should not have their day to day
lives interrupted by those proxy wars. So at most they
should be seeing headlines videos. That's okay, But if anything
becomes more inconvenient, more expensive, et cetera, people's tolerance for

(01:08:45):
those wars will fade very quickly. So I think that's progress. Actually,
even though I don't like the proxy wars either, I
think that's progress significantly so compared to the tribal skirmish.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
So this is where so understanding your argument correctly that
like these people valued honor, We'll say, because I don't
think most of these blood feuds were motivated by the
hope for spoils. I think that was an incidental thing
that we would sometimes get, but it was mostly motivated

(01:09:17):
by honors, even when it happens today. It's honor killings,
when when gang members kill each other, it's over, Oh
they dissed us, so we have to go kill one
of their members. There's a nineteen sixty seven documentary called
Dead Birds that takes place in the islands of Southeast

(01:09:38):
Asia about a primitive tribe that still lived in that way,
and it was all of the killings between these two
tribes were reciprocal. It was like, oh, they killed one
of ours, so we have to hit back. It was
honor based thing. There was once a time when men
would say would value their honor above their life. I

(01:10:01):
would say, my honor is my life, and they would
willingly die, or sometimes if you're a samurai, willingly kill
yourself in a painful way for your honor and to
preserve your honor. And they would look at someone in
an enlightenment Western society who dismisses honor in the way

(01:10:22):
that Stephen Pinker does, says, it's the thing that we
believe exists because we believe everyone else believes it exists,
or something like that, and he would look on that
person as a mean and dishonorable and eminently unenviable person,
and he would say that person is only like dismissing

(01:10:45):
honor because they are not a warrior, they are not
an aristocrat. They don't have what I have in the
respect of my community.

Speaker 5 (01:10:55):
So the.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
Way that we say, well, I think their views are
just the byproduct of their environment and the economic sort
of environmental necessities of their existence. But we in modern
society today have a more objective view of what is
truly good. I think there's some danger to that, especially

(01:11:22):
in a world where many people talk about a so
called crisis of men, where there is an absence of urgency,
there's an absence of any sense of necessity for men.
That men have become superfluous as protectors and providers in
some sense, and since the providing of protection and sustenance

(01:11:46):
was an expression of love for men of the past,
I think we've reached a point of society where when
everything is provided and people can take protection more or
less for granted, for now it seems to be fair
away in some cases, but they can depend upon the
state that has intervened and put an end to these

(01:12:07):
blood feuds, which is wonderful. Blood feuds were objectively awful,
but there is something lost there, and many men are
checking out and are living in a kind of haze.
And by every metric of like quality of living, standard

(01:12:27):
of living, you can hear like Ben Shapiro spouting off,
or Stephen Pinker and the better angels of our nature
or enlightenment. Now how everything is on the steady upward trajectory.
We do not at all seem happier. We seem to
be depressed. We seem to be on antidepressants, men and

(01:12:49):
women alike. And there seems to be more more to
life than just avoiding death. And if Nietzsche is to
be believed that there is a connection in the intensity
between pain and pleasure, that there might be something something.

(01:13:09):
I hate to invoke Christian language here, but Christian theologians
will talk about the difference between bios life and Zoe life,
life of the body and life of the spirit. BIOS's
life is like you are, your heart is continuing to beat,
you are still biologically alive. But then there's this thing
called Zoe, that's the spirit, the feeling of being alive.

(01:13:32):
And it seems that we're reaching a point where as
our bios is going up, we see a sort of
ontograph a Zoe going down, an increasing sense of disconnection,
an increasing sense of dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization. I'm sure

(01:13:54):
some of that's just the Internet, and we haven't figured
out the right etiquette to survive with the Internet in
the same way it probably took us a few thousand
years to figure out beer. But like I don't, do
you see what I'm trying to get at as far
as the dangers of I guess the best way of
putting in an excessively quantitative analysis of what constitutes human flourishing.

Speaker 4 (01:14:21):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
I think the crisis of meaning that you're referring to
is very much real, but I think it stems from
a misapprehension of the problems remaining to be solved. So
just because there aren't blood feuds every day that one
has to fight or defuse doesn't mean there's no purpose.

Speaker 4 (01:14:43):
Left for men. There are so.

Speaker 3 (01:14:45):
Many projects that need to be accomplished, so many perils
that befall us, from diseases to natural disasters to problems
of governance or societal oranization, and all of those could
benefit from people who devote their thinking, their resources, their

(01:15:07):
efforts toward them.

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
So I think what.

Speaker 3 (01:15:10):
Is missing is a sense of meaning because of the
postmodern era's deconstruction of prior narratives, and we do need
new narratives, but I would say those narratives should rekindle
a sense that progress is possible, and that in particular,
progress that solves real, pressing material problems is worthy of

(01:15:35):
being pursued. There are many barriers in our society to
technological progress and the uplifting of material living standards, and
I think a lot of men struggle with that because
maybe they've tried to work, but the cost of housing
is too high and they think they might never be
able to afford a house of their own. That's a

(01:15:57):
quite salient problem for the younger generations today. So how
can we overcome that through technology, through better construction techniques,
but also through liberalization of say, zoning laws and other
restrictions on development. So there's a policy component to this
as well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
I didn't fully read, but I did skim some of
the policy links you sent me, and I am, for
different reasons on board with our zoning laws are so ridiculous.
But I don't think that's what men is holding men back.
I think what men long for, and man, we've already

(01:16:39):
been going for so long there's so much to get into.
A big part of your platform is not just the
protection of civil rights, but indeed their expansion not just
among people, which you also include, but the expansion to
non human entities potentially as well. End understanding of rights.

(01:17:01):
And there are many ways that people can ground rights,
but my understanding of rights, generally, at least in the
Kantian framework, is that they are grounded in a sense
of dignity, in a belief that all human lives have
intrinsic worth. And for men who exist psychologically in a

(01:17:23):
hierarchical totem pole of space, the idea of dignity is
anathema to the sense of value that they feel internally.
Men long for honor, I think, and a society. What
the reason that they are withdrawing from society so much

(01:17:43):
is that there is no longer honor in society. There
are very very few honorable places in society. Men will
go to the fringes of society to find places they
can compete and find honor. I have found a wonderful
outlet for that myself in trade work, where we're working

(01:18:05):
largely among men, and all the tradesmen down talking to
all that work looks like garbage share, and it's a
very tacitly competitive environment where everyone takes great pride in
the superiority of their own craft to others, sometimes somewhat foolishly,

(01:18:27):
but it motivates them, and it gives them a sense
of belonging and a sense of appreciation without honor, without
being needed by others in an urgent, meaningful way. I
think society won't really have much of a place for

(01:18:49):
men who feel that way.

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):
Well, I think it depends on what is considered to
be honorable, because that is a culturally variable definition. So
I would say my response to your description of the
need for men to have honor and as well the

(01:19:17):
example that you gave is that it is pofitible to
define a view of honor that is constructed and doesn't
involve dying, doesn't involve killing other people, doesn't involve any
sort of destructive behavior, but could be honor found in
one's work or in accomplishing something beneficial, maybe in fellowship

(01:19:42):
with others, which is a part of the setting that
you describe. I'm not opposed to that, but the question
is can that concept be repurposed to once again bring
out the better angels of our nature, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
Right, and I think that becomes an empirical question of
just how plastic are our nature's exactly. I suppose theoretically,
with enough technology we can warp our brains into whatever
shape is conducive to whatever vision we think is best.

(01:20:22):
But I think that vision one would be very hard
pressed to find an objective foundation for whatever vision that
winds up being, whether that is a like Nietzschean hyper
competitive where we're all killing each other in order to
find out who's the strongest in a Darwinian battle for

(01:20:42):
reproductive success or if it's a completely pacifist there's never
any fighting ever vision, or you can come up with,
you know, a dozen or more, you know, plausible utopian
visions would all have their upsides and drawbacks depending on

(01:21:03):
what we what we assume from the get go to
be good. But I think the the idea even that life,
the life of the individual itself is the is the
necessity uh that makes all these other potential visions possible,
which is it sounds very solid on its on its surface.

(01:21:29):
Would that not also apply to the longevity of every
individual cell that makes up the human animal?

Speaker 3 (01:21:38):
Well, the cells are not individually sentient or self sufficient
outside of the larger organism. And of course, here I'm
assuming you're not talking about a one cell, Amiba, You're
talking about some sort of specialized cell, right right, And

(01:22:00):
before the counter argument is made that while human beings
also live in societies and they require some extent of
social cooperation to survive, the answer is yes, but an
individual human being could move to a different society or
to a different role in the same society. A skin cell,
unless it's like de differentiated into a pluripotent stem cell,

(01:22:25):
cannot become a different kind of cell. It can't become
a neuron or a heart cell. So as a result,
it's important to respect the sovereignty of the individual. The
individual is the unit of morality, whereas a cell is

(01:22:48):
a component, an integral component of a larger, unitary organism.
So I think that's where the distinction is. It's just
like saying, well, we let's say you live in a building.
You value that building. You don't necessarily place the same

(01:23:11):
value on an individual brick or an individual plank that
comprises that building. You could replace one brick or one
plank without an issue, but you do value them insofar
as they contribute to the building as a.

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):
Whole, of course. And the reason I brought up that
analogy is if you have a group of cells of
the specialized purpose that don't die when they're supposed to,
that's called cancer and it becomes a real problem for
the person or the building or whatever. But I mean
this idea of the sovereignty of the individual. I mean,

(01:23:48):
there's a few justifications you could make for this. There's
like an epistemic one, there's a political one, but the
metaphysical one gets really interesting because we did not create ourselves.
We were brought into being by our parents. And there's
a sort of a line back that we are not

(01:24:10):
separate from. I hate to keep bringing up Christian language here,
but there is a line whereas says, do you know
respect your boys? Do you not know that you were
not your own? You were bought for a price? Now,
of course that's talking about Jesus and whatever. I feel
that way about my parents. My parents brought me into

(01:24:33):
this world, and that doesn't mean that they own me,
but it does mean in the same sense that they
don't own me. I have obligations to not them exactly,
But to the line and to my children and to
others that that sort of put a big asterisk on

(01:24:57):
the idea of ownership. I am a steward of my
own body, but I am not a separate entity from
them in the in the broader metaphysical sense, insofar as
we are not biologically immortal like a greenland shark or
several varieties of flatworms, or what's the what's the three

(01:25:17):
thousand year old tree, bristle comb pine, and others. It
feels as if we evolved to die. It feels as
if death is a mechanism of changing the the biological
composition of the generations, as just as our bones regrow

(01:25:40):
every seven years or so. I'm sorry if I'm keeping
you so long. I know it's later over where you
are than where I am here. But I wonder what
is what is the foundation philosophically for this idea of
self ownership?

Speaker 3 (01:26:00):
Well, the idea is irrespective of the origins of one's self.
Right now, one is a self contained, autonomous, unitary being.
So yes, we came from others, and there's a period
of time in our lives when we're dependent on others

(01:26:22):
as children and those who brought us into this world.
Have an obligation to take care of us, and some
may argue we have a reciprocal obligation to them as
a result, And perhaps that's a good argument to make
from the standpoint of some sort of societal cohesion as

(01:26:45):
well as people treating other generations well, I don't think
that creates some sort of subordination of the individual though.
Just like if you sign a contract of some sort
that says you will get X in exchange for why,

(01:27:06):
that doesn't mean you're no longer an autonomous individual. It
just means you're bound by some sort of promise, some
sorts of actions that you've agreed to take, or that
you find taking to be the best situation that is realistic,

(01:27:30):
or you may even reluctantly accept it, but you still
accept it. So in terms of parents taking care of
their children or children taking care of their parents later on,
I see it in those terms, but I don't see
the individuals becoming part of some super organism whose existence

(01:27:53):
justifies the sacrifice of those individuals. I would rather keep
all those individuals around. And in terms of aging and
the origins of aging, So there are actually different theories
about this. In the biogerontological community the idea that aging

(01:28:15):
evolved in some way purposefully as a way of allowing
a species to develop or evolve certain beneficial traits over
the course of generations. That is a view that has
helped that it is a minority view, So the prevailing

(01:28:38):
view among biogerontologists is that aging is essentially the result
of damage accumulation over time, that the bodies repair mechanisms
haven't been evolved to get rid of, and our bodies
will share damage all the time. But there may be
certain kinds of more complex, more difficult to repair damage.

(01:29:01):
And as I mentioned to Aubrey de Gray, identify seven
types of damage within cells outside of cells that contribute
to aging. So some speaky that better repair mechanisms than others.
And it could be that natural selection simply doesn't operate

(01:29:22):
as well once one has already reproduced and reared one's children.
Some evolutionary biologists will argue there's also a grand parent effect,
so it may be useful even to stay around for
a bit longer to help one's offspring raise children. But
then it's not that people die right after becoming parents

(01:29:45):
or grandparents. There are some species where there is programmed aging.
We see it in the salmon that migrate and then
lay their eggs and die. But that's a very different
life cycle from what we have. So what we have
is just that after a certain time pass reproduction, natural

(01:30:07):
selection doesn't really have any dynamics by which to maintain
the individuals who have already reproduce, raised their offspring, etc.
So it's not like those individuals die right away. It's
just that we haven't evolved the damage repair machinery. Other

(01:30:28):
species might have been luckier, so that giant tortoises, for instance,
are the greenland sharks, they did evolve some better damage
repair machinery, so they have been said to be negligibly senescent.
It's not even that they don't senesse at all, it's
just their rate of aging is so much slower than ours.

(01:30:51):
So it is possible biologically speaking. And if it's possible
for the greenland sharks and the giant tortoises, why not
for humans. I sometimes wish we had evolved from one
of those species.

Speaker 2 (01:31:03):
And to be clear, I'm very pro all this technology.
It's on the one hand cool, and on the other hand, like,
wouldn't it be great if people could consistently live just
to ninety let alone to like, you know, two hundred
or something. You know, I think we finally reached a
point where our average mortality age has started to go

(01:31:27):
down for the first time in a while. Last time
I looked, I could be wrong on that, but the
point that's.

Speaker 3 (01:31:33):
Happened for a few years, starting in the late two
thousand pens and extending into the early pandemic. So, of
course during the pandemic year's COVID was a contributor, but
prior to the pandemic in the United States, it was
the deaths of despairity, alcoholism, suicide, essentially, drug abuse, opioid

(01:31:55):
overdoses as well. And I think twenty twenty three was
the first year when that decline in average life expectancy reverse.
So in twenty twenty three twenty twenty four, the average
life expectancy in the US started going up again.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
Yeah. So the point of bringing up the sort of
intergenerational connection and the metaphysical connection to the line that
we come from is more about the question of justice
that you mentioned at the very beginning. There's something unjust
about death, and this speaks to the mythical narratives that

(01:32:35):
guide us because it is also unjust, as some anti
natalists will say, unjust for us to be born. How
miraculous and magical is it to borrow some Daalkinzian language,
that we get to be lucky enough to be alive
in the first place at all? And what is the like,

(01:32:58):
where is the the existential wronging of death that cuts
this magical gift that we might not have had short
And maybe that was just a sensation. I don't mean
this is not by any means like a eight an
attempted takedown or anything, but it's a curious feeling to
have that. I want to probe you on a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):
Yes, well, I do think we're tremendously lucky to be alive,
and that's definitely not an injustice.

Speaker 4 (01:33:30):
It's wonderful that we are alive.

Speaker 3 (01:33:33):
Of course, if we never existed, we wouldn't have had
to say anything about it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:39):
We wouldn't have been able to apprehend it.

Speaker 3 (01:33:42):
And I would say, the fact that we exist, the
fact that our lives are so rich and deep and
nuanced and multifaceted, and we can have all of these
experiences and all of these thoughts and all of the
potentialities in life and then one day it's all snuffed out.

(01:34:03):
It's like an entire universe is extinguished, and there's no
justice than that. There's no justice in something so intricate
and so profound, with so much potential, just being erased
from existence as if it never existed. That I would

(01:34:25):
say is not only an injustice, it's a terrible tragedy.
Every time a person dies, we lose that kind of universe.
So I would say to me, life is good, and
I'm not an anti natalist. I think the anti natalists
are misguided because they think life is on net bad

(01:34:50):
and therefore it's bad to bring children into this world.
I don't think life is on net bad. I think
most children who are born appreciate being alive, and again,
if they don't, they have some serious mental issues that
they need to attend to. But I think once one

(01:35:11):
is alive, that life is of incalculable moral value and
efforts should be taken to preserve it. I think most
people will agree with me day to day, and even
in terms of fighting diseases and prolonging life in the
near to intermediate term. As you have said, I think,
based on your comments, you wouldn't mind, if everybody lived

(01:35:34):
to the age of ninety so that would be progress
compared to what we have today. Life expectancy would go
up for the vast majority of people. And I think
what transhumanism does to bring it full circle is take

(01:35:55):
those areas of essentially universal agreement, leaving out the people
who have mental issues or the taliban, or people with
really reactionary worldviews or theologies. But everybody else essentially agrees
with that incremental progress, and we transhumanists are just taking

(01:36:19):
it to its logical conclusion. We are taking it to
a future where these advances play themselves out and they
open up new horizons for human beings, just as past
technologies have opened up new horizons that enabled our current
state of technological development to be reached. But there have

(01:36:42):
been other eras in history where technologies that we accept
and take for granted today were opposed. They were seen
as violating God's will. Traveling faster than a horse, or
anesthesia or open heart surgery or in vitro fertilization. We're
all challenged by essentially the reactionaries of their time. And

(01:37:08):
yet now even people who express caution or concern or
opposition in regard to the next generation of technologies. They
accept by and large those prior technologies, and even if
they reject some of them, like the Amish do, they'll
accept others, and they'll especially accept the ones that involve

(01:37:30):
medical care.

Speaker 2 (01:37:32):
Right, well, I feel like that's a We've been going
for about an hour and a half now, and I
feel like that's a very good way to close it.
That transunionism does appear to be the logical conclusion of
what we could loosely call the Enlightenment and the project
of the Enlightenment. And I've got my own kind of
radical reactionary instincts, but not anti technology in that regard.

(01:37:58):
And Jannati, thank you so much for coming on. Remind
the audience one more time the name of your illustrated
kid's book and where they can find that.

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
So the name of the illustrated kid's book is Death
is Wrong. It can be found on Amazon. It can
also be found on my website. The Rational Argumentator in
five different languages, so there's of course an English version,
but it has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and

(01:38:29):
Russian as well.

Speaker 2 (01:38:30):
Very impressive. Jannati, thanks so much for coming on. It's
been an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 4 (01:38:35):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:38:36):
Likewise, I really enjoyed this conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:38:39):
Excellent s.

Speaker 6 (01:40:05):
No no, no, in.

Speaker 7 (01:45:16):
Um, there's a tower from merchant space, breaking free the

(01:49:16):
falls and words and bras, all the spite of.

Speaker 4 (01:49:21):
The towel, climbing high in the.

Speaker 8 (01:49:23):
Sky, reaching from the leader to the heaven's high building.
Constructuality transhuman technology, power is actual magnetically rising confectual turns

(01:49:57):
and science and technology to over CHLM gravity. They are
building insteadily vertically.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
We aim and launching efficiently.

Speaker 8 (01:50:20):
Who we are the building a phase of power. We
am the building. The spot will tell her building socially
trans human technology power in electual magnetically rising perfectually using

(01:50:57):
science and technology can grabbing well, hen joy, we don't adit.

Speaker 6 (01:51:29):
Heaven eventually that we don't a deity.

Speaker 8 (01:51:51):
Well heaven, Joy don't admit well ash heap sho don't
me having an innationally should ascial.

Speaker 2 (01:52:34):
I deity.

Speaker 8 (01:52:38):
Chap name inventially.

Speaker 4 (01:52:52):
Name I deity.

Speaker 7 (01:52:59):
Chat And that's some

Speaker 4 (01:53:03):
Love me Adity don't need a d T

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Discussion and Debate on Transhumanism - C.B. Robertson and Gennady Stolyarov II

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Discussion and Debate on Transhumanism - C.B. Robertson and Gennady Stolyarov II