Will you side with the Transhumanists?

[Ostroeuropa]

It's not the worst. It's just possible to conceive of a better one.
Evolution only gets you as far as "Good enough." it does not deliver optimal.

If transhumanism can give us what evolution will not (at least not for a long long time), what wars shall we fight over what to deem optimal?

Suppose a few of the master cogno-physicists claim, with some merit of rigor, that it is not optimal to some purpose or other that we maintain independent cognition?

Will you join the NPA (National Psychics Association) today, and help James Woods preserve your right to explode other people's head's telekinetically like in Scanners, detailed in the Majority Decision penned by Anton Scalia Clone XXIII?

Also, anyone too young to get that reference, I hate you a great deal. Bastards.

I see no reason for a war when an economy does the job.
Oh, you want to buy the ability to see really far?
Seems pointless bro. I'm going for a better immune system.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

It's not about God. From an atheist POV you've backed yourself into a corner here. If we assume humans just evolved like any other species, and recognize that evolution tends to select those most fit to reproduce, and recognize that those most fit to reproduce tend to be the most fit overall, then we realize that human testicles have evolved because they are the most fit for the species overall.

And that's why I support the transhumanism.

Yes, I've heard some are already getting groupons for the metalized-nitrogen field-bolstered cyber-coconut defense scrotums of the future.

[Conserative Morality]

Explain more about the way it marginalizes mankind. What of its existence pushes us to the margin, and to what conceptual margins?

The thing in the future listening to us likes specificity with this language, where possible. One of the meta-anayltic substations on Wittgenstein IV is quite insistent on the point. Our apologies.

Is this some weird ARG we're being roped into here?

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

I see no reason for a war when an economy does the job.
Oh, you want to buy the ability to see really far?
Seems pointless bro. I'm going for a better immune system.

What about the one that gives you perspective of unbounded possibilities blended in a theater of cogno-coalescencse that gives you all truth and beauty, fed at the pace best fit to your neurocrysallis as you become an endless otherness that can play Petanque with the rest of the Gods all day and enjoy it, or...

...rocking breasts. And I mean rocking. Like, beat out any other b*tch in the club, rocking. Really, really great boobs. Just awesome.

Then what?

[Ostroeuropa]

I see no reason for a war when an economy does the job.
Oh, you want to buy the ability to see really far?
Seems pointless bro. I'm going for a better immune system.

What about the one that gives you perspective of unbounded possibilities blended in a theater of cogno-coalescencse that gives you all truth and beauty, fed at the pace best fit to your neurocrysallis as you become an endless otherness that can play Petanque with the rest of the Gods all day and enjoy it, or...

...rocking breasts. And I mean rocking. Like, beat out any other b*tch in the club, rocking. Really, really great boobs. Just awesome.

Then what?

Might be good for an afternoon or two. You could always uninstall.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

Explain more about the way it marginalizes mankind. What of its existence pushes us to the margin, and to what conceptual margins?

The thing in the future listening to us likes specificity with this language, where possible. One of the meta-anayltic substations on Wittgenstein IV is quite insistent on the point. Our apologies.

Is this some weird ARG we're being roped into here?

No, that's just flavor text. Please eschew at your slightest preference.

The earlier part was quite sincere.

[HOlY Christus Krieger]

Im opposed to Transhumanism

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

Im opposed to Transhumanism

That's cool. Now say more things that involve why and how. To what length?

If the governor (or whoever runs your part of the world) called up the reserve citizen psychic militia to defend against a Militant Transhumanist Chrono-dysjunction Strike occurring in exactly three minutes and also exactly 3000 years, would you answer the call?

There's strong, and then there's psychic army strong.

[The Emerald Legion]

Also... details of my own position...

Yes I would. Why? Because I very much prefer a nigh-immortal body made of metal and circuitry to the current sack of flesh that breaks horribly if I fall off a roof or perform heavy work for too long.

[Conserative Morality]

No, that's just flavor text. Please eschew at your slightest preference.

The earlier part was quite sincere.

Mankind is the eternal apex predator; for ever so long as there is a threat, we can identify and eliminate it with mass action, simultaneously, across the entire world. We are more powerful than anything that could possibly exist, and if we are not, it is our duty to change the situation to where we are once more unchallenged.

If this singularity should arise, this superintelligence that supposedly cannot be stopped and is so far above us as to be unchallengable, we should destroy it, for it is unpredictable in its power and inhumanity.

[Phocidaea]

No, that's just flavor text. Please eschew at your slightest preference.

The earlier part was quite sincere.

Mankind is the eternal apex predator; for ever so long as there is a threat, we can identify and eliminate it with mass action, simultaneously, across the entire world. We are more powerful than anything that could possibly exist, and if we are not, it is our duty to change the situation to where we are once more unchallenged.

If this singularity should arise, this superintelligence that supposedly cannot be stopped and is so far above us as to be unchallengable, we should destroy it, for it is unpredictable in its power and inhumanity.

Humanity is resilient. Humans are cockroaches- now why isn't there a TVTropes page for that?

I think humans could defeat transhumans by simply exploiting their inflexibility and dependence on technology. It's called an EMP.

[The Emerald Legion]

Mankind is the eternal apex predator; for ever so long as there is a threat, we can identify and eliminate it with mass action, simultaneously, across the entire world. We are more powerful than anything that could possibly exist, and if we are not, it is our duty to change the situation to where we are once more unchallenged.

If this singularity should arise, this superintelligence that supposedly cannot be stopped and is so far above us as to be unchallengable, we should destroy it, for it is unpredictable in its power and inhumanity.

Humanity is resilient. Humans are cockroaches- now why isn't there a TVTropes page for that?

I think humans could defeat transhumans by simply exploiting their inflexibility and dependence on technology. It's called an EMP.

It's called an EMP shield. We already have them IIRC.

EDIT: Yep. Confirmed that is what faraday cages do.

[Greed and Death]

That was a very long-winded an unhelpful OP. But your belief in the singularity is the same belief of Christians believing in the return of Jesus.

And as to the question:

No, I won't side with transhumanists.

Well, that's a problem, because your job was to build the Dyson sphere that managed entanglement traffic in sector Delta Kappa Kappa, the sorority galaxy.

Thanks for letting down the team.

You find transhumanism technically non-feasible? Or some other objection?

What are you talking about there is now a doorway to soroity galaxy, I just spent my Weekend there. wow it was very close to death by snu snu before i got out.

[Northwest Slobovia]

Eh? Until recently, we didn't have any technology to deliberately change our biology, and what little we do have now is not really up to the task.

It's called evolution.

Are you telling me that you're denying one of the central theories of modern biology?

Humans have developed the way they have over millions of years of evolution because that path of development was the best-suited for them.

Please... We developed the the way we did because of many changing selective pressures applied to us, limited by our evolutionary history and by the random mutations that happened to appear. The notion that we're "best-suited" for anything beyond that is silly and contrary to the evidence. Our bodies are the best that evolutionary forces happed to produce, not the best that they can be.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

No, that's just flavor text. Please eschew at your slightest preference.

The earlier part was quite sincere.

Mankind is the eternal apex predator; for ever so long as there is a threat, we can identify and eliminate it with mass action, simultaneously, across the entire world. We are more powerful than anything that could possibly exist, and if we are not, it is our duty to change the situation to where we are once more unchallenged.

If this singularity should arise, this superintelligence that supposedly cannot be stopped and is so far above us as to be unchallengable, we should destroy it, for it is unpredictable in its power and inhumanity.

So in a sense this is a rejection of transhumanism (or whichever sections of it you refer to) as a threat to our own survival, that might brush us all aside catastrophically without reference for our parental role? Now I know how God must've felt when He realized he wasn't needed anymore. No wonder he mostly acts like "Angry Santa" these days...

Perhaps then rejecting transhumanism is a survival mechanism, reacting to the unknowable and all the ill-defined yet potentially very real risks piggy backing along like a kilogram full of weaponsgrade whatever up the ass of a true believer about to board a plane to humanity's next step.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

Also... details of my own position...

Yes I would. Why? Because I very much prefer a nigh-immortal body made of metal and circuitry to the current sack of flesh that breaks horribly if I fall off a roof or perform heavy work for too long.

What if it progresses to the point where "body" is no longer meaningful in its contemporary sense, and we are all reduced to no more than "information", seeking to continue to be "information" and to see itself in new ways?

Risks or gains here?

[Conserative Morality]

So in a sense this is a rejection of transhumanism (or whichever sections of it you refer to) as a threat to our own survival, that might brush us all aside catastrophically without reference for our parental role?

Not exactly. I reject it as a threat to our position of absolute power. Survival is a secondary, though important, concern.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

So in a sense this is a rejection of transhumanism (or whichever sections of it you refer to) as a threat to our own survival, that might brush us all aside catastrophically without reference for our parental role?

Not exactly. I reject it as a threat to our position of absolute power. Survival is a secondary, though important, concern.

It may be at the scales that are being discussed, whichever has one will have the other?

Or perhaps its the lightly setting padded cuffs of being cared for that we would find tasteful.

Better to live as less than Gods but survive by our merits than to be, as the Earl of Rochester called it, "the gilded opulence of [our] cage".

[The Emerald Legion]

Also... details of my own position...

Yes I would. Why? Because I very much prefer a nigh-immortal body made of metal and circuitry to the current sack of flesh that breaks horribly if I fall off a roof or perform heavy work for too long.

What if it progresses to the point where "body" is no longer meaningful in its contemporary sense, and we are all reduced to no more than "information", seeking to continue to be "information" and to see itself in new ways?

Risks or gains here?

Also acceptable. Of course I'd like to have a physical body lying around somewhere, to defend whatever medium my information is stored on.

[Kintuckistan]

I honestly hate transhumanism to the very center of it's cold, Frankenstein-complex core.

Let me start with this phrase:

"What could possibly go wrong?"
You fill in the rest....

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

Also acceptable. Of course I'd like to have a physical body lying around somewhere, to defend whatever medium my information is stored on.

I suppose you could just have one.

Maybe its physical incarnation will be a planet, like Unicron from Transformers: The Movie.

Again, if nobody knows what I"m talking about, I'm going to go lie down in a box because I'm told to ever hope to reach whatever passes for Singularity, even if its just finally having quality porn and health care available simultaneously to the very poor.

[The Emerald Legion]

I honestly hate transhumanism to the very center of it's cold, Frankenstein-complex core.

Let me start with this phrase:

"What could possibly go wrong?"
You fill in the rest....

To which I respond "Lots of stuff. Isn't science wonderful?"

[Kintuckistan]

The last thing planet Earth needs is some freak scientist bio-engineering a real life Man-Bear-Pig.

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

I honestly hate transhumanism to the very center of it's cold, Frankenstein-complex core.

Let me start with this phrase:

"What could possibly go wrong?"
You fill in the rest....

"What could possibly go wrong?" was precisely the premise alluded to quite centrally and throughout the OP.

So, by all means, fill in the rest. Restating what was already referenced pervasively in the question doesn't really add anything.

Moreover, the issue of "hating it to its core" then opens the spacious region of what you would do to stop others who intended to attempt transhumanism in some way you found particularly odious?

[Renegade Babylonian Kings]

The last thing planet Earth needs is some freak scientist bio-engineering a real life Man-Bear-Pig.

Oh dear. The thread just became Super Cereal.