anotherfilthyape

But consider how often the brain gives much more benefits that it gives these problems! Our modern lifestyle so resistant to nature is thanks to the brain... and mental illnesses are the minorit y of the population, headache, stress, tension, fatigue and mistakes are a small problem against all the benefits the brain causes... don't ya think?

The 22nd century is when your story happens? Or even further in the future? Think how much change can happen between modern day and the setting of your story... Are countries still the countries we have in the present time? There is a trend towards countries joining in international organizations (European Union for Europe for example) so you could extend this from Brazil to Peru and cover the whole of the Amazon (the Amazon rainforest stretches to some other countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia but most of it is in Peru and Brazil)... Rather than death the punishment could be exile (first time law brakers), life sentence (second time law brakers) and death (third time law brakers)... Edit: if you want to sell this as a cartoon you need better pictures, and os far the storyline reminds me of Avatar...

With the distance between Canada and the Amazon the matter is pretty much a moot point, it can be anywhere else in the world and you would still need to travel by plane... I recommend you a partial doomsday scenario where the US has been destroyed in an atomic war, since it is the distant future that can explain tribal features appearing in the USA that will allow you to have a culture much closer to Canada... A native USA culture with elements from the time the USA wasteland was ruled by the WASPs...

Yep you only said ear hairs, but it made me think about hairs in other places... we do need filters but I wonder how useful is hair as a filter in relation to the problems it causes... I thought you meant the rewriting of the genetic code was being achieved, but achieving regeneration is cool too... But I bet it will be a flawed technique for a time, with patients going through cancer... And this should be controlled because the problem with wisdom teeth is that we get too many teeth, let alone if we regrow milk teeth too...

Humans are biped because we stand on two legs, not because we have only two limbs, so cantaurs would be quadrupeds too, because they would stand on four legs and have two arms that are not used for locomotion... I did not propose wings like a bird... Nor I meant we had to let things to evlution, transhumanism is about taking the future wellfare of humanity in our own hands... We might not know enough about genetic manipulation to force the exterminion of wisdom teeth but we could develop implants to work better than teeth with less maintenance, among other things... couldn't we?

Huitoto, not hoitoto, the spellin is different (it sounds "woo-ee-tot-o'") This is a bora, I was refering to: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=354680407919848&set=a.168068279914396.48427.100001336764560&type=3 but if it is in the distant future who is to say the tribe has succeeded in not being affected by modern civilization? you can make up your own tribes because the future can, by any explanation you device, have its own tribes... or if you want it to be more like a tribe we know of now the tribe can be one tribe that is niot yet known to modern civilization and you can device it as you want (but their bamboo tech would not use bamboo unless you explain that bamboo now grows there too, they can only use objects that grow locally)

The existence of god has greater amount of inconsistencies and is more problematic and more whimsical to accept... I said that consciousness could be quantified in bits (bits is used for information, consciousness is a type of information) and it can, consciousness is information about the existence of information in a system that collects information so consciousness is a percentage between how many bits are dedicated to being self-aware and how many bits are dedicated to being aware of the remaining data, the problem is we cannot duplicate the reading equipment our brain uses to give us awareness of our thoughts, in other words, we can observe the brain system's working but we cannot understand the language... In other words, looking at the brain work is like looking at a computer programmed by someone else or watching someone speak a different language that has no relationship with one's own language, we can identify there is a code but we cannot translate it to something we comprehend. Define peace... The universe might not care about us but... You know, no matter how good you treat a saltwater crocodile it will still try to eat you if it gets a chance and no matter how much you try to make mosquitos avoid causing an epidemic of breakbone fever among humans they would continue causing it because the epidemic does not hurts them and they are motivated by survival for the sake of survival, not even for the sake of pleasure and joy, it is a world-eat-world, the universe does not care about us but the rest of the biosphere is just minding its own bussiness for survival Ok, the dolphins are pretty much studied and I bet they are smart as ancient greeks, and that means they are very smart, but they are vertebrates... On the other hand the sun is just a slow explosion that keeps exploding and from which we derive energy... It would be being animist to give the sun the credence of sentience because we do not know otherwise, you are making the ad ignorantiam fallacy and the burden of proof lays on you, you are the one that has to prove that the sun or mosquitos are sentient. If it cannot communicate, how can it be sentient? Sentience is a by-product of the ability to communicate or a parallel product; sentience needs a language to express the toughts and communication happens through language. Being animist would be a safe bet? Cost-benefit analysis says otherwise, we would die from trying not to destroy all the other potential sentience that we would be imagining in the world around us... What are you saying? That only laws of physics are valid science? That only laws of physics are facts? Evolution is a fact... But I was not strictly speaking about evolution but about the drive to survive... You seem to be biased against the more complex natural sciences that study life at a more complex level than physics... Which makes me remind you to read about emergentism... Chemistry also has facts, and so does sociology and anthropology and psychology and neurobiology... Et cetera. There is no need to bring alien species into the problem, we have not yet discovered alien species, even less, sentient alien species... The problem is just our biosphere; our point is not outliving other species in our biosphere but living longer (with or without them, "longer" here means "longer than already" not "longer than others") and living better (the later is a goal that justifies itself, "better" here means "better than already" not "better than others") or better said "living good enough" (sooner or later there is not much room for better, sooner or later you life good enough). The instinct for this is real and we know about it, it is a fact, not a whimsical nonsensical self-contradictory fantasy like god. Fright is why your heart malfunctions... not something inherently wrong in the heart but a flawed reaction to something that only causes fear to a sentient being (like finding that your 13 year old grand-daughter is pregnant when you are her legal guardian because her mother, your daughter, died and never knew the father) Saying "in reality it didn't actually think it was seeing itself" is contradictory... Caring enough? The tests are done when it is known the creature will care about the reaction... You must be arguing these experiments with those that made them, not with me... We know what consciousness has as consequence, we see it every day when our own consciousness results in our behaviour. Why is it a loose term? Becuase you say so or why? Why do plants act? Why do volcanoes erupt? Sans emotions instinct is the only driving motor for these creatures. Or something even simpler... Sperms do not have a system complex enough to be called instinctual yet they move through the best path they can find towards the ovum... You feel you are comiting mass murder every time you throw a bunch? At first I thought I understood that question but the more I read it the less I understand it... However perception is not an issue here...

That is assuming that eugenics would be applied as mandatory and determined by the government or by specialists... But that not need be the case... Eugenics could be applied as "if you want and can pay for someone to manipulate your zygote this is what specialists suggest, take your picking on how your child will be".

I doubt it is a grass skirt, it could be made from straw painted red or common cloth... Grass skirts are more common in Polynessia... I saw a very beautiful bora woman (boras are an ethnic community from the Amazon, from Peru) but if your person is from the future, the distant future, it could be an entirely fictional tribe, developed a la Mad Max from a catastrophe that left a small region as no one's land... and way backward... However in the present sobe tribes have not contact modern civilization yet and while tribes still follow old practices they have also started to use modern clothes to gifts from relief workers but what they bought through trade as tourism and other visitors are full of desire to invest in them (biologists that want them as guides or anthropologists or linguists that want to study them or their linguistic skill)...

you think? I love having one, it gets me a lot of kittens and I love kittens (I know, the word is not kitten, but I am censoring myself) Well, it could still qualify, it depends on the overall balance between how good it is and how problematic it is... Thankfully modern technology allows you to live without a heart but I guess it still is worth it to keep one's heart until it fails and one needs to replace it with the pacemaker or, better said, the artificial heart or the axial flow pump or the centrifugal pump Ok... I thought of centaureans because they are mostly quadruped... But I do not know much about biophysics that I guess is what matters here... But I am trying to get people into thinking what could be done to make human life easier so even if a jointed column would have its benefits, and having extra arms (a pair to take pressure off the spine and a pair to retain our articulate ability to grasp and manipulate objects) would give us benefits I'm trying to get people thinking into what can be possibly done to improve quality of life... I dont get much problem from the little toe but I do understand it is useless, maybe we wont lose it because we find it part of the natural and healthy look of the feet... Ear hair and nose hair on the other hand are things we could be bettwer without, and arse-line hair too... About wisdom teeth I agree they are very problematic... I would even accept genetic tampering to avoid it from forming, or an artificial jaw because as I said before the whole teeth system is pretty flawed.

Consciousness has not yet been quantified, it does not mean it cannot be quantified... It could be quantified in bits (bits is used for information, consciousness is a type of information) But why should we care about everything? We should not care because we should only care about what can be known positively, we can positively know about our own sentience and bet about the sentience of other humans and even betabout the sentience of other vertebrates, further than that there is no educated guess but mere whimsical bets, it is whimsical to bet other lifeforms or objects have a consciousness so we should not go that far... I said animists not animals... you know what an animist is? check it in wikipedia. How is that an answer to my post? And why not be efficient? We have a drive to survive the longest time possible and enjoy our existence the longest possible, why should we not follow that drive? My point is that your example of the comet is not universal... Life is something different than its absence and sentience is something different than its sentience. We can die from fright, without being touched... That is how different we are... You cannot kill a cockroach from fright. These experiments are done taking into account the animal's ability to perceives themselves reflected, that is my point... I think you are unjustly desestimating ethology. You know how science works, when it cannot directly observe something it works observing consequences of it... This is a tool every field of science uses, you are just not giving value to ethology and may be biased against it but entomologists have not achieved yet the evidence they have always searched for that their object of study are not mere robots of nature... Exact same behaviour is not what is sought but behaviour that reflects the inner workings... Behaviourism is what is applied. Potentiallity has different levels/percentages/-degree of probability-, a living human has more potential than a zygote, a human zygote has more potential than a sponge or a mosquito. A naive poster asked about humans evolving wings... Look the answers the poster got, now think about sentience, that is much more complex than wings and you would get your answer about other species developing sentience. Emotions are more complex in the way they involve things that are not necessary present, that is not as simple as releasing chemicals into the bloodstream and brain, it involves the advanced sentience we have developed thanks to the higher computing abilities of the vertebra and brain duo... Our spinal cord is why we are smarter, and our high brain-body ratio.

But those are not ethical problems but problems on another field and can be adressed by those involved in genetically tampering with humanity

She could have been made in a secret lab somewhere in any jungle from the Amazon to the Polynesia to South East Asia to Africa... Just try finding the tribe about which you can get more info... Start with wikipedia (the one in English is very full of data) and then check some libraries for further data... Edit:She could have been made in such a lab and then escaped to be taken by a local tribe... or she could have been in an airplane whn the airplane fell and a local tribe rescued her.

You are looking at the wrong book, physics does not try to describe reality, it tries to describe reality in relation to interactions between energy and matter and in relation to movement, not every aspect of reality is explained at that level... Read about emergentism that is a non sequitur That is the point... A meteor would not care... Why should we? Just because we can care? Then why do not we behave like animists and avoid consuming anything because anything can be sentient? Even air or even a rock? (And people have already died trying to eat only air because they deemed all life sacred). Even inuits that are animists are pragmatic enough to eat animals because it is convenient for their survival (they have a lot ot rituals and taboos involved in their hunting and predation of plants, but they at least end caring about themsevles rather than about lifeforms that are not humans)... And about nature recognizing level... I understand electromagnetic blasts affect machines but not humans, so that's somehow against what you said... Ethology has proven that some species do not recognize themselves in a reflection (species with the ability to perceive reflections), that is an evidence of lower degree of consciousness... Ethology is still young but it has proven a lot about animal sentience. I say the difference is vertebrates... Science does say it... Many documentals about lifeforms share this view, ethology shares this view. That is the same argument against abortion and it is flawed logic because any number of things can and should happen before the organism evolves into a sentient organism (just like any number of things must and can happen before a zygote evolves into a sentient human) None of these are vertebrates I bet ya... And pain is not the issue, sorrow, grief, joy, that's the issue, it lasts longer and is more complex than mere pain.

I know Gattaca did not support eugenics, but I claim they made a bad argument to oppose eugenics... And it is not my personal opinion... People everywhere would benefit from Gattaca-like eugenics... You think Stephen Hawking wouldn't rather be a commoner gene-therapy client that the exceptional cripple man he is? And failsafe measurements for machinery failing would be done in advance before leaving them with every menial job possible, and even then menial jobs are not something we would suffer much from if the machines doing them fail unless every machine fails at the same time and that is a stretch... We already trust computers with more dangerous occupations...

Ok... She does not need to be an alien to be that strong... In fiction it can be explained by she being a genetically altered human, her green skin can come from the presence of chloroplasts, giving her photosynthesis, her higher strength can come from genetically made muscles that provide greater strength for lower mass (and she could be unique)... Personally I like colour green but I have never found it attractive in female human-like beings that have that colour (at least not Star Trek's green women, even from the movie that updated special effects, it looks too artificial, maybe because of contrast between white sclera and green skin...) but you can justify it in-story in any way... What constitutes sexually immoral can vary from culture to culture (I find it disgusting but in some places of Asia orangutans are sex slaves in brothels... From my point of view it is zoophilia but it is clear they do not consider it so).

But the benefits do not outdo the problems it causes? I mean, we have conquered a lot of area just thanks to it... I see... So... Would be fare better as centaureans? That seems anecdotical qualms against the knee... As far as I know the system is used in the elbow too and in most verteberates and even in invertebrates, kind of... So... Is that fair criticism? I am masking thequestion because I am wondering what advances would be convenient from a transhumanist viewpoint...

I would make a poll but I dont know which options would appear so I rather give an open question... For the expertsand the not so experts, which body parts are more problematic than they are useful? For example hands are very useful and rarely ever present problems (I use them every day and I have to give little thought to their care)... On the other hand I think the digestive system is full of crap and it has the additional problem that its entrance, the mouth, is hard to mantain hygienically well

Why do you care if this possibility is not yet part of your life? Be pragmatic! Or you care because you are writting sci-fi about it? If you are writing sci-fi you can do as you please, any option should work if you have the skill to handle it but remember; gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzee are anthropomorphic and so are furries but you are a zoophile if you do them!

It depends who you ask... To some believers Thor, Loki, Odin, etc. where somewhat all-powerful or better said "infinitely powerful" yet not trully all-powerful... (the difference is that "all" allows no exception and "infinitely" does... I mean the multiples of 9 are an infinite series but their quantity is smaller than the infinite of 5). This is more clear with the grecolatin deities (Aphrodite/Venus, Zeus/Jupiter, etc.) as interpreted by Plato... But if you define "divine" as merely "more powerful" then... Why cant humanity be itself considered divine then? How much powerful is powerful enough to be divine?

Lets think of a gattaca model. where improvement is not only on intelligence but on physical skill... however with everyone at such level of advancement... Who would take the minor jobs? Well, I hope by then we can assign those menial tasks to machinery becuase it is a way to eliminate class struggle...

I agree with the importance of diveristy, that is the same point I made on an essay against the assumption that "social darwinism" is darwinism correctly interpreted... But the idea that we would be animals because we accepted universal darwinism is mistaken... Animals do not seem to bow down to mystical forces, that is what pre-civilized humans and what fundamentalists do, so it is a human trait... Now we are not considering evolution a mystical force either, we are considering its worth from undertsanding of it... Eugenics does not need to say "sterilize this person" or "avoid those two from mating", eugenics can say "modify that zygote so their children does not has that gene and that gene and that other gene"... Eugenics could even be applied to humans to create transgenic humans... But it is indeed risky so we better not make laws regulating it until we learn better.

We try to preserve them in controlled form, to retain their genetic material in case it might be necessary, but there is no conservationist effort to let them roam as self-sustaining species. Indeed this is why humanism has a position against murder, one of the reasons at least. This is why as a humanist I do not oppose the murder of serial killers, rapists, cleptocrats and other people that are more dangerous to humanity than beneficial. When I use the term level I use it because I think it is pretty expressive and easy to understand, since you want an explanation I will rephrase the whole idea; We have no reason to try to preserve rocks intact, we have extended this lack of care to weeds and when we ask where to stop not caring I say that the ability to exhibit sentience is enough, in ohter words, we must only worry about sentient beings. Why do we care about sentient beings and not about anything or anyone we do not consider sentient? Because only sentient beings care about their own existence or the existence of their peer, this is a unique value, the capacity for emotion, that makes them more than mere matter, yes, there is no immaterial component to their matter, but there is worth to their existence. The issue is really complex to explain completly and I am having a headache right now but if you need more explanation make me detailed questions and I will answer. And note that the worth of their existence is not an instrumental worth, as the worth of money or works of art, but a worth in relation to itself. Emergentist science can explain enough about instincts, consciousness and emotions to make a claim, whether it is behaviourist psychology or whether it is ethology... I have not yet started to study ethology because I want first to complete studies in philosophy and I had to stop because I could not advance in my country the way I wanted (I found philosophy to biased here). Consciousness is the effect of writing a code and decodiying so it keeps changing (it involves learning, if we ever invent Artificial Intelligence it would require the ability to learn for it to be trully Artificial Intelligence). I recommend you the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter, it gives an excellent acount of consciousness and emergentism. Most biologists are not ethologists... Ethology is a specific field of study in relation to animal behaviour and the internal mental state of animals. The problem of finding internal mental states in someone that is not oneself is already adressed by philosophy (the problem is known as the philosophical zombie) and it explains the existence of solipsism; however we can accept emotions in other people by projecting their behaviour, this tool, our natural empathy, is the same tool that, when analysed, becomes the tool of the ethologist and I have never found confirmation that non-vertebrates exhibit the complex self-worth of vertebrates, that is also the reason why they do not exhibit much creative behaviour. Emotions are not merely chemicals, that is a materialistic and physicalist way to put it, if you go into materialism or physicalism nothing matters and everything is permitted... However emergentism (that is semi-dualist but, unlike dualism, does not need non-material components for existence) understands that emotions are a complex result of the code that our thinking system is and gives value to things in relation to how much wellfare they seem to give us. It understands that consciousness consists of perceiving the workings of our thinking (that is a sort of code) to further change it (our ability to reflect) and that perception is the alteration of our thinking's code as an answer to our enviroment (or to other objects that may affect our thinking, like drugs). But we are not the universe and we are not responsible of making the universe static, we are ourselves and we have to look after ourselves and that means looking after humanity itself... We care aboutecology because it has consequences on us, nothing more, nothing less.

Is our biosphere all powerful? No definition of divinity has it that divinity can be less than all-powerful... So, nope, our biosphere is not divine and bets are that nothing is divine...

that's what I meant