# Transhumanism - the philosophy and the practical side
Hi everyone, those of you who read my intro post may recall my interest in biohacking and transhumanism, I thought it was a good idea to make a more detailed post exploring the practical side of the transhumanist philosophy.
First of all, for those unfamiliar, there's the philosophy of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is best thought of as a simplification of humanism. There is a wonderful explanation of this idea by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his website here:
http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/
For those who don't want to click the link, i'll summarise:
Transhumanism says "if life is good then it is a good thing to extend it" and "if intelligence is good then it is a good thing to extend it". The basic idea of transhumanism is that we should enhance the human condition using technology.
To a certain degree most people living in western nations are at least partly embracing this ideal. After all, you're reading this using a computer and getting the content via the internet - both pieces of technology that have massively enhanced human lives. I would go so far as to argue that computers are the most important invention humans have ever made but that's out of scope for this article.
What is different for those who call ourselves transhumanists is we embrace the idea of using technology to upgrade and enhance ourselves before it becomes widely socially accepted and we take it as obvious that we should do something about the injustice of aging and involuntary death and we should take seriously the ideas of augmented human intelligence.
So, that's the philosophy - let's look at the practical side.
## An ordinary day
I'll start this post by looking at what normal humans tend to go through nearly every day.
Imagine you wake up early so you can get to work or whatever, you're tired still but you have responsibilities so you get up and use the bathroom, drink some coffee (or an energy drink - mmmm), check the news (or steemit) and get dressed etc, if you have kids you get them up and get them to school.
Maybe you have a mild headache, so you swallow a painkiller. If you have a medical condition you might take medication for that too and if you're health conscious you swallow a multivitamin tablet.
This should be familiar to the vast majority of people - let's look at the problems though:
- You wakeup tired
- You need to get up at a time that's not ideal for yourself
- You need to get the kids to school so they can slowly be taught things by other humans
- You are probably like me a caffeine addict
- You get headaches and have to take a painkiller to treat them
- You are vulnerable to medical conditions
- You likely are doing work that is boring, but that society needs someone to do
- You need to get updated on the news by manually watching or reading it
How to deal with these issues?
You wake up tired at a nonideal time? Why not replace your hypothalmus with a chip or override it with an implant? I'm working on this one myself actually, but for obvious reasons i'm not getting anything implanted in my brain and will rely on external electrodes.
There's also nootropics that can make you alert and able to process information far faster than caffeine will, and similar drugs that can put you to sleep without any sort of drowsy "hangover" that most sedatives create. They are often not available without an actual medical requirement though despite low side effect profiles.
Getting the kids to school for slow manual teaching?
There exist cognitive models of how humans learn information, and these can be combined with automated testing and feedback to optimise the curriculum and academic material automatically for each individual student. Such systems are still primitive by comparision to human tutors, but as AI gets better there'll come a point where the only reason for using a human tutor instead of an AI is misguided nostalgia or luddism.
Caffeine addiction?
There's ways to electrically stimulate the brain or to hack the hypothalmus directly thus eliminating the need for chemical stimulants. Of course this doesn't help pre-existing addictions, but there's promising approaches to treating addiction using rTMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to reprogram the brain.
Headaches and painkillers?
It's downright trivial to eliminate headaches with subdermal implants.
Vulnerable to medical conditions?
Replace most of your internal organs with artificial replacements and augment your immune system with nanotechnology and say bye to most medical problems. This of course depends on a lot of advanced technology that is not here yet - but it's feasible and one day it'll become just common sense to abandon all the old-fashioned organic organs
Boring work?
Get an AI to do it and implement universal basic income to solve the unemployment issue that results - free people up to pursue whatever interests them
Manual news updates?
Progress is being made on the "neural coding" problem - how information is actually represented in the brain - when we crack this it will become fairly simple to download information into the brain.
## Realistic current approaches
Of course a lot of the above is not realistic, so here's what is realistic for most people:
### Enhance your cognitive abilities with nootropics
The simplest way to get started is to get hold of some piracetam and alpha-GPC (or another choline source), I won't go into dosage etc here, there's plenty of guides online and I suggest the /r/nootropics community on reddit for advice and relentlessimprovement.com for sourcing. Naturally there are other nootropics on the market, but piracetam is the "gateway drug" and both widely available legally and most well tolerated in terms of side effects.
### Give yourself a whole new sensory input - get magnets implanted
Go and get magnets installed in your fingertips and you can feel EM fields - this sounds quite minor but it gives you a whole new perspective on the world when you literally get a whole new sense that others do not have.
### Sign yourself up for cryonics
I was hesitant to include this in this post as personally I do not consider cryonics to be a transhumanist technology as such - to me it is more akin to a specialist subfield of emergency medicine - but it can not be denied that if you want to make sure you keep living, cryonics is essential. If you're in the US I encourage you to get a life insurance quote literally right now - as little as $32,000 could be enough to save your life and if you're young the premiums should be easily affordable.
### Become a full-blown cyborg
Yes, i'm serious - get some NFC/RFID tags for interacting with external devices, get a subdermal bluetooth transceiver (this is not yet commercially available sadly - but it will be fairly soon, i'm building one myself) and when it becomes available get a general purpose computer installed (another thing i'm doing myself - getting a small linux box installed inside my body to connect to other implants including an EEG-based neural interface). There is so much that can be done with currently available technology that can be used to augment the human body.
#### Get a CES device
If you are not comfortable building one (and if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be) then go buy a commercial unit like the Alpha Stim and use it. This is a simple way to eliminate various mental health issues and enhance focus and concentration.
#### Get a tDCS device
Related to the above, another form of neural stimulation - do not even think about building your own, just get a commercial device and do your research. Used properly this can do all sorts of amazing things to enhance your neurological state and cognitive capacity. Used wrongly of course this technology can be VERY dangerous - do not use it without doing the research.
#### Get an NFC tag in your hand
This is something really simple but it opens a lot of doors (some literally so) - you can program such a tag to store your contact details, a bitcoin (or other cryptocoin) wallet, whatever you want. You can also unlock your phone or computer with it, unlock your front door, backup crypto keys and even pay for products in some stores using a swipe of your hand. Only cyborgs can do this stuff, it's a true augmentation.
Most importantly of all, follow one simple principle:
## If you have a problem, no matter how minor, and it can be solved with technology you have access to - solve it
Following that one simple principle in every situation and applied for ANY problem - including those thought of as just "part of life" will improve your life in multiple ways. It's silly this even needs a name as it should be common sense - but it's sadly not common sense, so we had to give the idea a name and that name is Transhumanism.
hiveblocks