I became acquainted with the concept of hyperhumanism as such when I first met an Illuminati (yes, they sort of exist) and managed to make good friends with him, mostly because we both (used to) think that humans are stuck in some sort of loop that stops it from becoming a better version of itself, but it had potential.
Many things come to mind… the sons of the seventh sun of the Mayan Popol Vuh tome, Pythgoras tself and the Egyptians, “becoming” instead of “being”, posthumans (like cyborgs and such); this leads me to imagining a very achievable utopia in which simple actions lead to great solutions, and everybody can live happily with enough resources to live with dignity.
…as a philosopher, I became concerned with how humanity evolved, because thanks to my illuminated friend, I got to realize that one cannot evolve individually towards apotheosis, but rather has to grow individually to thrive into it’s community, and thus evolve it. I became what I proposed and got into action to set an example.
For sure, things got started and I got involved into politics, working with other neighbors into – literally – working for our community to make it better. We started into security issues by chasing criminals and working closely with the police, also improving the green areas and protecting some trees that were going to be cut down, and from there on things improved, we had an actual group with neighbors that supported the actions.
If was a different
type of person, I promise I could have tricked people into creating a
new political party and launch from there, getting even more involved
in politics and earning my income from there, but alas, a philosopher
I am, and a philosopher I will be… I chose to implement a new model
of doing things: providing the options and let people choose.
I
still don’t know if this is a good or a bad idea, and my best pick
is to think that in some cases it can be a great idea, but when
dealing with politics, telling anyone what you are going to do is a
terrible choice. Kids tell what they are doing, old folks what they
did, and idiots what they will do…
…but it’s kind of difficult to work to improve a community without the community even knowing, right? But why would you like to keep people away from projects like these? Well, you can be surrounded by geniuses, but it only takes one idiot to spoil a project…
If only one idiot gets to listen, it takes minutes to make the other idiots come and overwhelm your project with obstacles, out of place questions, and in general make your project stop.
After this actual experience, many others and years of keen observation, I have been thoroughly convinced that humans suck at being whatever they think that a human is. People are not congruent and obviously it has taken many years, but the establishment has achieved it: they managed to have a bunch of idiots taking superficial input as a complete and deep analysis, thus making them easy to control.
Yes, I know this
sounds like a conspiratorial theory, but far from that, it has become
reality. Just give it a minute and think, how much does media (TV /
Internet) influence people’s opinion? That simple exercise should
let you WATCH in your very same facebook or twitter timeline the kind
of manipulation that media can have, and that is only one channel of
influence, and we have plenty of them, which share the same mistake,
not taking critical thinking into account.
When critical
thinking became a thing in the end of the 90s, I thought that we were
going into an age of enlightenment, with all this “information
highway” bs that they used to promote the internet, and the trend
became clear, we were going to have knowledgeable and very informed
societies, but rather than that, we got stuck into becoming
consumers, plugged into the feed,
an ever connected stimuli that holds our attention while extracting
something from us – currently it is only money, proof of work,
stolen CPU cycles and big data chowder.
By being connected into this feed, we became passive, and entered what could be a “matrix” analogy: from our biological perception to our consciousness, we are occupying our minds mostly with input from the feed, which we have some sort of control over, but can’t actually define what it’s going to show up, because it’s fed by other humans, as well, which makes it unpredictable.
This feed makes us idiots, and yes, while it also provides us valuable information, it’s mostly made up of garbage content: cheater shows, narco TV shows, action movies made up of mostly violence, with quick cuts to leave no space for thought, etc. It all runs under the same goal: making money out of it.
By feeding the right stuff into the feed, content creators that work for international companies can easily change the perception of the masses, and thus colonizing their thoughts into buying this, getting that or voting for it. Emotion became the key for this handling, and the only obstacle for emotion is reason.
The amigdala holds the key into manipulating through emotion, as it’s directly responsible for emotional memory. By giving it new information mixed with info that takes the audience back to some pleasant memory, the amigdala either approves or rejects new data through emotion. This makes up for first tier decision making, mostly intuitive and empirical.
Superficial beings which need to be manipulated less need just to satisfy this emotional filter into making a decision, while a more complex human will take this into the rational side. By being rational, a person can pick between an empiric or heuristic approach to problem solving, and if it uses it’s frontopolar cortex correctly, it can even create a creative whole new solution.
Rounding it up a bit, media made us idiots, easy to handle idiots. This feed became the actual matrix which holds our attention and consciousness, making us prisoners into a digital panopticon, but there’s also the extra-digital effect on our societies, as the actions derived from the thoughts imposed by these artifacts make up for more animal or beastly attitudes from humans, and it’s easy to understand why:
People are manipulated emotionally, they are subject to a feed that greatly overstimulates human beings thus rendering them ineffective to both distinguish their own metareality to reality itself, making them unaware of their own potential, leading them into doing whatever they choose to by setting a desirable (and fictional) example on the media.
By not becoming aware of their emotions and not knowing how to deal with them, persons are easy targets for media neurohacking, and by overstimulating at a very fast rate, they make the brain’s mechanisms that allow for deep thought totally ineffective, as the human brains holds some limits on how much information it can process. If we allow humanity to go on like this, we’re doomed to having the next generations working with less cognitive functions that today, because we’re trading our own brain skills for those online, but that is another topic.
People can’t take a long phrase ina conversation because we have become a fast-food thought generation, which tries to consider things so superficially fast and need so much of our time that we can’t spare a couple of seconds to actually listen and try to understand an argument.
There’s no much empathy, and summed up with arrogance, we built cities full of people who strive to be right, rather than accepting new information and learn, allowing them to grow. I find this not only primitive and in bad taste, but also retrogressive, as it makes humans take superficial decisions, even over stuff that will affect the rest of our lives.
In overall, we could say that our matrix consists of a humanity plugged in by means of gadgets and fed stimuli to manipulate our emotions into giving our thoughts, attention and efforts into satisfying a standard lifestyle model imposed by some companies whose only target is to sell more.
Well, so all this explanation is needed to understand why we’re facing an imminent social decay, which will eventually lead to a hostile and unfair world. Let’s think for a minute on that video in which there’s a small lady shopping something over the counter of a 24/7 store, and a big, strong, arrogant and very hostile guy approaches here and tries to step ahead of her to pay for his beers. He tries to impress the lady with very violent gorilla-like movements. When coming out of the store, the big guy approaches her with an attitude, like if he was going to punch here, until she takes out this gun from her bra and the guy runs away, as quick as a fox…
I think this example could describe part of how our society is devolving. A society based on information should know that there’s a line on every store or service office, and you have to wait your turn, but the need for time and the possibility of oppressing others became more important because control and submission release a ton of dopamine, which happens to be very addictive. This leads to an “R-complex” mindset, in which domination becomes the goal to achieve in order to get a new dose of dopamine; I dare to say that violence is addictive thanks to this endogenous drug.
The number of people who are more interested into going to the museum to appreciate some art over choosing a fast action paced movie and a couple of beers is diminishing. People prefer to be entertained rather than educated, because we need the stimulus. Just think, a person who gets into superhero character while in the movies and develops am emotional link to it shares the success as well, thus releasing dopamine by watching how his own personification on the screen cracks a skull or two, dominating the enemy by means of violence.
…and that’s how we want better humans?
When cyborgs began to appear, probably many of us became excited and wanted to became one. As for myself, I tend to think that some devices should be temporary orthopedics in order to allow brain and body to learn the new skills the enhancement provides, and then releasing it. Probably cyborgs are the first real post-humans in the world, but I tend to think of evolved persons who are sustaining an individual growth and pouring them into their communities as post-humans, as well.
By meeting our first transhumans, some of us realized that humanity now had the possibility of real evolution by means of technology, and we do have it, but we still have a ton of obstacles to even DESERVE that right.
Humanity is as rotten as it could be… we don’t deserve the right to the eternal living that the transhuman singularity has to offer… do you really want to extend a period of ignorance, arrogance and violence? I could bet that the only humans who deserve to live forever won’t probably want to do so, because they probably got where they are by understanding life itself.
So, can technology really make us better humans? I don’t know yet… I’m pretty sure that it could be so, if only humans were more interested in their own growth rather than being entertained, sadly enough, the trend proves stupidity is winning the race.
When I got into hyperhumanism I met it from the occultism side, and then learned it on the empirical side by working on myself and meeting other post-humans, and then I realized transhumans exist and understood even more, but whenever I look around and see a big mass of people acting irrationally it frankly turns me down. Also trying to interact with humans is so frustrating, because they don’t want to talk or debate, they want to win, even if there’s no contest, even if you’re just talking about music, or poverty or whatever. Few humans can hold a conversation without competition.
So, there’s a bunch of Post/TransHumans, and the rest is full of common humans with the potential, but not even the least of will to flip around and grow into a posthuman, and we have to take into account that some of those posthumans are working to keep humans prisoners, what possibility do we have to provide an option for humanity that will allow it to be more empathic, informed, critical and rational?
I personally don’t think that a stupid person can be empathic, as it takes some intelligence for love.
How
can I place myself in your shoes if I don’t care about you or your
opinion? If there’s no space for debate, how can we achieve an
agreement? So, we can’t
achieve a posthuman state if humans are not willing to understand
that we’re all a social fabric, and yes, it does affect us in
America (the continent) whatever happens to a poor individual in
Shanghai… understanding fractal math and chaos theory makes one
think that there’s a true connection between individuals, and it
doesn’t matter how far apart they are, everyone affects each
other.
Think for a second about gravity… all the
universe is slowly expanding and keeping some order because of it.
The same way the moon is affected by earth’s gravity, the earth is
affected by the sun’s gravity, and the sun affected by the gravity
of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole located into the middle
of the milky way, the galaxy in which we are located.
We could make a somewhat cheap analogy with a superstar that casually walks into a mall… just like a Higgs bosson, it will attract persons with less “mass” (or fame, as the analogy obliges), probably even causing some troubles for people unaffected by this presence. Everything in the universe affects us, and obviously what affects us more is the people who surrounds us, and then our community, and the city and country we live in; we can do affect our surroundings.
But, the point is that humans are becoming trash, and we’re getting far from the possibility of hyperhumanism, which seriously speaking, is a great ‘ideology’ to pursue, as it implies plenty of cool stuff and evolution to a point where we could achieve an utopia in which everyone could happily live with dignity.
…but does humanity deserve this utopia? I used to thought that it deserved it, but I insist, after plenty of observation, I realize that humanity not only does not deserve this, but also is not ready for living with dignity. It’s easier to let your actions flow under the “minimal effort” mindset, but it has gotten ridiculous.
From malicious Indian phone scamming companies to Nigerian Sakawa boys schemes, from government corruption to resources extraction like fracking, which actually disrupts a lot, we’re subject to trying to survive being hit as less as possible, leaving no place for organization and thus achieving a next state of humanity, where we’re no longer slaves of our own status quo, and where we’re free to work for whatever we want to achieve as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.
Yes, it’s sad, but now I’m convinced that we can’t fight for the masses, and that people probably won’t get it until they see their own lives profoundly affected. This is the only way that people can react, otherwise, they’re too busy being entertained all day rather than working on his own growth. With people like this, we’re very far from being able to push all humanity into a state of neo-rennaisance, instead we’re devolving into a neo-oscurantism, where people are more interested in proving they’re right rather than learning.
So, is it really worth working for a few chosen ones who can actually understand our work? Should we share our researches and technologies to people who don’t deserve it, or are too primitive to use it properly? Are we working for future generations that will certainly appreciate some more of our work in more profound ways?
Let’s think again for a second… is humanity worth all our trouble? aren’t we then working to extend the lifespan of a species designed to fail? Why do we allow humanity to extend itself if we’re actually managing to extend evil? Isn’t it mostly the same as caring for a fighting bull that will end up dead anyways, just satisfying the needs for the morbid and the sick/mad?
Please, tell me… is humanity worth the effort?