JCorvinus @JCorvinus@schelling.pt

Transhumanism has long been pitched as 'the philosophy of the future,' with proponents wondering when they will get a chance to use radical technology directly upon themselves.

In my article, I propose that Virtual Reality will be where the rubber finally meets the road, and the challenges involved in delivering an ideal VR experience lead directly into body-modifying biotechnologies like BCI

https://arvrjourney.com/how-vr-could-bring-transhumanism-to-the-masses-553cb0a0e14e

This does seem like the kind of task that AI *should* be uniquely suited to, but the problem is that for that you need an extraordinary amount of data - the problem more or less needs to be solved already, which defeats the point. Once built though... parametric perturbation and coming up with good/bad values for each generated variation would let you make AI models that iteratively feel better than the human bootstrapped one

Most VR input right now is, in the most complicated, a series of linear curve mappings. Pull the trigger inwards and the value goes from 0 to 1. Put a finger near the button and the glow does the same lerp, maybe with an easing curve. Connecting them together is the next step

Thinking of multimodal VR input as a giant manifold the user's attention flows across where valleys smoothly embrace inputs as the benefit limit of one ends and the other begins. One could probably build this manually if they were obsessively single-minded enough.

Hello again friends! Sorry I've been away for so long. Does anyone have any interesting information about social systems design? To be more specific: how spaces influence group and individual behavior, and how rulesets, discovery, and user matching influence group behavior (like on social media sites)?

Trying to drop Disney IP into an AI art model to poison the data set and get IP lawyers into the fight is small potatoes

Some day an angry artist is going to find a way to get ITAR protected data into an art gen model and then shit is really gonna go down

One thing I find amusing is how the great defender of liberal democracy, Fukuyama, called transhumanism 'the world's most dangerous idea' despite the fact that, in its initial conditions at least, transhumanism imported so very heavily from liberal humanism. Given how near total pluralism flows from transhumanism, almost necessarily, it might be the most liberal idea in existence

One thing that really struck me while watching the monkeys use BCI in the neuralink presentation is that animal uplifting is going to be enabled _purely as a result_ of testing & development of this tech. Imagine being able to put a voice box on a crow or dolphin eventually

Thankful for all my internet friends
I hope it's nice and comfy inside the glowing rectangle

Happy thanksgiving!

anyways, as is glaringly obvious: all my homies are body freedom maxis

I think there's a schism forming in transhumanism that, by 2030, will be obvious to everyone. It'll be similar to classic vs modern liberalism, with classic transhumanists being the grinder/diybio/body freedom maxis, and modern being the WEF/Davos/AI Safety types. They'll both agree that radical tech can improve the human condition, but the modern branch will be willing to embrace totalitarianism in order to (as they argue) prevent global catastrophe.

Anyways, go forth and abolish suffering it'll be fuckin lit

2 reasons for this:
I know that the brain abhors a steady state, and 'keeping your finger on the button' will eventually result in downregulation
&
given the richness of everything I've experienced, in both sober and altered states, the idea of a 'single' pleasure state is just... completely wrong. There's 'firing on all cylinders' euphoria as well as 'melty warm blissful' euphoria at a very minimum

To do some utilitarianism for a bit: there's this really common idea that you can't ever abolish suffering without losing something, but I think this is misguided. I feel there's a cluster of positive-valence states that are roughly equal in value that can be cycled through, some of which entail zen-flow productivity, & any superwellbeing maximizer will optimally explore this space without ever getting caught in the dreaded 'pleasure trap,' and without ever having to fall into negative states