When I was five years old, it occurred to me that I might die someday. So I asked my parents if that was true. Mom kneeled down, held my shoulders, and said something like:
Oh, no, sweetheart. Everyone thinks everyone will die someday because they all get old. But we’ll fix aging before you get old. And if we’re wrong, we’ll just bring you back, because we love you.
It turned out my family was working on signing the whole family up for cryonics. They had books by the likes of Ettinger and Drexler filling their bookshelves. If I had a family religion, the glorious transhumanist timeline was it.
I’ve been finding myself wanting to talk more about this difference in general. I keep feeling like 21st century transhumanists don’t understand what the movement was. It was “trans” in the sense of “transcend and include”, not “go beyond and leave behind”. We were talking about things like reinforcing bones with diamond-like fiber placed there by nanobots, and delivering oxygen 20x more efficiently with little machines in our blood, so we’d be able to outrun modern cars and hold our breath at the bottom of a pool for an hour. And that was just the beginning — the simplest and most trivial applications of a growing mastery of reality.
I used to sign people up for cryonics with a degree of shared trust that if nothing else worked to stave off permanent death, this one would. There’s something utterly beautiful, that I have literally never seen in the rationality community, where a profound weight (what I came to call “the mantle of mortality”) would lift. People have no clue how heavily their expected eventual death weighs down on them. It’s truly beautiful to watch someone become free of it. It’s a type of relief folk have no comparison for as far as I can tell.
I took on that weight in October 2014. I’d held it and examined it when I was five, but I actually put the damn thing on last decade. Sort of an inverse karmic effect I suppose: I now vividly understand on the inside what subjective kindness I’d given others by its loss in myself.
I think the newer generations don’t understand what was lost with this doom-saturated approach to the future. It’s not just that AI could wipe us all out. It’s that hope and beauty are extremely hard to see from here, which makes focusing on something other than doom very, very hard. I experience it as a quality of building sandcastles on a sinkhole. Everything collapses eventually.
Having grown up a kind of immortal, there’s still a core of me that has unshakeable hope. And even with reflection today, that hope does not strike me as naïve. I remember at around age seven, when I came to understand what the deathist trance was, I vowed to myself:
If the answer ever appears to be that I should let myself die, just assume I’ve made an error in thinking. Death is never the answer.
By my read, folk raised mortal give up far, far too early. I don’t know what it is. It’s like despair is some kind of relief they want to collapse into. Like treating death as a kind of falling asleep, like it’s a rest, and maybe things will be better because Mom or Dad will fix it in the night. Or existence stops and that’s somehow relieving. I’m guessing; I don’t really understand the rationale. It looks to me like the individual human version of apoptosis.
Where I feel despair is at the level of collective action. Even now, I look around the LW-adjacent AI safety community with frustration and some exhaustion at the mortal sentiment that wants to express sorrow and grief and a kind of “Well, I guess we keep fighting against doom… but guys, I think we’ve lost.” It seems to me that this is the same apoptosis.
Death is never the answer. Grieving for our lost future before it’s determined strikes me as highly unwise.
But the death trance is far too strong, and I don’t see how to shake it, even in this subculture devoted to truth. The infection has successfully camouflaged itself as good epistemology. Reason, when pointed at the predicament, warps systematically to become arguments of hopelessness and despair. It was like that back in 2012, and possibly earlier, but it has metastasized and dominated the culture.
I have tried to push against this trance. But I don’t know what I’m doing, and I haven’t learned how to defeat it the way I’ve been trying, and now I’m tired.
I miss the innocence of anticipating the glorious future. Even calling it “transhumanist” feels strange, like a child talking about adulthood as “trans-child”. It once felt inevitable, and beautiful, and I watched as it became slowly more shared.
I dearly wish the culture here would loosen their fixation on “Don’t hit the doom tree!” and target something positive as an alternative. What does success look like? What vision can we call ourselves and humanity into?
There are yet still such visions. But first the collective needs to stop seeking to die. And I’ve lost faith that it will let its fixation go.
Now I think it would be great to make some kind of compilation of transhumanist reflections on the current timeline—laments including, yes, but also like you said—visions of the future, what we may have if we change our course.
Some folk on TPOT have been trying to compile positive visions of the future. I think there’s a book published of short stories of exactly that. In part meant to combat the hyperstitioning of doom by hyperstitioning something positive. I don’t recall the book’s name though.
I resonate so very strongly with this.
When I was five years old, it occurred to me that I might die someday. So I asked my parents if that was true. Mom kneeled down, held my shoulders, and said something like:
It turned out my family was working on signing the whole family up for cryonics. They had books by the likes of Ettinger and Drexler filling their bookshelves. If I had a family religion, the glorious transhumanist timeline was it.
I’ve been finding myself wanting to talk more about this difference in general. I keep feeling like 21st century transhumanists don’t understand what the movement was. It was “trans” in the sense of “transcend and include”, not “go beyond and leave behind”. We were talking about things like reinforcing bones with diamond-like fiber placed there by nanobots, and delivering oxygen 20x more efficiently with little machines in our blood, so we’d be able to outrun modern cars and hold our breath at the bottom of a pool for an hour. And that was just the beginning — the simplest and most trivial applications of a growing mastery of reality.
I used to sign people up for cryonics with a degree of shared trust that if nothing else worked to stave off permanent death, this one would. There’s something utterly beautiful, that I have literally never seen in the rationality community, where a profound weight (what I came to call “the mantle of mortality”) would lift. People have no clue how heavily their expected eventual death weighs down on them. It’s truly beautiful to watch someone become free of it. It’s a type of relief folk have no comparison for as far as I can tell.
I took on that weight in October 2014. I’d held it and examined it when I was five, but I actually put the damn thing on last decade. Sort of an inverse karmic effect I suppose: I now vividly understand on the inside what subjective kindness I’d given others by its loss in myself.
I think the newer generations don’t understand what was lost with this doom-saturated approach to the future. It’s not just that AI could wipe us all out. It’s that hope and beauty are extremely hard to see from here, which makes focusing on something other than doom very, very hard. I experience it as a quality of building sandcastles on a sinkhole. Everything collapses eventually.
Having grown up a kind of immortal, there’s still a core of me that has unshakeable hope. And even with reflection today, that hope does not strike me as naïve. I remember at around age seven, when I came to understand what the deathist trance was, I vowed to myself:
By my read, folk raised mortal give up far, far too early. I don’t know what it is. It’s like despair is some kind of relief they want to collapse into. Like treating death as a kind of falling asleep, like it’s a rest, and maybe things will be better because Mom or Dad will fix it in the night. Or existence stops and that’s somehow relieving. I’m guessing; I don’t really understand the rationale. It looks to me like the individual human version of apoptosis.
Where I feel despair is at the level of collective action. Even now, I look around the LW-adjacent AI safety community with frustration and some exhaustion at the mortal sentiment that wants to express sorrow and grief and a kind of “Well, I guess we keep fighting against doom… but guys, I think we’ve lost.” It seems to me that this is the same apoptosis.
Death is never the answer. Grieving for our lost future before it’s determined strikes me as highly unwise.
But the death trance is far too strong, and I don’t see how to shake it, even in this subculture devoted to truth. The infection has successfully camouflaged itself as good epistemology. Reason, when pointed at the predicament, warps systematically to become arguments of hopelessness and despair. It was like that back in 2012, and possibly earlier, but it has metastasized and dominated the culture.
I have tried to push against this trance. But I don’t know what I’m doing, and I haven’t learned how to defeat it the way I’ve been trying, and now I’m tired.
I miss the innocence of anticipating the glorious future. Even calling it “transhumanist” feels strange, like a child talking about adulthood as “trans-child”. It once felt inevitable, and beautiful, and I watched as it became slowly more shared.
I dearly wish the culture here would loosen their fixation on “Don’t hit the doom tree!” and target something positive as an alternative. What does success look like? What vision can we call ourselves and humanity into?
There are yet still such visions. But first the collective needs to stop seeking to die. And I’ve lost faith that it will let its fixation go.
I miss the promise of the stars.
That is a beautiful piece!
Now I think it would be great to make some kind of compilation of transhumanist reflections on the current timeline—laments including, yes, but also like you said—visions of the future, what we may have if we change our course.
Thank you. And yes, that would be lovely to see.
Some folk on TPOT have been trying to compile positive visions of the future. I think there’s a book published of short stories of exactly that. In part meant to combat the hyperstitioning of doom by hyperstitioning something positive. I don’t recall the book’s name though.