An interesting dialogue at BHTV abot transhumanism between cishumanist Massimo Pigliucci and transhumanist Mike Treder. Pigliucci is among other things blogging at Rationally Speaking. This BHTV dialogue is partly as a follow-up to Pigliucci’s earlier blog-post the problems with transhumanism . As I (tonyf, July 16, 2009 8:29 PM) commented then, despite the title of his blog-post, it was more of a (I think) misleading generalisation from an article by some Munkittrick than by an actual study of the “transhumanist” community that was the basis for Pigliuccci’s then rather sweeping criticism. The present BHTV dialogue was in a rather different tone, and it seemed Pigliucci and Treder understood each others rather well. (As for now I do not see any mentioning of the dialogue on Rationally Speaking, it would be interesting to see if he will make any further comment.)
I have not time to comment the dialogue in detail. But I say that both Pigliucci and Treder did not distinguish between consciousness and intelligence. Pigiliucci pointed very clearly out that the concept of “mind uploading” suppose the “computational hypothesis of consciousness” to be true, but (at least from an materialistic point of view) it is not at all clear why it should be true. But from that he tacitly draw the conclusion (it seemed to me at last after a single view of the dialogue) that also [general] intelligence is depending on that assumption. Which I cannot see how it should. Is not the connection (or not) betwen consciouness and intelligence a so-far open question?
This is a standard semiclassical motivation as to why gravitons most probably exist (I think from Steven Weinberg “gravitation and cosmology” but I have since long lost the book so I am not sure): In the limit of weak gravitation GR looks similar to the Maxwell equations. In particular there should exist gravitational waves.. (Have not yet been detected experimentally but if GR is (at least approximately) correct they should exist.) This means that you could in principle build a gravitational wave microscope. Say you want to measure the position of a test particle using this microscope. Now if gravitational waves were actually classical you could use arbitrarily feeble waves and thus arbitrarily small recoil on the test particle. And thus measuring position and momentum of the test particle with lower unaccuracy of position times momentum (along a given direction) than allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. But if gravitational waves are quantized in gravitons of energy = h times oscillation frequency Heisenberg uncertainty relation will be satisfied (Heisenberg’s original semiclassical derivation goes through for any wave quantised like this).