Debunking transhumanism with its reliance on physicality (Critical Notes)

The human nature, controlled in its foundation by an animal (monkey) consciousness, is such that any person, despite the ability to be aware of oneself as a subject of action, is too often unable to overcome own stupid wishes from the point of view of the ordinary arguments.
This is his remarkable property of bringing his desires to the fore with or without understanding their stupidity, together with their promotion no matter what, gives not only the creative finds, but also the opposite of them, which can be expressed in the maxim: if I want, realizing this, then I exist, producing some expansion of Descartes' maxim: I think, therefore I exist, since a person has not gone very far from the monkey, differing from its existence in spontaneous desires only in that he wants as spontaneously, so and he wants, comprehending own wish. It is not necessary to think adequately at the same time, although, of course, it is desirable, but this how it will turn out.
Transhumanism is a clear example of realizing one's own desire to become better in any way and exist completely without troubles, misfortunes, distresses and unnecessary reflections.
Well, how can one not use all the undoubted and even dubious achievements of science and technology for such an improvement of a person so that he stops feeling pain in the form of suffering, illnesses, aging and death, and lives forever, it's really unclear for what, since without suffering this is not realized due to the lack of contrast between them and pleasant sensations.
The absurdity of such approach to a person, which puts his corporeality, but not his consciousness, in the foreground, is obvious, since the very development ofthe human consciousness, which contains not only natural consciousness, but also awareness of oneself as a subject in a hostile environment, thanks to what consciousness is able to develop, what occurs in the struggle with this environment, and this inevitably causes sufferings, and illnesses, and aging, and death, but it does not lead to stagnation, which occurs in other case.
The rest is non-existence, in which everyone hardly wants to stay forever, even if he has suffered greatly in the temporary life given to his body.
However, it is not harmful to want in principle, but it is often quite costly because, for example, transhumanism wants to make this mankind and a person in addition, in fact, eternal not in dreams, but in very specific actions, for which gigantic sums have already been spent completely useless, and will be spending further, since why not to become immortal, if there is a science that seems to offer something interesting in this regard. So, we will plan immortality, no matter what.
But in general, money is a pity, since it could be used with greater benefit for the entire population, and not just for moneybags, especially since not all are fools who defy any arguments.
Therefore, it is worth dwelling in more detail on two problems: the possibility of improving the human body and the possibility of extending the life of this body to infinity, on which modern science is hard at work, though without much success.
However, there is nothing surprising in the manifestation of such stupidity by transhumanists, which include not only many moneybags and government officials who do not believe in God or the devil, but also many scientists, since they should believe solely in the unstoppability of scientific progress.
The bottom line is that they all consider the main occupation to be the case and the result of this case, in which their bodies participate, the derivative of which, as they believe, is consciousness. So, improve the body and there will be case and there will be a result, and consciousness will somehow attach to this, as long as there is life of the body.
Hence, there are exorbitant expenses for various ways of connecting the body with artificial intelligence, as a result of which, as transhumanists believe, not only the superman, which F. Nietzsche dreamed of, will finally be obtained, but the happiness of the eternal existence of mankind will be found in the form of a combination of these perfect people-androids, combining all the advantages of computers, coupled with the Internet and the personal qualities of the body, and these perfections will begin to play by galaxies in the future so just - out of boredom, apparently, because apart from this they will have nothing to do, once the limit of perfection is reached, which, as it seems to many, will eventually result in the transfer of all human properties into digital space and the need for the body will disappear altogether.
You can laugh or scoff at such curiosities as much as you like, but they are quite seriously trying to put them into practice, which can result in a stop in the development of the consciousness of a person and all of humanity and, as a result, their quite natural bodily extinction.
*
The problem of combining the human body with the artificial intelligence is quite solvable in terms of connecting the human body with various amplifiers of its physical capabilities, as well as the possibility of increasing speed in making informed decisions based on connecting its body directly with the artificial intellect, what is already being practiced, for example, to increase efficiency actions of soldiers on the battlefield.
However, all this does not affect the extension of a person's life and the adequacy of the perception of incoming information in relation to the adoption of appropriate decisions, the correctness of which is limited by the mental abilities of a particular person. These abilities lend themselves to strengthening by extraneous means only in the speed of decision-making, but not in their correct assessment.
Moreover, created over time in this kind of a person-android, that is, a person with the artificial intelligence embedded in him, the habit of relying in the selection of significant data from the general information flow on the artificial intelligence reduces the human component of this creature to an application to the corresponding the artificial intelligence program, depriving him of own mind and will, most importantly, of creativity, that is, reducing the level of self-consciousness to an extreme minimum, since all artificial intelligence programs are built on a formal-logical approach, thereby narrowing the consumed information flows to an unacceptable limit.
Therefore, this kind of supposedly improved person in direct combination with the artificial intelligence (human—android) actually loses the ability to develop both his own and in a community with similar subjects.
In other words, quite quickly such form of the perverted beingness loses the ability to exist, since it excludes itself from life for the reason that life is fundamentally illogical. In addition, the artificial intelligence that dominates this creature remains incomprehensible to the principle of operation of the natural consciousness that supports the life of the body, as a result of which the disproportion between the tasks solved by the artificial intelligence and the tasks facing the natural consciousness in this human-android leads to the loss of natural consciousness when any significant error of artificial intelligence and thus the death of the natural body.
Thus, only one brainless frame remains from the human-android - the android, along with the artificial intelligence, which does not know what to do next, and not the superman.
Even more primitive and fatal in relation to the rate of degradation of a person is the idea of moving a person with the help of computer technology into the virtual worlds, where he can change his image, acquire a new virtual body, as if fitting into a different corporality, in order to slip away from reality unacceptable to him at this time.
Here he really moves away from real life, which gives real development, and acquires, in the case of everyday and significant time inclusion in this virtual reality, dystrophy and the imminent death of his own body, which clearly shows which of these two realities is real, despite all the dissatisfaction by it.
*
Since science knows practically nothing about consciousness, which, indeed, is not amenable to any measurements and manifests itself only according to some external signs, insofar as it tries to operate with the bodily parameters and properties of a person, which is completely meaningless, since the body in the absence of consciousness is nothing more than heaps of muscles and bones.
Nevertheless, scientists are trying to change the human genome, with good intentions in mind, aimed at improving the person and extending his life, preferably indefinitely.
It is easy to imagine what their intention to change the genome, which has been created and worked out for millions of years, will lead to, besides they do not really understand how this most complex program works on a protein carrier and they do not admit that it is only an application to consciousness, which uses it for its own development and, along with that, for organizing the work of both each cell of the body and the whole organism as a whole in its environment. That is, outside of consciousness, the genome, no matter how you change it, does not represent anything, and when experimenting with it, when consciousness is connected, it can be compared with a grenade in the hands of a monkey, twisting it.
Paradoxically, but they, actually operating with their consciousness, but not with their body, do not allow into it the thought that the human body is just a temporary tool for the actions of consciousness, and this instrument (the body) for absorbing, transforming and transmission of information cannot but have a limited period of existence, determined by failures in information flows that gradually disrupt the functioning of body cells, as well as determined by the accumulation of information with age in human memory cells, gradually forming a fairly conservative circle of concepts and relationships.
In addition, the neurons of the brain are not replaced during life, unlike most other cells in the body. And their inevitable death due to the accumulation of decay products over time leads to a loss of control over the actions of the body and thereby depriving it of viability.
Therefore, a more or less full-fledged life of a person, as practice has shown, with rare exceptions, is possible only up to the ninth decade.
In other words, any artificial change in the genome can only bring dissonance into the functioning of the human consciousness and nothing more. In addition, any person is not a ram, whose breed can be improved in order to collect more wool from him.
So, such attempt to “expand” a person opens the way for an increase in the number of mental hospitals, but at the same time opens up the opportunity to earn money due to allocating funds for such “promising” researches.
The continuous renewal of the cells of any organism, discovered in the early 50s of the last century, prompted scientists to the possibility of the artificial rejuvenation of the body, as well as the possibility of constantly replacing human cells with new ones with the help of nanotechnology, what supposedly will lead to immortality, but, as it turned out, cellular regeneration does not affect lifespan, since it is determined mainly by cellular DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid in the form of a macromolecule, storing information in the form of a genetic code consisting of a nucleotide sequence that ensures the storage, transmission and implementation of the genetic program for the development and functioning of the living organisms).
Nevertheless, some methods have been identified to control the regeneration of cells in a number of organs of the body, which can help in the treatment of certain diseases, but in the matter of ensuring immortality, this kind of cell renewal has proven to be untenable.
Even more untenable was the idea of the endless replacement of the atoms of a person with new ones, as if atoms determine human life. Here the physicality has ascended to an unthinkable height, despite the absurdity of separating it from consciousness during the life of the body, although it has long been known that by itself consciousness has nothing to do with atoms, and in general it does not belong to the material formations of the world known to us. Therefore, there is no sense in this replacement, and technically it is impossible to do it.
*
However, scientific thought is constantly struggling not only in search of truth, but also in search of a good monetary allowance.
You can live perfectly in the field of the search for immortality, which all the "best" people of our planet, who have everything but him, simply crave.
This sweet word means for them the eternal preservation of everything acquired, which then can be used forever.
Similar view of things borders on pure and unclouded idiocy, but to make such sweet impossible by possible overpowers all the arguments of reason, which is used by scientists, who have long begun to spend heaps of money primarily on themselves, and then on meaningless research on the problem of immortality and, despite this, having offered something to the balbes with bags of money.
But first of all, these cunning people, in the manner of Mulla Khoja Nasreddin, requested a lot of money for preliminary research on such a complex and burning problem for the "best" people, which is not really solvable.
At first, they got down to business so zealously that they gave rise to a number of scientific directions, each of which confidently has determined the causes of aging of organisms, and the most cunning even have suggested, however, theoretically, some ways to get required immortality, close to the implementation, having pointed out along the way that a real resolving problem can be waited in a cryogenic container with good freezing for better bodily preservation.
And the designing of these containers began with the formation of a whole market for storing the bodies of rich idiots, who actually have rested in them forever.
But for the sake of order, let's move on to a brief description of the main scientific approaches to the problem of aging, which for some authors is an excellent basis for suggesting to these rich dreamers of eternal life the idea that by revealing the causes of aging, scientists can try to eliminate them, providing them with immortality.
More detailed information about these and other approaches to the problem of aging can be obtained, if desired, without much difficulty by turning to the Internet.
*
Particular enthusiasm for the real achievement of immortality was caused by the discovery that the terminal sections of chromosomes (a long DNA molecule of a three-dimensional structure containing part or all of the genetic material of an organism) - telomeres - are shorten at each division of a cell, and at a certain moment they shorten so much that the cell can no longer divide and loses viability, having established thereby a link between aging and the telomere shortening.
The subsequent discovery of the telomerase enzyme, which completes the shortened telomeres in germ cells and tumor cells, as it were revealed a way to achieve immortality by ensuring the constant completion of the telomeres, but it immediately turned out that in this case, the “immortal” cells grow into a cancerous tumor.
Further studies have shown that the addition of the high-molecular hyaluronic acid into the human cells slows down the aging process and reduces the risk of cancer, although there is no need to talk about immortality, but it is often possible to fool many people which are far from science, with success.
To date, a number of studies have shown that the aging process is influenced by many processes and phenomena that are almost impossible to get rid of, namely: gene mutation, oxidants, telomere shortening, DNA methylation, protein and DNA glycosylation, genome instability, hormonal imbalance, carcinogenesis, harmful effects of irritants.
It is impossible to exclude any of the mechanisms of aging, since by suppressing one, you can disrupt the other, for example, by suppressing the activity of free radicals, you can disrupt the processes of the cell division.
It should also be noted that the mutations, without which the evolutionary development would not be possible, destroy the organism over time. In particular, they cause aging because they create errors in DNA copying that cannot always be corrected and accumulate over time.
At the same time, over time, the main control organ of the human body, the brain, inevitably fails. Neurons in the brain do not divide and are not replaced. Therefore, the decay products gradually accumulate in them, preventing their normal functioning. In addition, over time, the blood supply to neurons becomes more difficult due to embrittlement or narrowing of the vessels that supply blood to the brain.
But, even if the body does not age for a long enough time, it will still fall out of life or because of such objective external factors as the fatal diseases and injuries, and in any case, a person will quickly lose touch with the environment due to information already accumulated in the memory cells, which creates unchangeable habits that prevent adaptation to an ever-changing environment that carries new risks that a person is unable to cope with, losing the ability to form an adequate logic of his actions, and, as a result, it leads to a violation of contacts with society and an actual drop out of it.
*
That is, the evolutionary course of development of organisms - and man is the same living organism as the rest - dictates the course of events, determined by natural, and for man and artificial selection, occurring in the interaction of each organism with the environment, which contributes to a very specific limitation of the life cycle any individual in favor of procreation of this individual, thereby removing from circulation those organisms that are no longer compatible with the changed environment or are the least capable of adaptation. These organisms either die (are eaten, forced out) in the competition for food and the most favorable conditions of existence, or their life processes decline, and, for example, the salmon that have produced offspring immediately die.
In other words, a changing environment dictates the need for a successive change of organisms, thereby selecting the most “tenacious” ones, which in itself requires a limitation of the life span of any organism for the benefit of the survival of both its offspring and the entire genus.
The same applies to the human race, only artificial selection in accordance with changing social needs is of greater importance to it.
In this regard, even as close as possible to ideal compensation for certain violations in the functioning of the body does not exclude the effects of the environment on a few ageless organisms, who die both by chance and because of the inability to compete with younger and, therefore, more adapted to the environment the organisms of own genus, or they die from the disruption of the functioning of certain organs, in particular, an unfavorable change in their sizes, not allowing to normally eat or breathe, as well as with a significant change in environmental parameters, or from the incurable injuries and enemies.
From the point of view of determining the possibility of functioning of the living objects of beingness in it, it is necessary constantly to update these objects in a changing environment in order to adapt them to it.
The manifestation of this immutable renewal in the system of any organism consists in the replacement of some cells with others with the death of the former, and in the generation of offspring by organisms, similarly, replacing them after the death of their parents.
That is, only the finite life of any organisms ensures the long-term existence of the whole genus, and, therefore, the very manifestation of the infinite life.
*
In addition to the telomeric theory, those wishing for eternal life liked the theory of gene cleaning of cells, the author of which was the British biogerontologist, informatics and mathematician Aubrey de Gray, who developed a strategy for negligible aging using genetic engineering methods.
He categorically stated that in order to achieve almost immortality, it is necessary to eliminate a number of molecular and cellular damage using genetic engineering methods: extracellular debris, intracellular debris, cell loss, mutations in the nucleus and mitochondria, cross-links between polymer molecules, which will ensure the cell non-aging.
He noted that it is possible to create the chromosomal copies of mitochondrial DNA and place them in the cell nucleus, which will replace the damaged own mitochondrial DNA. In addition, he proposed the destruction of "slags" by introducing enzymes that destroy them into the cell.
As a result, he declared, people would stop dying of the natural causes.
It is hard to believe that this "scientist" does not know such elementary truths as the fact that similar “treatment” of the aging of the body, that is, interference in the fine work of the genome and intracellular mechanisms, and they have been debugged for tens and hundreds of millions of years by the natural selection in a particular environment and for a specific type of organisms, which has been gained so far only about one and a half a dozen of the entire plenty earth organisms, in particular, some species of sharks, whales, turtles, mollusks, jellyfish, as well as lobsters, sea urchins, hydras, holothurians, the vegetative form of planaria (worms), for humans turns out ineffective due to a significant lead in the development of their brain in comparison with the control centers of all other living beings, which in non-aging organisms, as it can be seen from their list, are rather primitive, because they are intended for the simplest instinctive-reflex functioning under unchanged conditions.
The human control center contains 11-19 billion neurons of the cortex of the human brain and 150 billion of all neurons of the human body, which operate on the principle of distribution and transformation of information through the entire life of a person through emerging and disappearing connections- a kind of update impulses - between neurons that are not programmed and cannot be modeled, and the number of which over a given time interval can be many times greater than the neurons themselves.
The accumulation with age of inevitable disturbances in the functioning of brain cells (Alzheimer's disease and Pick's disease), which usually occurs after 65 years and increases toward 80 years, leads to the death of some neurons and the corresponding loss of individual synaptic connections (atrophy of the cerebral cortex and subcortical formations), and this means memory loss or the development of dementia in one form or another.
Compensating for such disturbances in the cells of the cerebral cortex, in contrast to disturbances in the functioning of the cells of the simplest organisms, is almost impossible due to the too complex mechanisms of the combined functioning of neurons that appeared during the more than two-million-year period of hominid brain development.
Besides, experience and human habits cannot be eliminated or compensated by any means.
*
Of course, not all authors of hypotheses identifying the causes of aging are unscrupulous. Therefore, these authors do not claim to know how to eliminate the phenomena that they assume cause aging.
For example, such a hypothesis is the consideration coming from the followers of the molecular genetic theory that aging is the result of the accumulation of random mutations that lead to errors in the system of storage and transmission of the genetic information.
All stochastic theories are similar to that mentioned above, that is, fruitless in terms of ways to eliminate random mutations in chromosomes, errors in DNA copying during cell division, and wear and tear of DNA repair mechanisms that the authors explain aging.
*
In conclusion, it should be noted that the very emergence of transhumanism and similar approaches to human society means not so much the stupidity or bad faith of a significant part of intellectuals, insofar the degradation of this creative, that is, the leading part of society in relation to the creation of a new by the aspiration not to the heights of human thought, but the intention to acquire additional significance in the eyes of society, acquire capital and live for their own individual pleasure, ahead of the dreams of transhumanists about the onset of universal pleasure, that more and more makes them more related to the behavior of the primates, and the society itself deprives the creative power, reducing it to a miserable vegetative state of stagnation that cannot last forever.