HUMANITY and TRANSHUMANITY, meeting 1 (out of 3)

the cast

A Visit from an Old Lady

are xenopsychology and xenosociology reasonable undertakings? feasible?

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human sociological universals

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organizations, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art. divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing. family feasting, firemaking, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.

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insect sociological universals (possible)

Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste determinism, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, firemaking, food taboos, gift-giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals, hospitality, hosing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care, law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, solder castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weather control . . . and still other activities so alien as to make mere description by our language difficult.

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computational xenosociology

"the models Octopus and Conquistador brought me uncontrollable laughter, with their jokelike primitivism, while the model New Air, despite its appearing to be less than totally trivial, is also devoid of any serious argumentation. Eight models! Eighteen development engineers, among whom are such shining stars as Karibanov, Yasuda, and Mikich! Damn it, you should expect something more significant!"

sci fact: agent-based modeling

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Monocosm

"Any intelligence — technological, Rousseauist, or even a heron's — in the process of evolution first travels the path from the state of maximal separation (savagery, mutual hostility, crude emotions, mistrust) to a state of maximal unification while still retaining individuality (friendliness, high culture of relationships, altruism, disdain for success).

This process is governed by biological, biosocial, and specifically social laws. It is well studied and is of interest go us here only insofar as it brings us to the question: what next?"

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prognosis

"First: mankind's stepping onto the path of evolution of the second order means the practical transformation of Homo sapiens into Wanderers.

Second: most likely; far from every Homo Sapiens is suitable for such transformation.

Summary:

My dear Kammerer, as a sociopsychological experiment I offer you this situation, not without innovation, for analysis."

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what are you reading, Prince?

"I am a practicing psychologist. When I am dealing with a person, I can say without false modesty that I feel his spiritual state at every moment, the direction of his thoughts, and I'm quite good at predicting his actions. However, if I were asked to explain how I do it, and on top of that asked to draw or explain in words the image — that is created in my mind, I would find myself in a very difficult position. Like every practicing psychologist, I would be forced to turn to analogies from the world of art or literature. I would refer to the characters of Shakespeare, or Strogov, or Michelangelo, or Johann Sourd."

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eye of the needle

the Penguin syndrome

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eye of the needle (2)

fukamization and fukamiphobia

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eye of the needle (3)

"monsters" in Little Pesha

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Institute of Eccentrics

"a branch of the Institute of Metapsychic Research. They study the limits and beyond the limits of the human psyche. It's chock full of weird people."

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an "eccentric"

"A modest, very shy and sad woman. She has a unique and still unexplained ability. (They haven't even given this ability a scientific name yet.) If you set a clearly formulated problem that she can understand before her, she begins to solve it passionately and with pleasure, but as a result, completely beyond her control, obtains the answer to another problem, which has absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand and which, as a rule, is beyond her professional interests. The posed problem acts as a catalyst on her consciousness to solve another problem, which she either glanced at in some popular scientific journal or accidentally overheard in the conversation of specialists. It is impossible to determine ahead of time which problem she will solve; there is something like the Classic Uncertainty principle in physics at work here."

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an "eccentric"

"A modest, very shy and sad woman. She has a unique and still unexplained ability. (They haven't even given this ability a scientific name yet.) If you set a clearly formulated problem that she can understand before her, she begins to solve it passionately and with pleasure, but as a result, completely beyond her control, obtains the answer to another problem, which has absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand and which, as a rule, is beyond her professional interests. The posed problem acts as a catalyst on her consciousness to solve another problem, which she either glanced at in some popular scientific journal or accidentally overheard in the conversation of specialists. It is impossible to determine ahead of time which problem she will solve; there is something like the Classic Uncertainty principle in physics at work here."

Unicycling Helps Your French: Spontaneous Recovery of Associations by Learning Unrelated Tasks

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"Why, when you were changing the course of history in other worlds that was all right, but when someone wants to change your history... Today, every child knows that super-reason is always good!"

"Super-reason is supergood," Toivo said.

"Well, all the more, then!"

"No," Toivo said. "Not all the more. We know what good is, though not very firmly. But as for supergood —"

Asya struck her knees with her fists again.

"I don't understand! I can't understand this! Where do you get all this presumption of a threat? Tell me. Explain it!"

"None of you understands the premise here," Toivo said, angry now. "No one thinks that the Wanderers are planning to do evil to earthlings. That is really very unlikely. We're afraid of something else altogether. We're afraid that they'll start doing good here, as they understand it!"

"Good is always good!" Asya said.

"You know perfectly well that that isn't so."

good is always good

"You know perfectly well that that isn't so. Or maybe you really don't know? But I've explained it to you. I was a Progressor for only three years; I brought good, only good, nothing but good, and Lord, how they hated me, those people! And they were right. Because the gods had come without asking permission. No one had called them in, and there they were, doing good. The good that is always good. And they were doing it secretly, because they know that mortals would not understand their aims, and if they did understand them, they wouldn't accept them... That's the moral and ethical structure of that damn situation!"

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"That's why I don't like these conversations about Wanderers, and never have! They always end up with this terrified babble from detective novels! When will you realize that these things are mutually exclusive...

Either the Wanderers are a supercivilization, and then they don't give a fig for us, they are creatures with a different history, different interests, they don't bother with Progressorism, and in general in the whole universe only humanity has Progressors, because our history is like that, because we weep over our past... We can't change it and we strive to at least help others, since we managed to help ourselves in time... That's where our Progressorism comes from!

And the Wanderers, even if their past did resemble ours, are so far from it now that they don't even remember it, just as we don't remember the sufferings of the first hominid struggling to turn a stone into an ax..."

He was silent. "It is just as ridiculous for a supercivilization to have Progressors as it would be for us to open courses to prepare village deacons..."

"What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?" (from Xenopsychology, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Analog 104:41-53, April 1983)

the Great Revelation

KOMOV: One one-hundred-thousandth... that's not so little when translated to our billions. So, it means a schism?

LOGOVENKO: Yes. And that's why it was secret. Don't get me wrong. Ninety percent of Ludens are totally uninterested in the fate of humanity or in humanity. But there is a group of those like me. We do not want to forget that we are flesh of our flesh and that we have one homeland, and for many years we have been working on how to soften the consequences of the inevitable schism... For it looks as if humanity is being divided into a higher and a lower race. What could be more revolting? Of course, the analogy is superficial and at its root incorrect, but you can't avoid the feeling of humiliation at the thought that one of you has gone far beyond the limits that are impassable for a hundred thousand. And that one can never lose the guilt over it. And incidentally, the worst part is that this schism goes through families, through friendships...

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an opposite view: vertical progress

"Well, here it is, vertical progress! In the purest form! Humanity, spread out on the flowering plain beneath the clear skies, has made a surge upward. Of course, not the whole crowd, but why does that upset you so? It's always been that way. And always will, probably... Humanity always went into the future with the shoots of its best representatives."

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the choice

KAMMERER: Afraid?

GLUMOV: I don't know. I just don't want to. I'm a human, and I don't want to be anything else. I don't want to look down at you I don't want people I respect and love to seem like children to me. I know that you're hoping that the human will remain in me... Maybe you even have reason for hoping. But I don't want to take the risk. I don't.

[cf. PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]

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an aside on ethics

"Of all possible choices, always pick the kindest"

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the genetics of genius

"Since each individual produced by the sexual process contains a unique set of genes, very exceptional combinations of genes are unlikely to appear twice even within the same family. So if genius is to any extent hereditary, it winks on and off through the gene pool in a way that would be difficult to measure or predict. Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up to the top of the hill only to have it tumble down again, the human gene pool creates hereditary genius in many ways in many places only to have it come apart in the next generation." — E. O. Wilson, 1978

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focus

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from Long-Legged Fly by William Butler Yeats 
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

his mind moves upon silence

consider Archimedes of Syracuse...

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supplementary material