If you remove greed, lust, ambition, negative emotion and fear from the equation, while giving society a set of guidelines, they wouldn't be failures since they would be obedient, tranquil, and intelligent. Some sort of industrialist socialist empire would form and proto-humanity would reach the stars.
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An attitude shift towards what? Consumerism? Capitalism is built off the exploitation and corruption of the human condition, i.e a prison with invisible walls. There will never be a perfect world with the current system. I don't see how communism (see: world peace) would be "un-necessary" either.
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Originally Posted by ImmortalPig
I don't see how socialism or communism are necessary.
Just an attitude shift is all that is needed.
An attitude shift towards what? Consumerism? Capitalism is built off the exploitation and corruption of the human condition, i.e a prison with invisible walls. There will never be a perfect world with the current system. I don't see how communism (see: world peace) would be "un-necessary" either.
Last edited by Zking; Oct 12, 2014 at 10:45 PM.
Reason: <24 hour edit/bump
Originally Posted by Zking
If you remove greed, lust, ambition, negative emotion and fear from the equation, while giving society a set of guidelines, they wouldn't be failures since they would be obedient, tranquil, and intelligent. Some sort of industrialist socialist empire would form and proto-humanity would reach the stars.
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An attitude shift towards what? Consumerism? Capitalism is built off the exploitation and corruption of the human condition, i.e a prison with invisible walls. There will never be a perfect world with the current system. I don't see how communism (see: world peace) would be "un-necessary" either.
Assuming that emotions and motivations are as clear cut as you seem to imply they are (which we cannot prove as of now) and that it's even possible to cull specific emotions without influencing related emotions (lust and love are just varying degrees of attraction), the "remove emotions, insert obedience" reeks of authoritarianism.
I'm all for human augmentation, there's nothing wrong with prosthetics or externalization of human function, but augmentation is not the same as modification. It's one thing to make a better eye, or a better arm, or a faster brain, this is just enhancing that which is already present. But modification is a judgement call on what is superior and inferior, and with something as complicated as our mind, it is ludicrous to make assumptions on what is superior for the advancement of humanity.
And let's not get into theoretical, perfect world arguments if you're not going to apply the same scenario to the other side. In a perfect world, capitalism is the harnessing the resources of society to meet the greatest demands of society and delivering them efficiently to society at little cost because of competition. In practice, attempts at capitalism create a massive imbalance of power between haves and have-nots. In a perfect world, communism is the harnessing of the resources of the society to fulfill the needs of society. In practice, attempts at communism create the same imbalance of power that capitalism creates.
nyan :3
Youtube Channel i sometimes post videos of other games
Youtube Channel i sometimes post videos of other games
Originally Posted by Zking
An attitude shift towards what? Consumerism? Capitalism is built off the exploitation and corruption of the human condition, i.e a prison with invisible walls. There will never be a perfect world with the current system. I don't see how communism (see: world peace) would be "un-necessary" either.
An attitude shift away from technophobia. That's all that is needed.
Originally Posted by Oracle
But modification is a judgement call on what is superior and inferior, and with something as complicated as our mind, it is ludicrous to make assumptions on what is superior for the advancement of humanity.
Sure, people will have to make choices. But you could always augment without losing anything, for example adding a processor or memory without removing a part of your brain.
Originally Posted by Zking
And I think we are already living in a "perfect capitalist world".
Pure capitalism does not exist in the world, not a single country is capitalist.
<Faint> the rules have been stated quite clearly 3 times now from high staff
Originally Posted by Oracle
And if the point of the thread is to just guess at what transhumanism would look like, this might as well be moved to offtopic or closed, because there's no real discussion to be made.
The point as stated in the OP is to discuss ethics and moral beliefs, people went further into theoretics so I had to present the "perfect world" example
Originally Posted by ImmortalPig
An attitude shift away from technophobia. That's all that is needed.
Sure, people will have to make choices. But you could always augment without losing anything, for example adding a processor or memory without removing a part of your brain.
Pure capitalism does not exist in the world, not a single country is capitalist.
1. Exactly.
2. And really all you would lose is your "humanity".
3. I stand corrected, but pure perfect capitalism is a lot more likely to exist than pure communism ever would.
Originally Posted by Zking
If you remove greed, lust, ambition, negative emotion and fear from the equation, while giving society a set of guidelines, they wouldn't be failures since they would be obedient, tranquil, and intelligent. Some sort of industrialist socialist empire would form and proto-humanity would reach the stars.
Sorry to quote something so old, but read the Divergent series.
After reading that if you can still say you believe human society would be perfect without things like greed, ambition, fear and lust; then you didn't understand the book.
These things are a part of what make us human and give us the ability to be sentient and do the things we do.
If we didn't have greed, lust ambition, negativity and fear, we wouldn't be intelligent and tranquil. We would be robots, no emotion, no desire to do what we want, 0 human qualities whatsoever.
