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tamarStates of the Union
“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” —Walt WhitmanFL Gazing down nereids I, absent on some swelling shore, From above again by the soft distance? Up do they look? Thin-bronze latino familias, their silken hair and linen, Wool and Tassels Yahwe- Sun so bright so-can’t be seen, diadems, Heavenly host, etc Dissipates. The best of the orients skyscrapers almost Lush pave...
tamarToward a Healthy Transhumanism (Part I): Reproductive Transhumanism
“Our body must be our work” —Nikolai FedorovTo readjust man’s current course toward what can be called the “transhuman”, we must first suspend the crutch that creationism is and really think. We must first define what is human. We must define it the only way we know how, by investigating how we unconsciously we define it already. Surprisingly, the consensus around what is human is basically ubiquitous, and, importantly, “humanity” once taxonomically ascribed is immutable (and therefore not to...
tamarFour Movies America Didn't Understand
“Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah Stayin’ Alive…” —The Bee GeesI thank God that my parents didn’t watch movies with me growing up. But should I really thank them? Would it not be cruel for me now to do the same to my children? Did them not watching movies allow me to watch and sublimate the American masterpieces with proper maturity and respect? It is unclear, but it likely saved me from the extent of my interaction with them being the purchase and use of a Scarface or Godfather themed gaming mousepad, likely,...
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tamarStates of the Union
“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” —Walt WhitmanFL Gazing down nereids I, absent on some swelling shore, From above again by the soft distance? Up do they look? Thin-bronze latino familias, their silken hair and linen, Wool and Tassels Yahwe- Sun so bright so-can’t be seen, diadems, Heavenly host, etc Dissipates. The best of the orients skyscrapers almost Lush pave...
tamarToward a Healthy Transhumanism (Part I): Reproductive Transhumanism
“Our body must be our work” —Nikolai FedorovTo readjust man’s current course toward what can be called the “transhuman”, we must first suspend the crutch that creationism is and really think. We must first define what is human. We must define it the only way we know how, by investigating how we unconsciously we define it already. Surprisingly, the consensus around what is human is basically ubiquitous, and, importantly, “humanity” once taxonomically ascribed is immutable (and therefore not to...
tamarFour Movies America Didn't Understand
“Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah Stayin’ Alive…” —The Bee GeesI thank God that my parents didn’t watch movies with me growing up. But should I really thank them? Would it not be cruel for me now to do the same to my children? Did them not watching movies allow me to watch and sublimate the American masterpieces with proper maturity and respect? It is unclear, but it likely saved me from the extent of my interaction with them being the purchase and use of a Scarface or Godfather themed gaming mousepad, likely,...
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“You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly.”
—Sexus, Henry Miller
“Damn 'em all. They changed it, changed it all around. Smeared it all over with blood.”
—The Misfits
Those who are or who have been saved must above all, to have donned the helmet-hat of salvation, have been sealed with the knowledge of one thing: that everything will be just as it was. As it was before, before salvation, back before being born-again. Back to exceedingly normal like the miracles.
The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. You, saved, will be the same as the dead you, even more so; stronger, more fleshed-out, the same but suppler. Prehistoric man knew this about the crippled, knew there was something deeply wrong, the way the churches know and barr the crippled from priesthood. In all of the miracles of Christ and the saints and the prophets— aside from his own— we have only the miracle of normality. The withered hand, the blind eyes, the way-laid skeleton all restored; all pointing to something humanity has always known, that the diseased are not simply abnormal or deadly, but not inevitable— something faintly guaranteed as salvifically fixable. We repeat ourselves. Daily, in the wasting of time during which we roundtrip a sequential decision or action, we affirm the problem of ephemerality but also the correctness of everything we have done. The miracle man has wanted was never more than human, it was always a return to the normal, to what is still an opportunity for weakness: a hand unwithered.
The miracle is to restore backwards, towards health, the original state of things: toward the bodies of the whole ones who made them, or if they are not whole, toward their ancestors. Is this not Musk’s aim? There are others, and there will be more, in the Brain-Computer-Interface industry who aim to surpass the norm, to reoptimize and rewire and accelerate and augment the brain’s circuitry; this (like germline-engineering), when done irrevocably, implies speciation and portends war. What or how or why to stop this (in this age nothing seems stoppable), remains a prayed for mystery—; which must be what we pray for when we pray for God’s will, the good of all beings, which, when thought through, means the good of all beings and death of some— in other words what is best for all: in every sense.
Regarding Neuralink and the other, as of now, strictly remedial BCI companies, we affirm them miraculously and remedially and completely. It is easy to knee-jerk and bite against the implant’s “threads”; the threads that have waxed and waned in and out and across the cranial lobes of the first quadrapalegic recipients of the technology like Noland Arbaugh, but watching the simple happiness and freedom such a BCI gives a patient like Noland is enough to justify it completely. I went instantly from doubt to tears as I watched his first press release interviews. He is still a long way from normal; even with the daily devotions he now reads with his neuronal-mouse; even with his alternating Roswell and Crucifix hats and American flags and buck and bighorn mounts on the wall behind him— he, a wonderful first recipient of such tech, the holiest man of drudgery: the Americo-rural, almost capitally-lobotomized sage (truly!), the blue-collar believer.
Having clarified the ethical realities surrounding Neuralink and the like, let us quickly step back and concretize the various realizations we have made through this series of essays:
Are we to judge the cattle born of the farmer’s fisted glove? Are we to let its dead flesh rot in the field unbutchered and unseared? Let us, again, answer such a question through an examination of what we are already doing—and eating. We, in fact, are eating the AI (which long before LLMs stood for neither Actually Indians or Artificial Intelligence, but good ‘ol plaid-collar-cowboy John Wayne Artificial Insemination). If while driving outside of any greater metro area you happen to tune the radio to a country music station, you will hear, intermingled with pleas for denomination christian worship, advertisements for AI: for the ripest and most storied of ancestrally loamy bull’s seed— refrigerated and ready to be transported to your ranch and homestead for the fecundation of your next batch of genetically superior grass-fed.
The next time you dig your serrated steak knife into the beauty that is the violet, marble-veined, ruby ribeye you’re eating, remember you’re eating a farmers gloved hand shoved elbow deep; this is how, at the current moment of revelation at least, we should think about IVF and the genomically selected and optimized (whether edited or simply selected). We should not leave the kids for carrion, they have souls to be eaten as does the spritely calf, it's their parents who have done something. Something.
(Parethetically, one must ask if given the prevelence of IVF, a practice only growing in frequency and one that multiple first world nations account for/subsizide 10%+ of their reproductive growth with, such collections of embryos should be scored competantly with AI instead of soley screened for a handful of disabilities and then picked at random? The answer seems an unbashed yes, although for the religious, maybe not even considering the question is the way.)
You can never blame the creation, only the parent. That’s how God was made— something to blame (or worship) for making all this; all this that we can’t condemn. And it should be noted, as the christians note, that when we could do more than just blame him, when we could lay our hands on him when he came as a not just an unreachable parent but as a part of creation, we stood by and killed him.
Judgement related to transhumanist self modifications—whether cosmetic, electric, genetic, gendered or mutative— is a parent’s to bear when undertaken, at least until the child is a handful of years older than the age of reason— let’s measure it at 16 like sex. In other words, such absolute measures are a parents to prevent until the child is a handful of years older than what is sacramentalized as the age of confirmation in its (pre Ellen Organ) designation of 12.
The most absolute of the transhumanist procedures we have investigated are those involving IVF/genomics and implanted BCIs. Accordingly, these require more ethically complex investigations, especially given the fact that those who cosmetically mutilate/augment themselves are for the most part condemned by the instant. Perhaps, the religious and those who have no other protest than intuition and natural law are a clouded breed who simply must die. Perhaps, ironically, it was they who saw that man would in his cunning equip himself to cut the laddered helix (both before and after conception) and remove the need for miracle: perhaps this is God’s will, yet waste condemns the sin: sin being, as Tarkovsky names it, that which is unnecessary. Conception and “improvement” will soon be possible without waste. The mute shall soon speak with their minds. It is hard not to see beauty in these things. In man and the devil and God’s ingenuity. If we must jump, we must jump knowing death and the profanation of all not unlikely. Awash, we advise normalcy as the goal. We condemn waste and mutilation, we look toward the healthy human body, Rimbaud’s last sacrament, as toward a five pointed star; A fruit with the seed of excellence.
“You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly.”
—Sexus, Henry Miller
“Damn 'em all. They changed it, changed it all around. Smeared it all over with blood.”
—The Misfits
Those who are or who have been saved must above all, to have donned the helmet-hat of salvation, have been sealed with the knowledge of one thing: that everything will be just as it was. As it was before, before salvation, back before being born-again. Back to exceedingly normal like the miracles.
The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. You, saved, will be the same as the dead you, even more so; stronger, more fleshed-out, the same but suppler. Prehistoric man knew this about the crippled, knew there was something deeply wrong, the way the churches know and barr the crippled from priesthood. In all of the miracles of Christ and the saints and the prophets— aside from his own— we have only the miracle of normality. The withered hand, the blind eyes, the way-laid skeleton all restored; all pointing to something humanity has always known, that the diseased are not simply abnormal or deadly, but not inevitable— something faintly guaranteed as salvifically fixable. We repeat ourselves. Daily, in the wasting of time during which we roundtrip a sequential decision or action, we affirm the problem of ephemerality but also the correctness of everything we have done. The miracle man has wanted was never more than human, it was always a return to the normal, to what is still an opportunity for weakness: a hand unwithered.
The miracle is to restore backwards, towards health, the original state of things: toward the bodies of the whole ones who made them, or if they are not whole, toward their ancestors. Is this not Musk’s aim? There are others, and there will be more, in the Brain-Computer-Interface industry who aim to surpass the norm, to reoptimize and rewire and accelerate and augment the brain’s circuitry; this (like germline-engineering), when done irrevocably, implies speciation and portends war. What or how or why to stop this (in this age nothing seems stoppable), remains a prayed for mystery—; which must be what we pray for when we pray for God’s will, the good of all beings, which, when thought through, means the good of all beings and death of some— in other words what is best for all: in every sense.
Regarding Neuralink and the other, as of now, strictly remedial BCI companies, we affirm them miraculously and remedially and completely. It is easy to knee-jerk and bite against the implant’s “threads”; the threads that have waxed and waned in and out and across the cranial lobes of the first quadrapalegic recipients of the technology like Noland Arbaugh, but watching the simple happiness and freedom such a BCI gives a patient like Noland is enough to justify it completely. I went instantly from doubt to tears as I watched his first press release interviews. He is still a long way from normal; even with the daily devotions he now reads with his neuronal-mouse; even with his alternating Roswell and Crucifix hats and American flags and buck and bighorn mounts on the wall behind him— he, a wonderful first recipient of such tech, the holiest man of drudgery: the Americo-rural, almost capitally-lobotomized sage (truly!), the blue-collar believer.
Having clarified the ethical realities surrounding Neuralink and the like, let us quickly step back and concretize the various realizations we have made through this series of essays:
Are we to judge the cattle born of the farmer’s fisted glove? Are we to let its dead flesh rot in the field unbutchered and unseared? Let us, again, answer such a question through an examination of what we are already doing—and eating. We, in fact, are eating the AI (which long before LLMs stood for neither Actually Indians or Artificial Intelligence, but good ‘ol plaid-collar-cowboy John Wayne Artificial Insemination). If while driving outside of any greater metro area you happen to tune the radio to a country music station, you will hear, intermingled with pleas for denomination christian worship, advertisements for AI: for the ripest and most storied of ancestrally loamy bull’s seed— refrigerated and ready to be transported to your ranch and homestead for the fecundation of your next batch of genetically superior grass-fed.
The next time you dig your serrated steak knife into the beauty that is the violet, marble-veined, ruby ribeye you’re eating, remember you’re eating a farmers gloved hand shoved elbow deep; this is how, at the current moment of revelation at least, we should think about IVF and the genomically selected and optimized (whether edited or simply selected). We should not leave the kids for carrion, they have souls to be eaten as does the spritely calf, it's their parents who have done something. Something.
(Parethetically, one must ask if given the prevelence of IVF, a practice only growing in frequency and one that multiple first world nations account for/subsizide 10%+ of their reproductive growth with, such collections of embryos should be scored competantly with AI instead of soley screened for a handful of disabilities and then picked at random? The answer seems an unbashed yes, although for the religious, maybe not even considering the question is the way.)
You can never blame the creation, only the parent. That’s how God was made— something to blame (or worship) for making all this; all this that we can’t condemn. And it should be noted, as the christians note, that when we could do more than just blame him, when we could lay our hands on him when he came as a not just an unreachable parent but as a part of creation, we stood by and killed him.
Judgement related to transhumanist self modifications—whether cosmetic, electric, genetic, gendered or mutative— is a parent’s to bear when undertaken, at least until the child is a handful of years older than the age of reason— let’s measure it at 16 like sex. In other words, such absolute measures are a parents to prevent until the child is a handful of years older than what is sacramentalized as the age of confirmation in its (pre Ellen Organ) designation of 12.
The most absolute of the transhumanist procedures we have investigated are those involving IVF/genomics and implanted BCIs. Accordingly, these require more ethically complex investigations, especially given the fact that those who cosmetically mutilate/augment themselves are for the most part condemned by the instant. Perhaps, the religious and those who have no other protest than intuition and natural law are a clouded breed who simply must die. Perhaps, ironically, it was they who saw that man would in his cunning equip himself to cut the laddered helix (both before and after conception) and remove the need for miracle: perhaps this is God’s will, yet waste condemns the sin: sin being, as Tarkovsky names it, that which is unnecessary. Conception and “improvement” will soon be possible without waste. The mute shall soon speak with their minds. It is hard not to see beauty in these things. In man and the devil and God’s ingenuity. If we must jump, we must jump knowing death and the profanation of all not unlikely. Awash, we advise normalcy as the goal. We condemn waste and mutilation, we look toward the healthy human body, Rimbaud’s last sacrament, as toward a five pointed star; A fruit with the seed of excellence.
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