The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

Because they'd grant better hearing, and the technology for extensive biomodification is presumably the same as for "enhancement"
Maybe a little, but not much and it's really not what I'm talking about, as I've explained earlier. It's not what the transhumanists are talking about when they're talking about "human enhancement" either. Mostly they're obsessing about having higher IQs or not aging. The technology to increase intelligence is going to be significantly different than what's used to give people cat ears; you're working with different organs and doing very different things.
I am stepping even more into the fantastical with this question but I am curious how you would see this paradigm apply to a setting in which the "augmented" are so by virtue of birth. The Mutants of Marvel are the most iconic example but it is quite a common trope in tabletop rpgs. It is also not entirely beyond possibility in the real world if we consider the furthest stretches of genetic engineering.

What would be the just way to structure society in a situation where there is growing number of naturally born "augmented"?
That isn't really something anyone can do anything about, at least without either murdering a bunch of people or performing nonconsensual medical procedures.

Also, the fact that those people are such a small minority means the divide I'm talking about can't become an issue. Because they're a tiny minority society isn't going to be built around the assumption that you are a mutant. If one person has super durability, workplace safety rules will be sufficient for me, if everyone but me has super durability, I'm probably boned. Because their powers vary so much, that's another source of protection against the divide.

This is going to sound weird to people who are used to thinking of people like the mutants posing a problem exclusively because of their ability to become a ruling class. But that's a separate issue.
 
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Mostly they're obsessing about having higher IQs or not aging.
You'd quickly run into the issue that IQ is mostly made up bullshit.

As for not aging, well... a lot of medicine now helps mitigate the negative consequences of aging and I don't think you'd tell it's a bad thing?

The issue would be the immortal oligarchs, but once more that's not directly a transhumanism issue.
 
You'd quickly run into the issue that IQ is mostly made up bullshit.
They want to try anyway. And even a bunch of the people who think IQ is made up bullshit want to do the same thing. I'm reasonably sure that if you asked them the creators of Eclipse Phase would say IQ is bullshit. "Smart human" is still a morph.
As for not aging, well... a lot of medicine now helps mitigate the negative consequences of aging and I don't think you'd tell it's a bad thing?

The issue would be the immortal oligarchs, but once more that's not directly a transhumanism issue.
I actually don't care about the anti-aging stuff--I think it suggests an immature attitude towards death, but it's not actually bad.
 
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They want to try anyway. And even a bunch of the people who think IQ is made up bullshit want to do the same thing. I'm reasonably sure that if you asked them the creators of Eclipse Phase would say IQ is bullshit. "Smart human" is still a morph.
But then that'd just be better memory (writing things down), a knowledge database (going on wikipedia), etc.

All things that while useful and probably done faster and in a more compact way than what we have now, aren't that different and haven't destroyed society... well, I mean... mh...
 
Transhumanist fiction--and Eclipse Phase is no exception--usually presume that "increased intelligence" manifests as perfect recall (rather than having to go through old notes or look something up, you know it instantly), the ability to learn rapidly, improved focus, the ability to make (almost always accurate) leaps of logic and form connections the unenhanced can't see, et cetera. That's a lot different from what we've got now.
 
Disabilities are disabilities for a reason. A person without legs objectively has fewer options then fully legged person, a person with deafness has fewer options than a person with hearing, etc. you can accommodate these issues but that doesn't mean they aren't issues. So long as society can't cure them then mitigating them is worthy but there isn't any cause to act as if the latter is more moral.
The usefulness and liability of traits depends on societal context. Take the example being mentioned. Actually functional cat ears, while theoretically an enhancement in a vacuum of "you can hear better", would probably be a net negative in our modern noise polluted society. I'm already rather particular in keeping noise down when trying to sleep.

Is being heterosexual a disability that needs to be cured? That absolutely results in you having fewer options, in the very important area of "romantic partner selection" no less. Where do you think ability to feel pain, or average height, should be set at? Setting it higher or lower will be useful in some contexts and liability in others. My physical body isn't going to deliver Olympic gold medal tier performances with any amount of training, that definitely sounds like fewer options to me. I have no sense of smell, which sounds like a liability, but also means I am immune to farts.

Even traits that seem relatively straightforward probably aren't. I have a perpetual headache that never goes away, which I'd like to get rid of. But what is causing it? If the answer is something like autism or anxiety, the answer is its a manifestation of my personality, and fixing it would mean altering my identity in ways whose effects are uncertain. What if reducing my anxiety to cure my headaches cripples my long term planning skills and ruins my life? Well that's what my anxiety says anyways.

That's why your food example fundamentally doesn't work. Food insecurity is the product of society, disability is the product of biology. Society can make the latter easier but if we can correct for biology then we can help the people suffering for it. That's progress and should be embraced.
Phenylketonuria is a genetic disorder that causes brain damage, until it was discovered that with the right diet it causes little or no problems at all. Which means that a problem once seen as an inherited biological disability was actually a mere societal problem, because literally anyone takes brain damage if they eat a sufficiently wrong diet. The truth is that we all have limited options in some way, and we all are accommodated by society in ways that expand them. In the past "not being able to walk a mile without being exhausted" would've been a fatal liability, now it'd be more of an inconvenience.

I'm sure that we can all find some examples of trait that is "this will irreversibly affect your quality of life for the worse and society cannot accommodate it" but that's going to be the exception not the rule. There are tons of traits like "magnitude of sense, physique, or mentality" which are going to have unclear contextual answers. This is why I'm probably more partial to "brain in a vat controlling robot sleeves" as a transhumanist endgame. There you don't have to answer the question of "what setting should we put the knobs at" you can just adjust it as need be.
 
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Yes, because Star Trek is literally a utopian view of the future and Cyberpunk is literally a dystopian one, and that's true whether or not either setting has transhumanism.
Exactly, take away the cybernetics and C2077 doesn't become a better place lol. Corporate domination is what makes it awful, removing the cybernetics just makes it a slightly more boring dystopia (and similar to the modern day, but I repeat myself).

Citing it as part of some broader baseline vs transhumanist narrative is intensely silly.
 
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Transhumanist fiction--and Eclipse Phase is no exception--usually presume that "increased intelligence" manifests as perfect recall (rather than having to go through old notes or look something up, you know it instantly), the ability to learn rapidly, improved focus, the ability to make (almost always accurate) leaps of logic and form connections the unenhanced can't see, et cetera. That's a lot different from what we've got now.
Just like being able to ctrl+F something is faster than having to read through a journal. It's still just an improvement on what already exists.

The Sherlock magic would change things but feels like, well. Magic.
 
The Sherlock magic would change things but feels like, well. Magic.
Half of the stuff in Eclipse Phase (and transhumanist writing generally) is basically magic. If I'm not willing to entertain that the technology their ideology relies on actually will work as advertised, at least partially, I'm stuck concluding that "increased intelligence" is as likely as not to result in crippling anxiety or something.
 
are there any popular or relatively well-known examples of a transhumanist setting that doesn't have some degree of dystopia or "it's actually kinda worse with this fantastical new technology"?
 
are there any popular or relatively well-known examples of a transhumanist setting that doesn't have some degree of dystopia or "it's actually kinda worse with this fantastical new technology"?
YMMV but Infinity is a more hopeful cyberpunk where most of the usual tropes have been stopped at some point by someone going "wait, no, that's horrible stop that". I mean, it's a skirmish game so shit is kinda fucked, but for the common man, life seems pretty nice. Not perfect, but better than what we have now.
 
The usefulness and liability of traits depends on societal context. Take the example being mentioned. Actually functional cat ears, while theoretically an enhancement in a vacuum of "you can hear better", would probably be a net negative in our modern noise polluted society. I'm already rather particular in keeping noise down when trying to sleep.

Is being heterosexual a disability that needs to be cured? That absolutely results in you having fewer options, in the very important area of "romantic partner selection" no less. Where do you think ability to feel pain, or average height, should be set at? Setting it higher or lower will be useful in some contexts and liability in others. My physical body isn't going to deliver Olympic gold medal tier performances with any amount of training, that definitely sounds like fewer options to me. I have no sense of smell, which sounds like a liability, but also means I am immune to farts.

Even traits that seem relatively straightforward probably aren't. I have a perpetual headache that never goes away, which I'd like to get rid of. But what is causing it? If the answer is something like autism or anxiety, the answer is its a manifestation of my personality, and fixing it would mean altering my identity in ways whose effects are uncertain. What if reducing my anxiety to cure my headaches cripples my long term planning skills and ruins my life? Well that's what my anxiety says anyways.
Why do you think this is an argument against transhumanism? The point of the concept is not "we must have one perfect template and then endlessly copy it", the people who want biological uniformity are the bioconservatives. The point of transhumanism is that people should be allowed to improve their biology.

This spiel about the contextual nature of fitness is completely meaningless. If people want to have cat ears in some contexts but not in others that's literally the transhuman ideal. I don't care if someone chooses to stick with the human ear system or a selective version that lets them lower it in certain contexts. They're all great and it would do nothing but improve the world if we had a choice.

Citing headaches is frankly even more of a weird non-argument. If a headache can't be cured without harming the core of your identity then just don't cure it. This implied argument that because we can't have perfect solutions in all context it's therefore wrong to label some traits issues worth curing is a gigantic leap of logic that simply isn't justified. Should we not try to cure epilepsy because it could theoretically have some unknown connection to a neurological trait that could be important? Should we not cure limb reduction defects? You're moving goal posts and muddying the water but there are innumerable disabilities which are objectively harmful. Biology often is about trade offs but using that as evidence that it's wrong to try to cure issues isn't even anti-transhumanism, at that point you're verging on anti-medicine.

P.S It's good that Phenylketonuria can be cured by eating right, but guess what? It would be even better for its sufferers if it could just be caught with gene therapy. Your example proves nothing.
 
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are there any popular or relatively well-known examples of a transhumanist setting that doesn't have some degree of dystopia or "it's actually kinda worse with this fantastical new technology"?

The Culture series is what most immediately comes to mind as it is a straightforward utopia. The Commonwealth Universe might be another good example as the "transhuman" technology paradigm is generally treated positively even as it depicts societies ranging from dystopian to utopian.

In the tabletop rpg field there is the Transhuman Space setting published using the GURPs system. This is something of a post-cyberpunk setting where the world is neither a utopia or dystopia. It is also quite dated as it was first published in 2002.

A more recent videogame example would be "I Was a Teenage Exocolonist".
 
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Come on. Don't tell me that people don't lose options because of disabilities.

A perfectly accommodating society won't make a person in a wheelchair any less incapable of running. You're taking a reasonable position (society should make things easier for disabled people) and taking it to almost parodic levels. Comparing that to heterosexuality is frankly absurd. It's a fundamentally fallacious comparison.
Being heterosexual means losing options. So does lacking eidetic memory, or Olympic athlete potential, or countless other traits that are mostly upside at face value. Everyone in society has lost options as the result of their traits. Your declaration of something as a disability isn't a reflection of it losing options, because any trait combination means losing options. What it implies is losing consequential options given the context of our society vis a vis our personal identity and what would give us a quality of life.

The point of transhumanism is that people should be allowed to improve their biology.

This spiel about the contextual nature of fitness is completely meaningless. If people want to have cat ears in some contexts but not in others that's literally the transhuman ideal.
I do not dispute that. What I dispute is what you said here:
Disabilities are disabilities for a reason.
Food insecurity is the product of society, disability is the product of biology. The causes are objectively distinct.
Disability is an inherently social concept of social judgement of a trait whose consequences depend on the social context. Traits which would be serious or even fatal liabilities in some social contexts can be harmless or even helpful in others. There are certain traits which would be a disability in most if not all social contexts, but that isn't merely a factor of "it limits options in the current social context" or "it limits options relative to the average human normal".

The point of contention here is not whether or not people should be allowed to change themselves to pursue happiness, but whether to frame that as "change", "improvement", or "removing disabilities". The former term lacks social judgement vis a vis the individual and institutions. The latter two, not so much. To change acknowledges we may need to evolve to survive within the institutional structures we're living in, without getting into a discourse as to whether we or the institutions are responsible for the danger we needed to evolve to survive. To say "fix" or "improve" is to say the problem was the individual and not the institution, a judgement I'd rather not make when it doesn't even need to be made.

Half of the stuff in Eclipse Phase (and transhumanist writing generally) is basically magic. If I'm not willing to entertain that the technology their ideology relies on actually will work as advertised, at least partially, I'm stuck concluding that "increased intelligence" is as likely as not to result in crippling anxiety or something.
I am suddenly reminded of a certain game where too much of an attribute is a mixed blessing:
 
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The point of contention here is not whether or not people should be allowed to change themselves to pursue happiness, but whether to frame that as "change", "improvement", or "removing disabilities". The former term lacks social judgement vis a vis the individual and institutions. The latter two, not so much. To change acknowledges we may need to evolve to survive within the institutional structures we're living in, without getting into a discourse as to whether we or the institutions are responsible for the danger we needed to evolve to survive. To say "fix" or "improve" is to say the problem was the individual and not the institution, a judgement I'd rather not make when it doesn't even need to be made.
No, I categorically refuse this absurd euphemism treadmill. Some conditions make peoples lives worse and removing them is an improvement. This quibbling about "social judgement" is meaningless and helps no one. It just obfuscates how people's lives are impacted by disabilities.

Individuals no more have control over their biology then they do have over their society, far less control in many cases. This idea that focusing on biology somehow blames individuals is farcical and doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. You can recognize the role that societal forces play in making disability worse without pretending that there is not a biological component. I reject the false choice that implies otherwise.

You're welcome to use whatever word you want, I will continue to use words like "improve" until I see an actually compelling reason to cease and not a second sooner.
 
The big problem with modifying our bodies as it stands is that under capitalism there is but a single standard all are measured by.

Let's use an example of say... blindness. Companies often don't want to make accommodations for blind employees because it would lower profits. Should an eye implant be developed that provided roughly average vision, companies would probably use that as an excuse to drop accommodations. Two different people who are differently abled when it comes to vision may have very different relationships with their senses and desires to change that. Yet both would feel compelled economically to receive the implant, in the likely event companies decided they'd rather do than then provide accommodations.

But let's say that, instead of a vision implant, someone invent an implant that gave a person perfect echolocation, not quite the same as human, objectively superior to an average person's eyesight to many respect. These differences would still require some accommodations be made in a workplace, even if, again, they are an improvement in some areas over standard human vision. Do you think companies would still be so eager to adopt this implant? Or even permit existing employees to undergo the surgery for it?
 
The big problem with modifying our bodies as it stands is that under capitalism there is but a single standard all are measured by.
As was stated just two pages ago;
Most of the worries about transhumanism are its consequences in a capitalist system tbh. All the "you'll need to mod yourself to be competitive/earn a living" and "you won't own your body" go away in a society that works.
 
The big problem with modifying our bodies as it stands is that under capitalism there is but a single standard all are measured by.

Let's use an example of say... blindness. Companies often don't want to make accommodations for blind employees because it would lower profits. Should an eye implant be developed that provided roughly average vision, companies would probably use that as an excuse to drop accommodations. Two different people who are differently abled when it comes to vision may have very different relationships with their senses and desires to change that. Yet both would feel compelled economically to receive the implant, in the likely event companies decided they'd rather do than then provide accommodations.

But let's say that, instead of a vision implant, someone invent an implant that gave a person perfect echolocation, not quite the same as human, objectively superior to an average person's eyesight to many respect. These differences would still require some accommodations be made in a workplace, even if, again, they are an improvement in some areas over standard human vision. Do you think companies would still be so eager to adopt this implant? Or even permit existing employees to undergo the surgery for it?
Is it in place of vision or alongside vision?

But the way it's currently written does imply the former so we'll go with that. If so, we can equivalent that to something similar to full-body tattoos and/or extensive training, like how a Ballerina's feet have been shaped by that training but way more extreme. In which case it's 'some jobs would like it but your average office job is gonna turn you away because it's not worth it to accomodate' then yeah, that would happen. Extreme body modding does exist, even if only aesthetically with stuff like plastic surgery, so we do know how something like this might go down.

It'd be a relatively niche thing where due to it's 'extreme-ness' you'd be looked at funny at best unless you're in a context/work where it's useful. And if it's expensive then you'll get no sympathy from a large amount of people because 'hey you bought it, you should've known the consequences'
 
Man, this thread really zoomed along since I last checked in. 0.o

Count me as another one in the cat eared Tgirl camp. I'll even raise it to robo cat eared Tgirl.

I like the idea that your true self isn't bound by this thing obtained by little more than a quirk of genetics. That you can express some of that physically whether through augmentations or in more magical settings cool little bits like having a tail made up of foxfire. (If you've read the Cradle series then I'm thinking things like Goldsigns.)

Also, this probably just speaks to my anxiety, but there's even an appeal to having your robo body dissambled while being worked on. You have to slow down, relax and be able to trust that there's people taking care of you.
 
No, I categorically refuse this absurd euphemism treadmill. Some conditions make peoples lives worse and removing them is an improvement. This quibbling about "social judgement" is meaningless and helps no one. It just obfuscates how people's lives are impacted by disabilities.

Individuals no more have control over their biology then they do have over their society, far less control in many cases. This idea that focusing on biology somehow blames individuals is farcical and doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. You can recognize the role that societal forces play in making disability worse without pretending that there is not a biological component. I reject the false choice that implies otherwise.

You're welcome to use whatever word you want, I will continue to use words like "improve" until I see an actually compelling reason to cease and not a second sooner.
It rather does stand up to cursory examination. Look at how people react to individuals that are very overweight: it is not seen as a societal failing (beyond perhaps a very surface level 'people these days are too soft' sort of thing), even when many of the leading causes of obesity are judged to be linked to societal factors. It's a personal failing, and often tied to mostly biological things. Hell, we aren't too far off from being left handed being considered a disability that needs to be cured.

And I think looking at it as a euphemism treadmill is not helpful. This is not just changing the words to be the next word that means the same thing, it is re-framing the discussion, often in ways that the groups in question appreciate. For example, if you talk to many Autism groups about 'curing' or 'fixing' them then you're going to get a very negative reaction, and for pretty good reasons.
 
Honestly, issues of transhumanism come from the fact that it is still humanism. That it ultimately focuses on "improving" humans, rather than a much bigger and, imo, better goal of letting everyone be whatever they want to be, whether it is a cyborg catgirl or an ominous floating sphere of doom. Refocusing on giving everyone unlimited authority over one's body leads to less rotten ideological conclusions, imo, even if technologies developed are largely similar.
 
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Eh? What kinda transhimanism doesn't let you become an ominous floating sphere of doom?

(I mean, aside from the kinds in games with some kind of humanity stat or whatever.)
 
Alert: This probably deserves its own thread
this probably deserves its own thread
This is a thread about politics in tabletop games.
With respect to the spirited discussion taking place it has at has left behind the topic of games like eclipse phase to become a more general on the ethics of transhumanism, which probably deserves its own thread.
Thanks
 
Eh? What kinda transhimanism doesn't let you become an ominous floating sphere of doom?

(I mean, aside from the kinds in games with some kind of humanity stat or whatever.)

It is less that it doesn't let you and more that it tries to justify it why utility or whatever instead of going "wouldn't it be fucking awesome to be an ominous floating sphere of doom, regardless of potential downsides?" Freedom of choosing one's body implies level of impracticality and art that "improvement" does not. It is also more honest about underlying motivation.

Edit : missed the mod message while typing.
 
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