Transhumanism is silly when we've barely begun exploring our normal humanity. Virtual reality is silly when we've barely begun exploring our normal reality. What are being presented as means for more deeply experiencing human life are actually means for running away from it.
If most of us haven't even so much as mastered the ability to sit quietly for an hour and simply be still and content with what is, maybe it's not yet time to start hanging a bunch of bells and whistles on the human experience as though we have taken this thing as far as it goes.
Most of the futuristic visions people hold for humanity are really just visions of humanity running away from itself. Leaving earth and colonizing space. Leaving reality and building virtual reality. Leaving humanity and becoming cybernetic. All before we've learned to really be.
Baked in to all of these visions for our future is the assumption that humanity must always be restless. Must always be discontented. Must always be flailing around grabbing for more. Which will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if believed. So don't believe it. It's bullshit.
What if instead of looking outward for directions to take the human exploration, we looked inward? What if we as a species spent a few centuries really getting to know ourselves and what we're made of? Maybe we're like someone leaving a solid gold house to go treasure hunting?
Maybe all of our problems as a species can be solved by simply awakening human consciousness to what's really going on? Maybe all of our societal, geopolitical and ecosystemic problems would resolve themselves if we could become conscious of the forces within us that drive them?
Ever known someone who's always moving from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, but always running into the same problems because the real source of their discontentment sits between their ears? Maybe that's humanity in general in our visions for the future.
What if there was a real societal push for practices like meditation and self-enquiry? What if facilities for psychedelic exploration were set up for public use around the world? What if we plunged in that direction, instead of trying to run off into space and virtual reality?
This human adventure is going to keep unfolding for as long as it exists, but we do have control over what direction it unfolds in. Seems to me it would be best to start from where we're at and get the hang of basic human experience before getting all fancy about it.
After all, you've got to walk before you can run. And as far as the exploration of our inner dimensions is concerned, most of us aren't even crawling yet.
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