21 Reasons the New Second Life Viewer 2.0 is a Huge Improvement

Viewer 2.0 is, in fact, dozens of long-requested features. The fact that these features we've asked for years and years of Linden Lab to deliver for the Second Life platform is a testament to the teams and leadership, and is a very good sign for the longer-term viability of Second Life as a platform. Two of the most stand-out features are HTML on a prim and treating a browser like a browser. But there's lots more.

First and foremost, I want you readers to understand that "Viewer 2.0" goes beyond the browser, and shows a fundamental shift in the thinking and working at Linden Lab.

1. Presentation with Machinima

I've said since 2005 that machinima is the single best way to show off virtual worlds. I'm hardly alone in this opinion. The gorgeous videos produced by the Ill Clan to promote Second Life shows that Linden Lab gets it, too.


Different use cases are illustrated, making room for business and education as well as the fun and escapism.

Further, the videos that are there to promote the new Viewer are produced by PookyMedia. These are nothing new, as Torley has a whole bunch of instructional videos that he has been creating for years. However, they have always seemed to be a sidenote, whereas now these videos *are* the launch, front and center.

Linden Lab still has a little ways to go - I still don't see similar videos on the Business side of things, such as on secondlifegrid.net. However, Linden Lab is promoting these other cases to the media.

2. Media Outreach for Business and Educational Use

One of the long-standing criticisms of Linden Lab in promoting Second Life has been the focus of "Second Life is a fun escapist place" that is the dominant way people think about Second Life. I was impressed with this interview Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon did with Robert Scoble that was released today at Building43.


In it, Kingdon clearly mentions business uses, cost-saving for travel, and simulation of "not possible in real life" uses. I was disappointed with one aspect, however, as he compared Second Life to Las Vegas, where one might have a business convention during the day, and then go to a nightclub at night. That could have just as easily been compared to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, or London, and not have the negative, overt connotation of sex and immorality that Vegas touts.

3. HTML on a prim.

When I first started thinking about virtual worlds, back in college, and how I would design my own, one of my fundamental assumptions was a sort of "reverse compatibility". HTML. A virtual world, to be an evolution of the web, must easily handle all the current uses of the web.

When I joined Second Life, I was surprised when this was not the case. Second Life for years has been a virtual walled garden, with little to no interest of interacting with the rest of the web or social media. As Second Life gained popularity in 2005 and 2006, this attitude changed, but by then a lot of work was needed to enable web pages in Second Life.

Years later, we now have interactive websites within Second Life, with a robust permission system. And while the webpage display as media stream and being able to make httprequests out to servers via Second Life's in-world scripting language helped, they provided only a tiny subset of possible uses of the web in Second Life.

Being able to interact with the web natively in Second Life is a fundamental shift for the platform. I will have to post a followup blog post just about this subject, because the possibilities are so vast and expansive. A brief off-the-top-of-my-head list:
- working on documents in Google Apps
- watching YouTube videos in-world with friends
- adding multimedia content to everything: social, business, and educational uses
- replace awkward interfaces in-world with web-site driven interface
- replace text display in-world with websites.
- virtual goods sellers can now update all of their kiosks around Second Life from one website, and create sales interface through Xstreet online.

4. New Navigation Ideology

We have decades of experience, as a culture, working with computers and interacting online. There are many paradigms that have been tested, rethought, and improved. There have been alternative methods tried and failed. Ultimately, we have a set of behaviors that people use while using the Internet that work pretty well.

Until Viewer 2.0, most of these have been ignored. People call Second Life a game, frankly, because Second Life looks and feels like a game:
- The arrow-key / WASD control scheme.
- The avatar.
- The over-the-shoulder-camera.
- The health system.
- Pie menu navigation.
- Mouse-driven view changing

Add to that even more foreign concepts:
- 3-D building toolkit
- Inventory system that looks nothing like a PC or Mac's file system.
- Flying

Now, many of these are inherent to the platform, such as the avatar, flying, and so on. But the big picture was that Second Life's original viewer was designed by game designers, not web designers. Though, to be fair, we're talking 2001, before Firefox was anything but a 1982 Clint Eastwood movie.

The new browser is designed from the perspective of, "Second Life is part of the 3-D web, and let's use some of the behaviors we know and love from the web."

5. Back Button / History / Search Bar

What did the new browser ideology give us? A few of my favorites are the back button, the history of visited places, and the search and URL bar being at the top of the screen.

Back Button

If I recall correctly, Electric Sheep Company had this in their browser that they released for the CSI tie-in that they did with Second Life. This feature was certainly widely suggested before that, and it is a natural behavior.

History

Along the same lines, storing a history of places a user has visited is another natural web browser feature that fits with a virtual world.

Search Bar and URL Bar at top

This is not only about making Second Life work more like a web browser, but about the ability to do common tasks easier. Search in Second Life has been hitting Control-F. The average user doesn't know this. While this is a standard among web browsers and software, it's not a user's preferred choice for web browsing. The URL bar is really only a slight alteration, space-wise, from the previous browser, which listed the full name of the simulator at the top of the screen. But instead of having to poke open a map to navigate, one can just copy and paste a url, or even more simply:

6. Lip-Sync is on by Default

What is Lip-sync? When you talk via headset or microphone, your avatars lips move along with your voice. Is it perfect? No. Does it add to the immersion, and help dispel the "creepy telepathy" feeling I get when people talk without it. Yes! Is it buried in a developer "Advanced" menu? Not anymore!

7. Drag and Drop landmarks.

I think this is a cool feature. Drag a landmark from your inventory or history directly to your URL bar at the top, and you teleport. Simple.

8. Flash Support

Which I still don't see for the iPhone or the iPad. Just saying.

9. Tattoo Layer and Alpha Mask Layer

What is this, you ask? A Second Life avatar is assembled by the viewer and transmitted to other users in-world. It has a variety of "layers", such as "shirt", "undershirt" and "skin". Each layer can be changed independently, allowing third party content creators to sell individual items, such as pants or photo-realistic skins, rather than being forced to sell entire avatars looks as a set. What was missing was a "tattoo" layer.

Now, one might say, "How many people want tattoos on their avatar?" In the traditional sense, perhaps it might be a priority. But in the avatar sense, we're talking about make-up.

The same goes for alpha layer. This basically means that parts of a body can be made transparent, and non-human avatars can be made much more easily.

Content creators have long since wanted the ability to create tattoo and make-up separate from the skins, as well as an alpha layer for avatars. These will open up a whole new market for content creators in-world, while giving more flexibility to users who want to customize their avatars.

10. The Sidebar

The new sidebar is an attempt at putting all the commonly used things: profiles, inventory, landmarks, etc, into one standard format and easy to hide. I think it needs some work, but it's superior to the old interface.

11. Touch-Menu Interaction Improvements

Death to the Pie-menus! Huzzah! Linden Lab opts for the more universally recognized pull-down menu style.

12. View Presets

At the bottom, there's a button "View", and the eyeball icon lets you select one of four presets. This allows a user to quick go to first-person, over-the-shoulder, view of one's avatar from the front, and traditional view.

Unfortunately, this has a drawback... they stick even if you close the view. But the ESC key will break out of any view, just like mouselook, so it's really not that big an issue.

Various Interface Improvements

13. Chat History is replaced with an up-arrow next to the chat input box.

14. The top pull-down menus make far more sense.

15. Simplification of advanced features with "more" buttons that expand more features. (such as the snapshot window)

16. Line numbers on the left-hand side of the script programming window.

17. The annoying blue llDialog box is now: 1. In the same style as the rest of the browser. 2. At the bottom near chat, which is a more useful place that up in the top right corner.

18. "Nearby avatars" is now a tab in the "People" sidebar that let me quickly see who is around me. Super useful!

19. It's Still a Small Download

While Second Life requires about a gig of hard drive space (this seems far more trivial now than it did in 2004), the download is only 22.4 megabytes. Piece of cake.

20. All The Old Controls Still Work

Experienced SL users will have some time getting used to new locations for chat windows, but really an hour with the new viewer and I've got it. The big thing is that all the hotkeys and controls all still work.

21. Things still in the works

The other thing to be excited about are some announcement of initiatives still in the works. They include:

- In his interview with Scoble, Mark Kingdon spoke about Second Life providing connection to larger web - social tools to "break down walls", as he said. The purchase of Avatars United was cited as a valuable asset in this step. The SL Profiles that appeared a few months ago shows that this initiative has been in motion for a while.

Second Life will die as a walled garden. As it opens itself for interaction with external social media platforms, it will thrive.

- The programming language C# is being integrated into the scripting system so that more people can use existing programming knowledge to do programming with Second Life.

- "Inventory hasn't been updated yet". Catch that quote from the Intro To Viewer 2.0 video? I'm assuming this means Linden Lab is developing a long-awaited overhaul to the inventory system.

What I'd like to See From Here:

Well, since Linden Lab has now accomplished many of my major gripes about the platform, and is working on others, here's some features I'd like to see next:

1. Compatibility with standard 3-D formats. This will allow people with traditional design skills to work with Second Life, and immediately bring in a slew of new content, as there are lots of free and inexpensive 3-D art out on the web.

2. Better Facial expressions. I can't say this enough. Second Life's communication is already more meaningful that a simple telephone call. It could grow by an order of magnitude if it had accurate facial expressions mapped via webcam.

3. Drag and drop with your PC or Mac. I want to be able to drag the following from my desktop directly to Second Life:
- image files, 3-D objects, and avatar animations, and have them upload exactly in the folder of inventory I want.
- URLs, and have them automatically apply to the surface of an object
- standard document types, such as word processing / presentation / spreadsheet formats, that I can drag in-world and have them display. (Perhaps I'll settle for Google Apps, now that HTML is in-world)

3. "Portaling" objects. Essentially, I want the equivalent of a hyperlink in Second Life. I click on a door, I can go anywhere. Not a landmark, but a seamless transition from one space to another space. And, eventually, to other grids.

4. Increased privacy and functionality with "Inside / Outside" spaces, as I described here.

5. SL-in-browser. It can be done. One day. I dream.

6. More diverse types of sims.
I would like to be able to run a simulator with:
- no avatars, where the trade-off is a much higher concurrency rate.
- instantiated on-demand, where I can create copies of simulators as need arises, and pay on-demand prices rather than monthly blocks
- more space, more objects, less avatars.

7. Better privacy controls. I should be able to mute not only an avatar, but any object an avatar owns. I'd like to be able to turn off my parcel so that no one permitted can even load the contents, not even Linden Lab admin without a court order. Secure chat that can't be hacked by a third party client.

Conclusion

But for now, I'm extremely pleased with the new Viewer 2.0 release. Many, many doors have just opened for the possibilities of Second Life. Having interactive HTML and flash support alone makes lots of possibilities available. Combine with an array of interface improvements, and this really is a much cleaner, better experience.

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Shifting Focus of Virtual Worlds

This year will see increasing corporate and academic use of virtual worlds for private, individual ventures. Marketing efforts in virtual worlds are pretty much frozen solid, but will thaw a little proportionate to the recovery of the economy.

Second Life will continue to be the industry leader for interactive virtual worlds, while opensim-based and Second Life spinoff worlds will enjoy success for ones that stay cheap or that cater to a specific niche. But first, let's rewind to 2009.

(The rest of the article can be read at Pixels and Policy, whom this article was written for.)

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Muppets and Convergence Culture

If you haven't seen this meme, you will soon. Beaker does "Dust in the Wind" and gets comment-spammed by YouTube. (faked, but funny commentary on the medium. It's both funny and shows deep understanding of social media.

YouTube is not a new medium for the Muppets. Naturally, the Muppets are ingrained in our culture and naturally emerge into new media like YouTube. Smart brands, like the Muppets, are using that as a springboard to release new content. Such as the pop-culture-savvy Sesame Street sketch about "Mad Men". ("Good work, sycophants!)

The Mad Men sketch illustrates the use of YouTube to reach a mass audience, especially one that doesn't normally watch a young child's learning TV show. It also shows an understanding of the popular television that people like. The Beaker video goes much further. Let me tell you why.

1. Convergence.

Muppets are one media, and when Sesame Street first aired, that was a first example of convergence of children's education with television. The Sesame Street producers were very meticulous at utilizing advertising methods of television commercials to appeal to children in the same way. They nailed it, and have made an award-winning children's show that has been on for decades and syndicated and re-made for dozens and dozens of countries around the world.

This video with Beaker is an entry into YouTube, not only converging with that, but with the 2-way nature of social media like YouTube. The whole comedy of this sketch is Beaker interacting with the comments popping up on the screen. It was deliberately aware of how people consume media and interact with it, and used that to make comedy. That's gold.

Then there's the Waldorf and Statler comments at the end about Digg. (I do declare "Let's keep Digging 'til this thing is buried!" ought to be the new motto of Digg.)

So, by my count, we have puppeteering, TV, YouTube, and Digg converging on one video. Nice work!

2. Interactive.

The Beaker video could have just stopped with the comments coming up, and having him be frustrated, burn down the set, etc. However, notice around 0:45 into the video, and Beaker moving around actually causes the comments on-screen to move. This serves both as a way to illustrate Beaker's frustration and panic as he has to push through the comments, but as a wink and acknowledgment of the fourth wall that is present in television, and is torn down with interactive social media like YouTube.

3. Social References.

Look at some of the comments. The writers of this sketch clearly know their audience. They know the memes and the terminology. Here's a list of some that stand out to me:
- "You're doing it wrong.", "moar" (LOLcat references)
- "teh lose", "Epic win", "fail", "OWN3D" (gamer lingo)
- "zero stars" and other hyperbolic statements
- "BURNINATION" (reference to Trogdor, a character from Homestar Runner.)

The writers are saying, "we know you, we know what you like, and we speak your language, and we can be intelligent about it".

Please, God, Let the Muppets Do More Web Videos

That would make me very happy. The videos are smart, funny, and use the medium very well. And everyone loves Muppets.

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How I'd Write the Avatar Sequel

James Cameron claims that Avatar is, essentially, "Dances With Wolves ... in space ... sorta". Yet it's clear to me and others interpreting the movie that, at the very least, the setting is a post-singularity world, or at least something similar. Obviously movies often have more than one plot, sometimes layers and layers of plot. While I find it hard to believe that Cameron would accidentally put so much in Avatar about transhumanism / post-singularity humanity issues, I suppose it's possible. But a work of art is, of course, a living thing that is more than just what the creator intends.

A sequel has been announced, and possibly a trilogy, an I'd like to chime in on what to me would be a logic plot for a sequel, given my own interpretations of Avatar.

Earth Tries to Retake Pandora

This is the most obvious step for a remake. Earth needs this precious metal, and given the instability of the planet Earth that was alluded to in Avatar, they will come back and take it by force. This could go two routes:

1. Earth misunderstands local politics and treats this as a regional, rather than planetary revolt. Plot possibilities open up for cross-tribe tensions, possibly hinging over the acceptance of a human (Jake Scully and company), or possibly over getting rid of humans. Maybe other tribes *did* like the technology humanity offered and was benefiting, even if the Na'Vi we saw in the first movie didn't. Ultimately, Earth's counter-offensive will need to come to an understanding of the global connectedness of Pandora, predictably too late for the invaders.

2. Earth understands it's a global revolt, and sends an overwhelming force. Having underestimated their opponents the first time, they do much more human intelligence gathering. The natural movie trope is to have an anti-Jake Scully, who befriends another tribe with lies and generally is deceitful. Jake will have to once again face his own self. Maybe his brother was brought back to life somehow. In any event, if this is the route Cameron takes, it's much more interesting than (1), being that it isn't a basic rehash of the original plot.

Na'Vi are related to humans

If Earth does come guns blazing, and with superior force and a much smarter approach, even the god/supercomputer Eywa won't be able to stop them. Instead, there is a logical reason why Earth forces would have to stop - we're from the same race. This could go down several ways:

1. Humans left Earth thousands of years ago and were technologically superior. It's the classic Atlantis myth. They genetically modified themselves to this new planet as a survival method, since it would take years to develop industry on the planet. Either they chose to live simple, under the guidance of Eywa, or something happened - war, disease, cosmic event, whatever - that destroyed much of their inorganic technology; over the millennia, their culture forgot that they came from another planet, or perhaps it's still preserved in myths.

2. Humans and Na'Vi come from a proto-race that colonized both Earth and Pandora. Perhaps we get to see a third race by the third in the trilogy. Maybe even see remnants or citizens from this proto-race. Or even more far-out: the proto-race is really post-singularity beings that don't normally have physical bodies, but choose to colonize planets with physical forms. Hollywood's dumbing-down mentality would probably kill this idea for being as weird as what I've heard the Wachowskis original Matrix plot was - nano-computers infecting human brains.

Or maybe this proto-race is evil - creating races for them to ultimately develop new technology and terraform planets, only to be reconquered and new technology and planets harvested once they're ready. Then the humans and Na'Vi would need to align together to stand side-by-side, thus mimicking the humanity-balanced-with-technology philosophy the Matrix delivered. (albeit delivered in the form of 2 awful sequels.)

SPOILER: (what I just described was the plot of Mass Effect)

Human Race is Transforming into Cyborgs

Given my analysis previously that Avatar is cautionary about cybernetics, and given James Cameron has covered this topic before in Terminator 2, I think we might see the human race even more corrupted by machines. Maybe the humans come back, but the suits are more directly connected to their bodies; maybe the humans can't even leave the suits at all. Maybe computer AI winds up controlling human organization and delivers orders. This could be a cool plot scenario, as it gives the humans a chance at redemption in the act of rebelling against their cybernetic dehumanization, and stand with the Na'Vi.

So, we'll see. I suppose that's all I have to say. I'd love to hear your ideas as to what an Avatar sequel might be like.

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Humanism without the Secular

I've had some fantastic conversations over the last couple months since seeing James Cameron's Avatar. One last night with virtual world veteran Larry Rosenthal (aka Cube3), may have snapped one more of the crucial pieces together. He and I discussed my review of Avatar and transhumanism, and he pointed out that my beliefs were just plain humanism. He's right. I don't think we can essentially "become God" as the strictest transhumanist beliefs go. I realize because I didn't explicitly state some of my assumptions, it may lead to a misconception that I'm a transhumanist in the "upload and become a super-being" sense, which I'm not. Instead, I assert that there are two rivaling understandings of what "transhumanism" really means. In my article about Avatar, I make an assumption that I am speaking from one understanding; anyone who is in the other camp's understanding might misconstrue what I wrote and get confused as to how I draw the conclusions that I draw.

In a literal sense, transhumanism means to transcend the human condition. But what does that mean? Does "transcend" mean to become something completely different? Or does transcend mean getting in touch with a nature of humanity that is normally hidden? Both could be valid ways of looking at it, and I'm in the latter camp. I see transhumanism as the means at which we can more fully reach some of human's potential. I don't see it as becoming other-than-human, as becoming a god, as it were.

Context: Politics and Belief in Science and Technology

Backing up a bit. Last year, from September through December I struggled to write a blog post essentially of a unified theory of the various prevailing sociological-political attitudes toward technology and science. The various camps include the Luddites, the technophiles, the transhumanists, and the secular humanists. The groups aren't mutually exclusive, strictly speaking, and I had a hard time probably because I was trying to relate it to my own personal experiences with 9/11 and the age of George W Bush and Obama in America. Clearly Obama's election is a product of the emergence of social media - that's easy enough to argue. Showing that it was a shift in attitudes toward science and technology themselves - well, that's a bit more of a tall order.

So the article kept getting rewritten and not published. But it made me deeply examine how people view science, technology, and humanity. It helped me look into why different camps of thought are so divided, especially on religious lines.

Humanism Does Not Imply Secular

I have a problem with secular humanism. It's secular. Well, strictly speaking, that's not the problem. The problem is that many people basically say that humanism implies secularism. Like somehow the exploration of reconnecting with the human condition automatically eliminates the need for God. Not that religion ought to be based on the need for God anyway; either you believe God exists or not. It is the atheist argument - that man invented God out of a need to explain the unexplainable. While this may be true, that still doesn't negate the existence of God. My counter-argument is that atheists also have that same need to explain the unexplainable, to fill every single gap of knowledge with a Religion of Science. It is the belief that science will ultimately explain everything, and we must have faith that it will.

Carl Sagan, the great astrophysicist spoke often that religion and secular science have the same aim and have the same faith-based root. Sagan saw wonder in the physical universe and drew spirituality through the exploration of it. Sagan was *not* an athiest, and was a self-avowed agnostic. Whether his spirituality included the belief in God, that's probably debatable. The important thing is that Sagan clearly believed that our spirituality and our scientific fervor could go hand in hand. It is a balancing act. It's the acknowledgment that even with scientific knowledge and spiritual exploration, we still can't know everything. That is very scary to most people. People like things wrapped up in a nice package.

Secularism Without Humanism is Just As Dogmatic As Anti-Science Religion

When you take science and you remove it from humanism, you get a dogmatic belief system in the same way as if you have religion without humanism. It is indeed true that religions have touched millions and millions for the better, spawned amazing works of art, and have and continue to serve altruistic purposes. At the same time, Religions also have this nasty habit of starting wars, even though every single major religion preaches peace and tolerance in its core beliefs. The key is that religions start wars when its leaders have abandoned compassion and humanist belief. Religions have been used to devalue the enemy, de-humanizing them, and making them prime targets for "cleansing". I shouldn't need to give examples to assert that religion are still usurped today as excuses for murder and war.

(And while I risk violating Godwin's Law), secular science-worship risks becoming what nazis did with their eugenics propaganda in World War II. When you worship Master Science as God and Master Science tells us that certain truths are true, then people will believe ridiculous ideas like Jews and Blacks and Gypsies and so on are inferior. It's bulls***, all of it, of course. The idea that somehow the nazi Germans were Aryan and superior is laughable to anyone who knows what the word "Aryan" really means. But the science sounded convincing enough to rile up the Germans in 1939 and cause the biggest, scariest human conflict ever. There was no humanity in Hitler's science, despite its stated goal of improving humanity.

Luddites and Anti-Science as a Reaction

Maybe this is why Luddites exist in our day and age; Science-worship can be a scary cult. For many, it is easier to wholesale reject technology and science than it is to come up with a balance between science and humanism. It's easier to have religion that doesn't care if it contradicts science, than to have to challenge one's religious beliefs and balance them with scientific laws. It's easier because it explains everything through faith. The Luddites are wrong for exactly the same reason that the Science-Cultists are wrong.

I'm with Darwin and Einstein and on this one - science is the exploration of the wonder which is God's creation. That doesn't mean God placed dinosaur bones in mountains to "trick us" as anti-evolutionists would assert. At the same time, it doesn't mean that evolution proves that God doesn't exist; it "merely" means that religions have been very, very wrong about how the physical universe works and needs to loosen up. I don't need to believe that God is up there listening individually to every single prayer and telling some poor legless man "no you won't get your legs back" or "Sorry, Haiti, you folks having a crappy worthless government and then getting struck by a giant killer earthquake is part of my divine plan." At the same time, I don't have to use tragedy as an excuse to simply drop all ideas about God and spirituality. Essentially, humanism doesn't have to be secular humanism.

Humanism is Actually A Religious Core Concept

And you know what? I believe all of the major religions' core beliefs agree with me. It is not like I am pulling this idea of humanism and religion going together out of thin air! Look at the stories of Jesus and Mohammad and Buddha and Moses. They all had transcendental experiences where they commune with the divine, each in their own different ways, and come back with a burning desire to show compassion to people who would be believers. It's a beautiful sentiment, and it's humanism. Not secular humanism, but humanism.

Transhumanism and Transcendentalism and Rival Definitions

There are rivaling definitions based on rival understandings about transhumanism and transcendentalism. As I wrote earlier, one is steeped in the idea of becoming a god. The other is more about a transformation that keeps us human, but opens up more potential to humanity.

The reason that I believe in the latter definition is a philosophical one. You can't change something into something completely different, unless there is an underlying common element to them both. For example, I can't change lead into gold using chemical means. However, I could hypothetically through nuclear means. This means requires understanding that, fundamentally, lead and gold are made of the same stuffs.

Human "Alchemy"

The same limits goes with doing alchemy on human beings. You can't change a human into "god" through transcendental means, unless humans and "god" already had some underlying connection and common elements. So if humans could transcend into "god", they would become all-powerful. But if there were more than one thing that was all-powerful, they would essentially overlap. So I conclude that humans can't transcend into an "all powerful god".

What then? If we use the definition of "god" in more of the polytheistic sense, that would imply that humans are just gods in a cocoon state. That's the widely believed transhumanist belief, where one would plug in one's brain into a computer and be far more powerful, but still not all-powerful. But isn't this a matter of perspective?

Is "god" a Matter of Perspective?

I've often referred to studies that say things like, "The average Sunday newspaper contains more information in it than an average Middle Ages person would come across in their entire life." Like Cortes and the Aztecs, the Spaniard conquistadors were gods to the Aztecs, simply with their knowledge of science and sailing and their technology of guns and galleons. But the Spaniards were a pious, religious folk; they certainly didn't view themselves as gods. My conclusion thus is that if humans were some sort of "god in cocoon state", that should we emerge from the cocoon, we still would view ourselves to be human beings.

Transhumanism Is Impossible, Literally Speaking

Ultimately, what it means to be human is clearly about access to external stimulus and responding (being alive) and sentience and perspective about our mortality, much more than it is about our bodies themselves. The idea that we could become something we would not recognize as human - literally transhuman - is impossible to me. Therefore, I am forced to look at transhumanism and come up with a pragmatic definition based in what's possible and what's more attuned to how humans actually operate and see themselves.

"Augmentationism" has been suggested to me, but that's not quite it, either. There is definitely a transformative property to how our technology will change us; at the same time, that transformation has always been happening - it's inherent to technology. And if technology is a product of human sentience, it's a product of humanity as well. You see! There's no escaping our human condition!

Quest for Immortality

That is what transhumanism - in the Science-is-God sense - ultimately boils down to. Humans constantly seek ways to become immortal. To become immortal is to escape the human condition which is mortality. It is our mortality that drives us, creates a hole in our lives that we need to fill. It is the premise behind asking the meaning of life. "Why do I have a limited time?" and "What do I do with my limited time?" People answer this question by having kids. They do it by creating art and literature. People contribute to society in the hopes that our collective civilization will live on and that each person will have become a small part of that. It's a biological imperative written into our most primal urges to procreate. And while we cannot escape our mortality, we can deny it and avoid it, and that is where we lose our humanity.

To deny one's mortality, and to avoid it, one is avoiding answering the question of "What do I do with my limited time?" It is willful ignorance. But that shadow - that hole which is mortality - still haunts us. We are reminded of it when we head or witness tragedy and loss of human life. That hole still needs to be filled, and people do it with money, sex, food, drugs, fantasy, and other diversions. However, let me clearly state: These are just things. They are not evil, nor good. It is how a human uses them that give them meaning. Therefore, I think that any philosophy which preaches the complete denial of these altogether is simply avoiding the question of mortality. It is more difficult to preach moderation and responsibility than it is abstinence, and yet it is moderation and responsibility which are the key tenets of any good ethical and moral system.

But we keep searching for immortality or perfection.. We call it a variety of things, like the Holy Grail, The Fountain of Youth, Shambala, or brain-uploading. We will never have these things, not the way we imagine them. It is Captain Ahab, searching for his white whale rather than caring for himself or his crew. If only I could catch that whale and take my revenge, then my life would be complete.

Religious Beliefs Can Be Corrupted By the Quest to Avoid Humanity

Religions that focus squarely on the afterlife and total denial of the current life are just avoiding what it is to be human. God made us human, right? Why would God make us human just for us to spend our whole life avoiding our humanity? That makes no sense whatsoever to me. At the same time, that doesn't mean I need to be a hedonist or a Satanist. Instead, I believe, one can accept one's own humanity as well as one's more eternal, spiritual nature. And the key is, again, moderation and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

A great deal of churches of various religions *do* preach these. However, from my own experiences, this seems to be more of a product of "listen to God's laws" rather than a fundamental understanding that it's our humanity that demands this. Is that a cynical view of churches? Yeah, probably. But it's the dogma that I've encountered over and over. It's definitely not an all-encompassing view, and I'm willing to have my mind changed that it's even a majority view.

But back on topic: It may be scary to religious conservatives, perhaps, but all that's needed is to go back and assert, "If God made man, God made humanity." I see humanism as a natural consequence of our nature - the good part of our nature. Didn't God make us "in his image" as the three big monotheistic religions say in their Creation stories? I argue that humanity and compassion are a large chunk of that.

Transhumanism as a Continuous, Non-Singulatarian Process

Now for me to practice what I preach, right? I need to perform more "human alchemy" on myself. And, well, actually, that's a good segue into my final point about transhumanism and technology. The singularity demands a single "before / after" point in time. I see that humans are constantly evolving as a civilization, in the same way that people don't simply get "saved" and then never have to worry about being a good person ever again. Being righteous is a continuous process, in the same way that civilization has and will continue to continuously evolve.

In any event, I believe one could be "transhumanist" with the focus on the "humanist". How we interpret the "trans" part ultimately lies in whether or not it is even possible to escape being human. If we can't, the trans simply reinforces the fundamental reality that the universe is in constant motion and we as humans and a civilization are constantly changing and evolving. If we can escape being human, then we won't care about humans because sentimentality and compassion are essential human traits. But to believe we can escape our humanity requires the same level of blind faith as believing "God put those dinosaur bones in the ground to confuse us."

You Can't Escape Being Human

And that's why the Na'Vi in Cameron's Avatar were so human-like. They had emotions. They had love and compassion toward each other, and even humans that they had no reason to show compassion. If this is indeed the result of bioengineering, as I asserted in my review, then we are still humans. We're just taller, and blue, and have more immediate ways of connecting with each other and our world.

Or maybe we've always had the ability to connect immediately with our world and each other, and we just need to step out of our cocoons.

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