Ieldra2 wrote...
iakus wrote...
Ieldra2 wrote...
Yes, Kai Leng qualifies as well. There is no fixed agreed-upon borderline, but the term "transhuman" is meant to mean "transitional human", located somewhere beyond normal human parameters but not yet so enhanced that you could call them "posthuman". The "posthuman" state, that's actually where brain augmentations will take you, implying that the way you think and your increased cognitive abilities will make you appear more and more alien to normal humans. Shepard is transhuman but not posthuman. I think whoever wrote EDI's dialogue was unaware of the distinction.
but by that definition, anyone with an implanted omnitool, biotic amps, or even a pacemaker is 'transhuman".
Anyone with implanted technology that gives them abilities beyond the human norm. A pacemaker doesn't count because it doesn't give such abilities, nor do omnitools since they aren't implanted, but a biotic implant does. Recall ME1? Martin Burns and his "Parliamentary Subcommittee for Transhuman Studies"? The issue was recompense for biotics who had been implanted with a risky L2 implant and suffered bad side effects. .
The Alliance soldiers' genetic modifications do not transfer to their children. At least the female soldiers' don't since a woman is born with all her eggs and they'd have to be modified separately. I don't know if that's possible for men as well, but I don't think the writers went that deeply into the science to differentiate. Anyway, since modification of gametes is a species modification I don't think that's on the table in the MEU. That's why Miranda is special. Her genetic template was created from the ground up so that all her children would inherit her abilities, and that's why the damned traditionalists among the writers made her infertile.
:S I really don't think they're traditionalists. I thought they were more showing how humanity is actually very new at this thing and isn't going to get the process perfect.
And I think the only thing that matters for 'transhuman' is the 'trans-itional' part. If you're only improving yourself, you're not *A* transhuman. If you're working to make yourself totally different through tech, you're *A* transhuman. Once you're there, yes, you're 'post-human'.
The difficulty is in subjective perception of this.
From our normal RL perception, transhuman is any form of augmentation. We mostly define it as such.
But to a society that has augmentation (of some sort) as a regular part of life, I don't think it's strange to see people defining transhuman differently. Some are 'more purely human' and some are 'abominations to humanity' and it all depends on the POV.
We have Shepard who is OK with some stuff, but the Cerberus level of 'improvements' is monsturous and the Reaper level of 'synthesis' is an abomination.
But the idea of them, in general, is absorbed by him. He has ideas by the end of ME3 that he didn't have before.
To Cerberus, staying 'pure human' = extinction, at some point. We won't preserve humanity if it is left to the organic and chaotic evolutionary method. Yet, the Reaper path to them also means that humanity is lost.
"We evolve or we die."
To the Reapers, there is no difference. It's just 'states' and 'DNA' and 'results'. Taking the Cerberus path to them is understandable but pointless ("Or do you THINK you can control us?"). Taking the more pure Organic path to them is pointless and not understandable, yet Shepard has been showing much higher success with it than anyone else.
The Reapers think in terms of millions of years.
Illusive Man thinks in terms of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.
While Shepard, rightttt up til the Citadel TIM/Anderson confrontation, and even as Paragon, thinks in terms of the here and now (but maybe up to 100s of years), and goes "What's the rush? Maybe we're not ready" (paraphrasing his intent.
That's the discussion here. There are several factions and characters with different POVs and perspectives, and we're mostly stuck in the POV of just ONE character. Shepard. He's a soldier, heck, even as special forces, he would be defined as a grunt by people like TIM and Harbinger.
So we can stick to what makes Shepard more...Shepard?, and go Destroy.
ORRRR we can go to the greater temptations, especially if we learn as much about tech as we can in the series, and go for Control or especially Synthesis. Learning about transhumanism, and yes, post-human theory, helps. We, the players, take the leap into the future and unknown, disregarding the perspectives of the warring people below us.
You may not have liked that, and preferred a better selling point for highly advanced tech. I can get that. But at the same time, would you mind if future games actually headed into that? Maybe the next game will be much more positive about integrating transhumanist tech into ourselves (even if there's still the option to be negative to it)? Maybe future games will even be much more positive about the full post-human idea, and of living as virtual entities in a cosmic world view?
Red is the lowest chakra. There are many more. Maybe we're done with the 'luddite' (as it seems you think of it as) main approach, and maybe future games will move on to other POVs, other characters. We're done with Shepard, correct?
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