draft

transhumanism is the recursive process of technological self-improvement

reference extropian principles http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm

with the right sort of cultivation, a human's capabilities can grow in any given 
dimension. although there exist many capabilities one may wish to improve, here 
we will only include those capabilities which are expected to contribute to 
further improvement. thus "the ability to fool oneself with wishful thinking" is 
not included in the list of justifications.

sort projects by dimension of capability, feasibility, and expected effectiveness

effectiveness is defined as the relative contribution of a given technology on a 
scale of 0 to infinity, where if the sum of all technologies a group has access 
to is greater than 1, then the group is able to create new technologies. 
technologies that affect the brain and that directly create new technologies are 
of special consideration because of the possibility of a positive feedback cycle 
of growth.


list of justifications, our core goals and values:

overcoming limits (increase maximum performance)
  physical strength
  perseverance
    sustained attention
  maximum complexity awareness
  bandwidth in
    sensory awareness
    information awareness
    pattern recognition complexity per unit time (increase)
  bandwidth out
    action latency
    expressiveness
    reduced time to mutual understanding
      communicate mental state and perceived history
      communicate plans, goals, models

improve system resilience (increase minimum performance) (zero performance means you're dead)
  mobility
  eliminate single points of failure
    biological immortality
    increase diversity
    partition society into loosely coupled units
      self-sufficiency

improve effectiveness (increase average performance)
  signal to noise ratio (increase)
    reduce extraneous input
    increase network size
  social interaction cross section (increase)
    flattening of social hierarchies
    reduce duplicated effort
      repeatable open source development
    delegation (offloading)
      leverage diversity of talent
  memory
  spatial awareness
  technology that enables technology development
    more useful mental models
      more predictive human performance descriptors
  reduction of unnecessary pain
  create drive for improvement