It seems to me that the Exhumans are almost like an extremist version of the Ultimates in some ways while being entirely the opposite in a few key points. The similarities in evolving to overcome human weaknesses is certainly clear. The differences is that the Ultimates want to reach 'the transhuman limit' and become the greatest transhuman beings that they can be. The Exhumans, otoh, want to step (leap!) past that limit and abandon their humanity. I find it refreshing that these two groups of extremists are opposed to one another. I don't get warm-fuzzys from the Ultimates, but at least I don't see them (philosophically) as a threat to transhumanity. The Exhumans, however, are pretty clearly baddies from the Firewall perspective.

I've always thought of exhumans as especially different in that they are willing to lose their humanity. While a mere transhuman scientist will gladly make himself smarter, an exhuman is willing to also induce savant autism. A transhuman soldier will sleeve into a fury, but a transhuman will modify his self-image and remove any desire for romantic interaction so he'll enjoy sleeving in some monstrously effective combat morph and get rid of all empathic sense so he can freely use terror tactics and enhanced interrogation techniques.

what does it mean to be human, transhuman, or exhuman? to me most people living in the first world are already transhuman, if you took away the surgeries, the smartphones, cars, stores, etc would most of these be able to survive a more natural human environment? truth is we have already integrated ourselves with technology to the point that its removal would cause serious concerns about many people's survival. True transhumanity is a step beyond that, I have a mechanical device around my stomach that keeps my weight down, a mechanical answer to a biological problem. It is a perminant part of me and its safe to say I'm no longer 100% biological. Am I transhuman? the jump from transhuman to exhuman is even more extreme, it means absolutely eliminating anything human about yourself. I think "the hive" entry spells this out pretty well, a group of or a single transhuman some how turns him/themselves into a hive of 40+ different types of arthropods (bugs, spiders, bees, etc) that have some form of hive mind and can survive and grow in space (wtf are they eating?!?!) and have spread to two other lifeless asteroids already and are increasing in numbers. but bigger than the absolutely huge physical transformation, whats going on with their psyche? they probably have some form of insect politics (kill contenders) and I doubt their world view would be anything like a human or transhumans. to me thats a good line for exhumans... they have completely eliminated all humanity in themselves and become something inhuman. beyond human (or even transhuman) reason, beyond human intellect, not even derivitave of human form, IE completely alien. heck... we probably have more in common with the ETIs and slime mold than we do with a former transhuman at that level of modification.

The Ultimates are different from the Exhumans in that they are trying to achieve a form of human apotheosis. While they might have similar aims and goals to the Exhumans, the ultimate being they look to conceive and uplift themselves to is still essentially human. They are in essence the farthest-reaching people within the concept of "transhumanity", with emphasis on the word "humanity". There is a notable reason why the Exhumans are considered villains, while the Ultimates are not. Exhumans are focused on achieving posthumanity, with little regard to the consequences that it might have on everyone else. Their actions are fundamentally sociopathic, because they could care less about society within the context of achieving posthumanity. For them, the consequences mean little because the ends justify any means... what should they care about how many survive a second Fall if it means they can attain godhood?

Baalbamoth wrote:

I think Arenamont and myself are making the same point, though our sliders have little different settings. Decivre- well... kill one man your a murderer (human/transhuman), kill many your a conqurer (Ultimate).... kill them all your a god (Exhuman) heh... all a matter of scope... but I think Ultimates form great villians and non-villians... their the Klingons (or Khans) of the EP universe, where The Borg are the exhumans...

If you've ever seen the sci-fi series Andromeda, they had a genetically engineered human subspecies call the Nietzscheans. They were engineered for fitness and strength, and revolted to create a society where strength and cunning equated to power. Take them, mix them with some more engineering, make them more unified and less clan-like... and you basically have the Ultimates. I don't know if the Exhumans are really borg. Borg are a unified mind, while Exhumans are often self-serving. Maybe they are more like the Zerg cerebrates after the death of the overmind? Highlander crossed with sci-fi body modification? Katamari Damacy as a way of life?

nizkateth wrote:

So, if my ultimate goal is to: upload consciousness into a self-replicating nano-swarm, use raw materials from asteroids to build and expand the nano-swarm to enhance and grow consciousness and processing power, and essentially turn myself into an amorphous mobile Jupiter-brain... does that make me an Ex-human in goals?

I don't think the problem is the goal (after all, who *haven't* thought about this from time to time?) The problem is that the enhancements you do to your consciousness are pretty likely to turn you into something exhuman. First you get to those annoying speed limits of your processors, so you start parallelizing more and more. You add more and more virtual cortex. But now you find problems with lag times and dropped packets (maybe you shouldn't have used UDP), so you start using eager execution: individual processors calculate possible neural states that are thrown away if new data arrives that change what the outcome should be. Now you invoke the whole battery of optimizations: lookup tables, branch prediction, neural forwarding... as you grow, your mind becomes more and more a cloud of possible mindlets constantly collapsing into an official main state. Things get really weird when you start running some of them on quantum processors, locally experiencing everything that could be experienced before collapsing into one state. You start running genetic algorithms to invent new pieces of sim-cortex, and soon need symbiotic sub-processes to hunt down useless or self-serving microcircuits (otherwise they would take over). By the time you are a few asteroids in size you have experienced a century or millennium in simspace time without interacting with any other intelligent being. But that is not a problem, you are so many now...

Of course, there is the possibility that you change your mind at some point in this process of self-improvement and decide that humanity really is just holding you back and start throwing it away. At that point, you become an Exhuman. It can be hard to predict how you'll act when you start radically changing your brain and I'm sure more than a couple Exhumans did not intend to become what they ended up turning into.

though there are more than one way to get to that godlike iq... I mean do you want to fork yourself to near infinate and install group/hive mind connections? do you just augment your cog and your mental actions per round to godlike proportions? all kinds of nifty ways to loose that dirty meat between your ears.

I wonder if you could run a mind on a large database architecture. A single storage medium stores all memory and skill while multiple processing units perform mental and physical actions informed by the same memories. So you have all the advantage of a fork but fork a is immediately aware of what fork b is doing because he remembers doing it. This separation of memory and active mind is of cause highly theoretical and could esaly result in problems.

I wonder if you could make your own super planet sized flex bot... wait... could the flex bot limbs break away from its own gravity?