Why would a very advanced Transhumanist Civilization ever need to have a military or wage wars?

Question

My Setting

First of all, let's define what a very advanced transhumanist civilization is in my setting:

1- Post-scarcity civilization (Kardashev level II or even III) where everyone has abundance in their needs from food and energy. People live in orbital stations so even the scarcity of living space is non-existent.

2- Very advanced AI with robots that do all the work that we now do, so people don't have to work anymore.

3- Aging problem has been solved, and people are quasi-immortal.

4- Citizens are transhumans enhanced with genetic-engineering and AI implants. (Will be discussed more below)

Background

In almost every sci-fi setting I have come across, and no matter how advanced the civilization is, there is some kind of fighting/war and we use our imagination as best as we can to imagine advanced weapons and military equipment. This, in my opinion, is due to a very flawed logic of extrapolating our current psychology which is mostly of violent and self-centered nature. This is of course appealing to us now because it relates to our emotions and makes those sci-fi interesting, but is this a really realistic view of our future?

Our current human brains are optimized through evolution for our survival and reproduction to allow further propagation of our genes. Consequently, any action that increases our chances of survival and reproduction as a species is rewarded by our brains and any actions that decrease those chances are punished. This is done by our brains by two mechanisms. 1) The Pleasure-Pain axis, which gives us pleasure upon doing something that increases our inclusive fitness like eating, having sex, being part of a group and ascending a social hierarchy (by resources accumulation and dominance), and pain upon doing things that decrease our fitness like harming ourselves, being expelled by our community and descending in our social hierarchy. 2) The Hedonic Treadmill, which ensures that we quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

It can be seen that those two mechanism easily justify our violent and selfish nature. Violence and selfishness assured the survival and reproduction for the fittest in a resource-scarce environment. Wars, regardless of their reasons be it resource acquisition, ideology or other reasons all fall under the effect of the pleasure-pain axis and are repeated because of the hedonic treadmill.

Problem

So what does what I described above have anything to do with the question? Well, because of all of the points I used to define a very advanced civilization with, transhumanism through genetic engineering seems to be the closest one that we should be capable of. This can be clearly seen through CRISPR and designer babies. And yet, we are still ignoring genetic engineering potential effects on the psychology of future humans.

The transhumanist David Pearce gives a huge insight into this through his Hedonistic Imperative, Abolitionist Project and Super-happiness. In short, he argues that in the near future and through genetic editing, we will be able to abolish suffering from sentient beings and edit our genes to allow us to live with information-sensitive gradients of well-being by raising our hedonic treadmill set-point. David calls this "paradise-engineering".

You do not have to completely agree with David Pearce to agree that our violent, jealous and self-centered nature will be something of no use in a post-scarcity society. In other simple words, why would a entity (a person or a state) need to fight another entity if both are superhappy, superintelligent and living in a universe with practically unlimited abundance?

Even if the reason for wars emerge from ideological differences, according to the pleasure-pain axis, wouldn't it be much more rational to just ignore each other or even split into two groups and continue living in their man-made bliss?

Question

Having described the above setting in which it is very plausible that genetic engineering will abolish our tendency to violence in an advanced civilization, why would this civilization still need to have a military and wage wars?

The question rephrased:

Why would we choose to keep our satisfaction and well-being of life dependent on the environment (through violence and war) when we can use genetic engineering to create much happier beings in a man-made paradise who can still function like us now through gradients of well-being?

Answer 1

Wars might not happen, but we will definitely have a military. Human psychology is this way because it is the nature of the world; not the other way around. I was reading waitbutwhy's essay on human nature in general. The relevant excerpt for the question is:

If there’s a common theme to all of human history, all over the globe, it’s probably humans bullying other humans. This is because bullying is one of the primary ways the Primitive Mind does business. Bullying is just humans doing business in a primitive format: the Power Games.

The Power Games basically goes like this: everyone acts fully selfish, and whenever there’s a conflict, whoever has the power to get their way, gets their way. Or, more succinctly:

Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off.

There are no principles in the Power Games—only the cudgel. And whoever holds it makes the rules.

The animal world almost always does business this way...

Emphasis made by the author. But the reality of Power Game is that if there are 2 groups of people (or any other beings), one with military and one without, and if there's ever a serious conflict between them, the one with the military wins. And this conflict can come about from even the pettiest reason like pride or just pure trolling. But the result is the same, the guys with the bigger sticks wins.

Think what would happen if there are no military or police forces or any kind of fighting force, everyone is blissfully peaceful. Then if 1 person rejects the peace-enhancing genetic changes, and decides to be violet, he can basically take over the world with a gun. At least until some force assembles to stop him. And suddenly there's a military in your civilisation again.

If your civilisation wants peace, it needs to enforce it when someone challenges it! The absolute lowest level of military you can have is what would take to halt a surprise attack until you can built more military power. If you still have countries, and 1 of them decide to hold a small fighting force, then the other ones have to deal with the possibility of this country attacking. If 2 countries have some forces, they have to consider each-other attacking the other one, therefore more military... At 3 entities with fighting forces, then 2 can ally against the belligerent. But there's a small chances that 2 of them ally against the peaceful nation. With more nations with a military, this ends up balancing out eventually when an aggressive alliance is too difficult to form and keep hidden.

There might not be wars, because everyone does actually prefer to live a nice peaceful life, rather than risk being the aggressors. But there will always be some standing force, even if just to impose a risk factor for any would'be aggressors.

Answer 2

The transhumanist civilization faces an existential threat from a civilization not like their own.

Your peaceful transhumance would not fight each other. That is all bred and engineered out. But they might not be the only civilization. Another civilization might not be so gentle. This civilization - of less engineered humans, or humans that are engineered differently, or aliens - wants the resources of your transhumanists.

The gentle transhumanists try negotiation, sharing, peace offerings; if those things don't work and the alternative is extinction, then the rational approach is violence.

Answer 3

Entertainment.

Sometimes people play cards for money. Sometimes they just play for the entertainment of the game itself. Even people who are currently very happy occasionally choose to divert themselves in such a manner (variety being the spice of life and all).

Those who play for money are either happy to lose the money, which is the equivalent of playing (and paying) for entertainment, or they’re playing because they desperately need to win more money back. The latter case (playing because you need to win) is like having a war for resources or ideology.

But your race has transcended both resources and ideological conflict. The only reason they would ever play a card game is for the entertainment value.

So too with war. The personal risk to your post humans can be reduced to nil using advanced robotics or medical technologies, leaving war as the ultimate expression of a competitive game. Throw hundreds of thousands of post humans into a war for a remote star system. Who cares if it gets shredded? The goal is for the posthumans to have fun playing the game. Nobody really gets hurt and everyone can enjoy a dopamine cocktail while bragging about their K/D ratio afterwards.

Of course, this sucks for any race not engineered into a state of post human bliss. Especially the ones designed by the posthumans to act as toy soldiers in the war game.

But who cares about them. They’re engineered to find dying in battle pleasant, right?

Answer 4

Having described the above setting in which it is very plausible that genetic engineering will abolish our tendency to violence in an advanced civilization, why would this civilization still need to have a military and wage wars?

It seemingly wouldn't, right? I mean, if we had the ability to create people who would experience complete and never-ending bliss as well as had the abundant resources to do it, why wouldn't we do that? And the answer if relatively simple - because of the people before the genetic engineering.

In order for these people to be created, you require a group of non-transhumans to create such a group, and these people would then have to create a group of people that they know will experience life superior to them in every way, shape, and form. Not to mention that, with quasi-immortality being applicable here, the scientists doing the creation will exist alongside these so-called 'perfect being'. And jealousy is a very, very human emotion. Let's say we can get around that problem by saying they can apply it to themselves. Well, then why would they give it to other people? Selfishness is also a human emotion. Not to mention that before all this existed, there are undoubtedly men or women of, shall we say, loose moral character who would see the rest of humanity going into little bliss pods as a perfect situation to raise up an army and conquer the galaxy, because after all, greed is a human emotion and no matter how much resources you may have, I very much doubt ownership of another sentient is one of them and there are plenty of people who would want to be capable of that. There can also be plots of people who refuse the transhumanism treatments for reasons which can range across a broad spectrum, and conflict comes from that.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that humans aren't perfect beings, and therefore it's never unrealistic to say that, despite all perfectly logical reasons to the contrary, conflict would break out. The history of war is filled with such examples of human behaving in non-logical ways, because while humans capable of logic, we're also capable of emotions.

If the starting assumption was all humans in perfect bliss bubbles, then there would be no good reason for wars and conflicts. However, that's not the starting assumption - the staring assumption is that we're humans, and humans are, ultimately, only human.

Answer 5

I think that you're confusing post-scarcity with unlimited resources.

A post-scarcity society still has money but things are just so cheap that by today's standards, everyone essentially has infinite wealth. For example, maybe 1000 tons of pure gold might cost $1. This means, that if you want, you can have your fabricator make you a pure gold fork at essentially no cost. Hell, you could even have your fabricator make you 1000 golden forks for essentially no cost. However, if you suddenly wanted a planet-sized cube made of pure gold, it would cost you. Even a post-scarcity level II or III civilization does not have the capability to give every single person (of which there might be trillions) a planet-sized chunk of gold at their whims.

Additionally, there might be dangers that want the peaceful transhuman's matter. Maybe there's a rogue paperclip maximizer on the loose or someone's Von-Neuman pet project went out of control. Moreover, advanced transhumanism basically requires that anyone can do it. What prevents someone dedicated enough from making fictional races real? Maybe someone gets it in their head that there really should be some space-orcs or whatever and engineer a self-propagating race of green-skinned and predisposed-to-violence people?

Answer 6

Epistemological differences

If two groups have different ideas about the very meaning of "truth" and "knowledge", and how to attain them, they can reach an impasse regarding some existential problem facing the entire society.

One possible problem might be the question of growth and the overall rate of resource use. The smaller your society, the longer it can last against the inevitable heat death of the universe. But if you're small and you eventually run into aliens who are jerks, you might get pounded. So maybe you decide to grow as quickly as you can anyway.

If two factions disagree on the answer to this existential dilemma, and can't even agree on what knowledge is, war is pretty much inevitable.

Answer 7

Fanaticism

All the pleasures and treasures of this world ultimately lose their luster, so some people go deep into religion or philosophy. For most this is healthy and causes no issues, but throughout history there have been dozens of wars and massacres waged in the name of religion, and in the modern era we have seen analogous brutalities done in the name of political ideologies.

Trans humans could also become extremists if all their needs are attended to, as their brains could still crave challenge, and they could easily feuds themselves into an extremist position

The popular image of terrorists as universally poor and uneducated is simply false terrorists can come from extravagantly wealthy backgrounds like Bin Laden, be extremely educated like Ted Kaczynski, or disturbingly normal like many ISIS recruits were said to be. So post scarcity and higher intelligence really can’t be said to stop these things, and in fact I’d argue that some aspects of trahnshumansim could make it worse.

The worldview of a terrorist is one of strict dichotomies and the inherent disposability of human life. I believe that transhumanism could exacerbate these things through the influence of machines on the human mind. A machine works ultimately in dichotomy, it is either a 1 or a 0, things need to be replaced when they’re not functioning or necessary, and when you make man run off machine logic it’s not hard to get machine “attitudes”. What I’m trying to say is you’ll set up machine logic as the ideal, and that’s one of inherent disposability and ruthless rationality.

Answer 8

If you have humans in a perpetual state of bliss, they lose the drive to do anything. Why? If your current state is perfect happiness, why would you do anything?

If you put them into a genetically engineered state of perpetual perfect bliss, they might as well not exist. Or, they can be replaced by statues.

If you still want motivations for people to do anything there need to be different states of happiness, or in other words, a less desireable state that they are in and a more desireable state that their actions might move them to (or the opposite, a less desireable state that they would move to by inaction).

Once we have these basics down, there is potential for conflict as soon as one's goals conflict with someone else's goals. These conflicts don't have to be about materialistic goals. They could be e.g. about idealistic goals.

You can see that in our current world as well. If people are starving they might fight for food. But if people are well fed and things are going OK, you get an Arab Spring. Now people are all of a sudden not fighting for survival, but for idealistic goals like freedom.

Or take a look at Central Europe. Over here things are going pretty well (at least before Corona). Almost everyone has enough to eat and even homeless people are rather rare. But still you get Neonazis and Antifa who fight each other, not because they are starving, but because they project their unhappiness onto some other group of people.

Even in a world of utter abundance there is a lot of potential for conflict.

Answer 9

Peaceful transhumans can be easily wiped out by non-peaceful transhumans. They will therefore be extinct and the latter will predominate.

It's not a matter of impulse or violent tendency, just sheer practicality. Any utopian transhuman culture which does not have a military capability becomes an amusing historical foonote.

Answer 10

Trust, and not knowing the Intent of someone else

If you think about it for a minute, every little action you or everyone else is doing is always happening because he/she/it gets at least a little value out of it (or hopes to get some in the future). This value doesnt need to be much, it can be as simple as "feeling good because I do it".

If you now think about why Entities actually do what they do in the long term, you will also notice that it's not only "a little value". But it's always out of self-interest. I will just cite yourself: "any action that increases our chances of survival and reproduction as a species is rewarded by our brains and any actions that decrease those chances are punished".

That's nothing anyone can really avoid. That's just like it is. Now here comes the problem of why your described civilisations will (from my point of view) still be in war / conflict:

They don't know each other well enough to correctly judge if an action that a different Entity does is good or bad for the observing Entity. In other words, they can not know why the other Entity is doing/saying the things they observe.

If they do not blindly trust in the "good intent" of the acting Entity, they will feel agressed by some or the other action.

You could try to avoid that for example by:

1. Making all the Data of the Universe known by all Entities. So they can predict the outcome of any action with 100% certainty. (May the Force be with you!)
2. Linking the Brains of all Entities, so they always know exactly why the other Entitie is acting like it is (think of Borg or the Zerg)
3. Making all Entities to behave in "vulcanian" fashion. If all Entities assume best intent in all actions they observe and start their conversation based on this action, using pure logic, conflict can be avoided.

All of those three have one common issue: evolution means mutation. Mutation means there will be some Entities which behave differently. Those could still impose a threat to the overall population.

Actually, this would make for some very interesting stories because no one would know why this "mutant" is acting like it is.

Answer 11

I think you are just evading the basic idea of what makes a civilization, because conflict is the engine of civilization, if not its essence. No conflict means such a civilization is irremediably doomed, and it should be damned, because it lacks any soul.

You've already provided a setting for such a failure of imagination, here are several ideas:

• You've described a civilization totally reliant on robots, machines and tools. In fact, it was always the contrary: we've been nurtured since the beginning of times by the machines which used us as tools for galaxy colonization as organic calculators. Now that this is complete, we can be disposed off.
• We've filled all needs, including immortality, and so that we've lost our humanity. Obviously roughly half of the galaxy population rejects such a devolution, and wants to return to simpler times: agriculture, religion, eventual death. It wouldn't be a problem in itself, except that the other half feels threatened by fundamentalism and needs to exterminate it, hence civil war.
• The obvious external, here extra-galactic element: neighboring galactic civilizations, that rightfully perceive us as an existential threat: warmongering humans. They have to sanitize us.
• We've all become rich, but soft and ignorant, and have awakened the black hole at the center of the galaxy which goes full quasar and scapes our control. Or, a galactic pandemia that turns us into zombies. Genetic homogeneity turns out to be predictably vulnerable anyways to a mutation, a simple flu/virus wipes out a galaxy.
• No matter its size, the galaxy can't escape the infinite human stupidity, multiplied by an infinite number of humans. We've created a technology (3D into 2D space folding) that destroys the galaxy, and the whole Universe in a blink of an eye.

Finally: an immortal Kardashev III civilization not only has stopped being human long ago, but has become intelligent and self-aware and as such, god-like similat ro how primitive humans used to imagine God.

But we aren't God, and God itself, the Universe and/or its Own Creator, recognizes us as a demon, a fallen angel that falsely proclaims its deity status, a false god with a false religion (abundance), but that instead deserves damnation in hell, because It is not.

God destroys it, and all of its subsequent galactic sized avatars, until it destroys in rage the whole Universe, Meta-verse, and It-self, and creates a new one, a new Universe purged of the corruption.

Please, just read Olaf Stapleton.

Answer 12

Evil Geniuses(Genii?)

After achieving post scarcity human society when through a serise of catastrophies, the AI war, the Decadence Century etc but once these minor issues were sorted out everything seemed fine untill Dr Evil stole the moon.

In the pre-utopian age humans were naturally limited by the need for cooperation in any large endevour. But post scarcity, individual humans are limited only by their intelegence and drive.

This was fine as long as good people made discoveries, used them wisely and shared them, but it was found impossible to prevent the birth of the occasional Evil Super Genius. These ESGs would work hard to make a leap in scientific progress and then unleash its results on the galaxy without regard for others.

The Great Moon Theft, The gender reassignment plague, Talking Cats, The Time Wars etc all caused problems for society as a whole and it was decided to create an organisation of Super Police to limit the effect of these inventions.

The Super Police worked to keep abreast of the latest science and its 'military' applications, ensuring they had a standing force which could react to any surprises thrown up by ESGs.

Today the Super Police are in effect a standing army, government and police force for humanity and althugh their main focus is on ESGs, Alien Invasions etc they are often called in to resolve minor family arguments before they go nuclear.. literally

Answer 13

War. What is it good for. Absolutely every single allowable possible sci-fi plot device ever.

Asking libertarian science nerds (who are my people) how to have civilization and not war is the same as asking your 7th grade algebra teacher what you get when you divide by zero. Answer: you get a breathless lecture about why you’re not allowed to ask the question.

At some point science fiction stopped being about asking philosophically interesting questions about the endlessly varied potential states of being and became about incredulously ridiculing any scenario that didn’t pander to the vanity and ideological preconceptions of its readers. -breathless indeed- Have you read any of the Hainish books by Ursula LeGuin? I’m not saying they are anti-war but they don’t wholly hang on capitalist war as forming the base quantum of all space and time.

Arthur Clark’s Rendezvous with Rama is good. For movies there’s Solaris, Melancholia, come to think of it, everything good is about a state of being that pushes beyond the boring cynical violence-worship that qualifies as plausible modern science fiction.

Answer 14

Frame challenge. It wouldn't (But that makes a very boring story)... So There will be dragons. Your transhumanic idealistic society where every want/whim is satisfied. Is a slowly stagnating society. Technology progress has halted. The vast majority of humanity spends their days idling away in virtual worlds disconnected from reality.. .One person, or a group of people become dissatisfied with the status quo... Perhaps they long to do things that even in your extremely hedonistic society where anyone an do what they want is illegal.

regardless they turn on the status quo and do to the apathy of the world they create a massive schism and start taking over the world.