But we did have to invent the (social) technology that enabled us to transition to a post-feudal society. And we did so without fully understanding feudal society.
For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse).
No one person had to understand everything about feudal society for the next stage to emerge. It just emerged, as always happens in an evolutionary process.
To try again with a more complete answer to your initial question:
Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception for the to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?
In all the examples you’ve given, organic life is the common denominator. Each is a case of the natural progression of life, either the natural life cycles that have existed for billions of years, or of the culture that has emerged out of that.
If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.
If we mean something else then people need to explain what they mean, but that’s really why we get stuck in the weeds on this topic; we don’t have a simple, agreed understanding of what it is we’re transitioning from/to and what is doing the transitioning.
But the simple answer to your central question is that the key difference here from the rule you’re positing is that we’re talking about a departure from the natural biological and cultural evolution that has brought us to this point.
> If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.
What you mean by that? Except for "mind uploading" I don't see what you referring to...
Like the Iron Age didn't succeed the Bronze Age in one night there is nothing to understand or to prepare to pass into a "transhumanist society"... because we already are...or even we always were.
Glasses, prosthesis, eye surgery, ... : all are the start of what is called transhumanism. That's why I think it should be used rather as a mindset than as a social goal.
Well sure, but as I said, this topic very quickly gets stuck in the weeds over definitions and “what do you mean by ...?” questions, as the above couple of comments illustrate.
I’d regard the augmentations you list in your last paragraph as remedies to help restore capabilities that are present in other humans of normal health/ability, prior to aging or injury. Other augmentations that are commonplace are tools that make us more efficient at doing things we can already do; I.e, computers enable us to do much larger calculations, data operations or information archivals/retrievals. But they don’t fundamentally change our evolved nature, so it’s hard to see how the prefix “trans” applies.
Despite many claims of breakthroughs, we’ve yet to see any technology that profoundly alters human genetics, cognition or mortality away from its state of natural evolution a few decades or centuries ago, and it’s not clear that anyone has serious answers for how such transitions will happen, nor how they could happen without a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underpin them.
The emergent structure of a society is always more complex than the analytical tools available in that society are capable of modeling. As the tools become more sophisticated, the same technologies and institutions that enabled their development results in a correlated increase in complexity in the social structures. Forever keeping true contemporary introspection out of reach.
The best sci-fi counterexample is probably Seldon's Psychohistory from The Foundation Trilogy.
A thought experiment related to this: how dominant would the average macro hedge fund from 2022 be if they were transported back to 1985, with no knowledge of specific future events but with all of their scientific knowledge, models (and maybe computing power?) etc.
I don’t disagree with the emergence/complexity progression statement but the issue is more fundamental:
you cannot accurately model a system within that system.
The thought experiment doesn’t work because the hedge fund would need to be transported back with networking and information access they can’t get in 1985. They would show up, try to get onto the trading floor, be rejected, have to get re-trained, have to hire an army of data entry folks, and they would still get beat by the good old boys network and insider trading that wasn’t yet being identified and prosecuted.
That’s all if they weren’t just investigated and arrested for cheating while their computers worked through their planned obsolescence timeline in some closet.
For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse).