I'm hard-pressed to find much of a disagreement here. I see the point that training changes a person, equips him or her with skills, goals, habits, and so on. Buddhist training results in an enlightened character, we might say. What's special about this character is that it's supposed to be an imperturbable state of mind, a freedom from ordinary kinds of suffering. My point was just that the motive, if not the result of that training seems to me humanistic and hedonistic. But I agree we shouldn't commit the genetic fallacy and reduce effects to causes. Some properties emerge and aren't reducible.

I'm happy to acknowledge the possibility of all sorts of modifications of the self. Everything that's functional can be made dysfunctional, and every adaptation can morph into an exaptation. There are many forms of training, many characters a person might try to adopt. The question is which type of person we should choose to be. There's a normative question here, and Buddhism begins with an answer to it: we should end a common type of suffering.

Put more dramatically, we might say that Buddhism presupposes a vision of transhumanity, an ideal of enlightenment or of a higher state of mind. But there are numerous visions of such a transcendent state, numerous conceptions of how the mind might be altered for the better.

And I'm saying not that Buddhism and humanism are identical, but that they overlap in their noncosmicist attitude towards suffering. Buddhists and humanists say all forms of suffering are bad or pointless. From a more deontological or existential standpoint, we might say the higher state of mind is obliged to suffer in honour of horrific truths. That's the contrast I'd draw between Buddhism and humanism, on the one hand, and a more pessimistic take on naturalism, on the other.

Indeed, too bad there's no beer here. Conversations like these are best had with beer.