- Losing faith in God in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the west dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.
- Transhumanists, in their eagerness to preempt charges of dualism, tend to sound an awful lot like...early church fathers. Eric Steinhart, a “digitalist” philosopher at William Paterson University, is among the transhumanists who insist the resurrection must be physical. “Uploading does not aim to leave the flesh behind,” he writes, “on the contrary, it aims at the intensification of the flesh.” The irony is that transhumanists are arguing these questions as though they were the first to consider them. Their discussions give no indication that these debates belong to a theological tradition that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Common Era.
Naaah, shit gets super-handwavey whenever science is used to justify religion, spirituality, mysticism or anything else that scientific evidence is lacking for. The object is not to make a scientific argument, the object is to make a science-ey argument. It's pretty much the core problem of faith: as soon as you attempt to use reason and logic to prove faith, you discover that the whole point of faith is that it can't be proven. And as soon as you attempt to use faith to reinforce reason and logic, you discover that ungrounded assumptions are toxic to scientific thought. As a species we have a nasty tendency to crave a unifying theory of everything and those annoying shitfucks that insist that if there is a god, he's hidden himself pretty well in the equations but if there isn't a god, an absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence mostly just piss off both sides. Meanwhile, those that are on shaky spiritual ground will often assemble a cosmology out of available parts - I worked with a guy once who decided he believed in Christianity simply because there's more documentation of Christian miracles on Youtube than there is for Islam or Judaism. The transhumanists tend to be those who have a faith in "science" but it's in air quotes because they tend not to be scientists - or if they are, they tend to have expertise in something other than machine learning, bioengineering or anything else that might come in handy. This allows them to view the "singularity" as the inevitable culmination of scientific progress rather than the literal invention of god. You probably don't want to watch What the Bleep do we know.
You want the analogy to advance the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. They want the analogy to advance the pursuit of comfort and self-satisfaction. Nobody ever compared quantum mechanics and Jesus because they wanted a better understanding of either; they compared quantum mechanics and Jesus because they wanted an excuse to stop questioning the shit that didn't make sense to them.
Annoying shitfuck reporting for duty, sir! That was how my parents introduced me to quantum mechanics. Oh man, what a journey.What the Bleep
Jaron Lanier on "cybernetic totalism" in 2000 Worthy of note: According to Kurzweil in 2000, the Singularity is only three years away.Do Dawkins, Dennett, and others in their camp see some flaw in logic that insulates their thinking from the eschatological implications? The primary candidate for such a flaw as I see it is that cyber-armageddonists have confused ideal computers with real computers, which behave differently.
I have plenty of them, in fact. I can honestly say that when I first read it, I disagreed with virtually every point he made. Nonetheless, I keep referring back to it. I think he's wrong about a lot of stuff, but I also think his perspective is well-considered, insightful and exists as a synthesis of a number of valuable areas of study. It's well worth the read.
transhumanism always sounds very... wisdom of Chopra to me.
If I have a religion, this is it. I believe that man will merge with machine, and it is happening in bits and pieces all over the world. It doesn't require belief. It doesn't require approval. The people working on AI will continue to work on AI. The people working on brain/machine interfaces will continue to work on brain-machine interfaces. Automation will continue to be be cheaper than human labor, and will only get cheaper. Providing we don't blow ourselves up first, we will become an interplanetary species within this century.
Fair enough. Know thyself. Waitwaitwaitbut ...since when have religions required "approval?" "and will create God in their own image" - see, that's a belief. "and will permit the perfect translation between organic being and silicon storage." See, that's a belief. "and demand curves will be repealed." See, that's a belief and one not particularly founded on anything. Fun fact: the printing press was invented in Crete and China and Byzantium before Gutenberg ever got to it but it didn't catch on because scribes were cheaper than movable type. The whole of the Ottoman Empire was an exercise in make-work in order to keep the young and unemployed from rising up and striking down the Caliph. Something they don't teach you in school: Gutenberg created movable type in 1440, a bare five generations or so after the Black Death reduced Europe's population by 30-60%. Scribes, in short, were in high demand so automation took over. I'm not going to question your beliefs... so long as you understand that they are beliefs, not statistical certainties. I can "believe" that the stock market will rise over the long run because mathematically, it is a positive sum game. I can "believe" that the sun will rise tomorrow because there's a lot of physics between that probability and any other. But I cannot "believe" in the Singularity the same way because And while you may think that people smarter than you understand Step Two? They're praying for miracles, too.If I have a religion, this is it.
I believe that man will merge with machine, and it is happening in bits and pieces all over the world.
It doesn't require belief.
It doesn't require approval.
The people working on AI will continue to work on AI.
The people working on brain/machine interfaces will continue to work on brain-machine interfaces.
Automation will continue to be be cheaper than human labor, and will only get cheaper.
You either misunderstand the quote, misunderstand bfv or both. Feynman was explaining the aesthetics of science, in that when you have a deeper understanding of something you appreciate it on a deeper level. His friend Jirayr initially stated, at a party he and Feynman were attending, that scientists could not truly understand aesthetics because they could only see the deeper level. It was this dispute that led to the wager between the two of them, to Feynman taking art lessons and for the two spending Sundays painting together for a number of years and, in no small way, reinforced Feynman's stance on the education of science because, from his perspective, Jirayr had been cheated by a liberal arts mentality that denigrated deeper understanding in favor of gestalt aesthetics. Norvig is stating that the AI insider's appreciation of AI is the trickster's appreciation of the trick, not the scientist's appreciation of aesthetics. One cannot simultaneously think the girl is sawed in half and magically rejoined while also appreciating the cleverness of the double box with hidden compartments. There is skill and mastery and aesthetic beauty in pulling coins from behind a kid's ear. There is not, however, any violation of the principles of thermodynamics. In order to appreciate the former you must reject the latter. Nature and art can be appreciated in whole or in part and the two approaches are additive. Magic and magic tricks, on the other hand, cannot for two are betrayals of each other.