Transhumanism as religion

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So far it's going like:

"But atheism doesn't give life any meaning." "So what?"

Scarlet A.pngmoral21:03, 4 March 2012

That's why you should join my secular religion. Philosophical suicide hurts. Don't do it.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:05, 4 March 2012

The grand irony being that I imagine most of these people subscribe to a Yudkowskian idea of rationality where beliefs must act as constraints for expectation of experience. Except where you're discussing cool sci-fi concepts where computers rule the world.

Scarlet A.pngbomination21:09, 4 March 2012

Most of them come from physics, computer science and engineering backgrounds. Those disciplines tend to produce a lot of crypto-Platonists that are totally in love with ideal, universal laws. This tends to lead to them applying the same style of thinking to everything and oversimplifying "real world" problems. I see this all the time with AI-types (and they're a dime a dozen in the transhumanist movement), they basically just take all the computational models in cognitive psychology and reify them. They basically have invented a new soul, which they call "information." If you take computational models literally, the mind is simply information, thus, if you want to upload it, you just "extract" the information. Of course, this is classic Cartesian dualism, but they usually get around it with some half-assed quantum argument or, viz. Yudkowsky, "It doesn't matter what paper it's written on!" This is also why LW drinks the capital-EP Evo Psych (in the Buller-ian sense) kool-aid: The hypothesis of massive modularity makes the brain into nicely mechanistic computer (or one big computer running a bunch of smaller computers, if you want to be precise). Of course, most of them don't know jack about neuroscience, otherwise they'd realize how nutty actually claiming the brain literally is a computer is. So they've created a new type of soul, end times, teleological/determinist view of history, salvation, etc. At the end of the day, they've just dressed up dat ol' time religion in blinkenlightsWikipedia. Which is why I love when they rail against the irrationality of religion.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:37, 4 March 2012

I don't see how it's the same as dualism. Sure, a literal interpretation of the brain being a computer is problematic, but the principle is that if you simulate the material that makes up the brain perfectly, then that should function as a brain. In fact, it's denying that this is a possibility is what dualism posits - though whether it's a realistic possibility is different entirely, of course.

Scarlet A.pngtheist22:05, 4 March 2012

Except you left out the main reason why they want to simulate a brain: Immortality. I don't think it's out of the question that we could simulate a brain, the sticking point is whether your "uploaded" mind would be "you." And then we're off into the land of swamp men and p-zombies, let's not even go there.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:12, 4 March 2012

The Swampman thing was handled so much better in Caprica and at the end of The Prestige anyway.

Scarlet A.pngtheist22:16, 4 March 2012
 

Though I do contend that, just as "is there a meaning to life?" is loaded to whether you want a God or not, the "is it really you?" question is loaded to your fuzzy feelings over souls and whatnot.

Scarlet A.pngd hominem00:11, 5 March 2012

And both of them are meaningless questions.

 
 
 

Which is why I changed my concentration ;)

ТyNo04:22, 5 March 2012
 

I'm also reminded of a line from the Atlas Shrugged fisking: "Listening to her impatience at other ideologies reminds me of a five year-old considering the world’s problems. Can’t get the Chilean miners out? “Why not just build a robot?” she’d say, handing over a sketch; herself pictured overseeing the operation from a unicorn. When kids do it, it’s cute (theoretically), but seeing a brusque Russian author do it — not so much." It might be about Objectivism, but, same idea.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)21:53, 4 March 2012