Thread:User talk:Nebuchadnezzar/Transhumanism as religion/reply (9)

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. Which is why I love when they rail against the irrationality of religion.