Somebody shared this on Facebook recently:
I ignored the claim about how the world is "so exquisite with so much love and moral depth", which probably merits a separate thread altogether, and focused on the part about "[looking] death in the eye". I said "How about no?" and included this as a picture comment:
We see so many such disturbing comments from humanistic thinkers. Fortunately, there are dissidents. The AI pioneer Marvin Minsky said it well in an article written for Scientific American:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pap...am.inherit.txt
People write off the idea of immortality as though it would be grindingly boring, apparently without realizing that the same sort of technology that would prolong life indefinitely should also be able alleviate boredom indefinitely—boredom certainly has some neural substrate which can be disabled. If age (currently!) leads to becoming set in one's ways, then control over mental plasticity can also be expected with the arrival of such technology. Certainly, there are already forerunners to such technology that have been used for decades, indeed centuries in some cases, in the form of drugs such as LSD, psilocin and other creativity-enhancing 5-HT2A agonist drugs.
All told, most if not all arguments in favor of dying I've ever seen from humanists betoken a complete lack of imagination and a rather feeble rationalization of a bad thing that evolution imposed for its own benefit.
The same goes for infirmity. Certainly, physical infirmity is something that is being and ought to be pushed back by biotechnology. These changes are most welcome. But what I find most interesting is the idea of pushing back mental infirmity. The idea that human intelligence is infinitely plastic—again, often shared by humanists like Sagan et al.—is a silly liberal conceit. Intelligence is highly heritable and most people inherit rather little of it. Again, this is something that has been decided by evolution. Smart enough to become the apex predator on planet Earth. But the competition is chimpanzees. What is out there in the cosmos that even the best human intellects cannot grasp? To his credit, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who usually sticks to silly humanist talking points, considered this idea very seriously in "a fascinatingly disturbing thought":
Essentially, he imagines an alien species analogous to us in the following way:
chimpanzees : humans :: humans : Tyson's aliens
In other words, NDT imagines something whose neural genome is as advanced beyond ours as ours is advanced beyond that of the chimpanzee. We—even the Nobel Prize winners—would look like chimpanzees in their eyes, mental midgets. This is a very interesting thought experiment. If the NASA scientist and historian Steven Dick is right about the so-called "postbiological universe", then this may be the case throughout the cosmos.
So, why not make it the case here? If humanism wallowing in a backwater of ignorance for millions of years to come, you can count me out. I think our sights should be set higher. A lot higher.
"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides." — Carl Sagan
I ignored the claim about how the world is "so exquisite with so much love and moral depth", which probably merits a separate thread altogether, and focused on the part about "[looking] death in the eye". I said "How about no?" and included this as a picture comment:
We see so many such disturbing comments from humanistic thinkers. Fortunately, there are dissidents. The AI pioneer Marvin Minsky said it well in an article written for Scientific American:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pap...am.inherit.txt
Whatever the unknown future may bring, already we're changing the rules that made us. Although most of us will be fearful of change, others will surely want to escape from our present limitations. When I decided to write this article, I tried these ideas out on several groups and had them respond to informal polls. I was amazed to find that at least three quarters of the audience seemed to feel that our life spans were already too long. "Why would anyone want to live for five hundred years? Wouldn't it be boring? What if you outlived all your friends? What would you do with all that time?" they asked. It seemed as though they secretly feared that they did not deserve to live so long. I find it rather worrisome that so many people are resigned to die. Might not such people be dangerous, who feel that they do not have much to lose?
My scientist friends showed few such concerns. "There are countless things that I want to find out, and so many problems I want to solve, that I could use many centuries," they said. Certainly, immortality would seem unattractive if it meant endless infirmity, debility, and dependency upon others—but we're assuming a state of perfect health. Some people expressed a sounder concern—that the old ones must die because young ones are needed to weed out their worn-out ideas. However, if it's true, as I fear, that we are approaching our intellectual limits, then that response is not a good answer. We'd still be cut off from the larger ideas in those oceans of wisdom beyond our grasp.
People write off the idea of immortality as though it would be grindingly boring, apparently without realizing that the same sort of technology that would prolong life indefinitely should also be able alleviate boredom indefinitely—boredom certainly has some neural substrate which can be disabled. If age (currently!) leads to becoming set in one's ways, then control over mental plasticity can also be expected with the arrival of such technology. Certainly, there are already forerunners to such technology that have been used for decades, indeed centuries in some cases, in the form of drugs such as LSD, psilocin and other creativity-enhancing 5-HT2A agonist drugs.
All told, most if not all arguments in favor of dying I've ever seen from humanists betoken a complete lack of imagination and a rather feeble rationalization of a bad thing that evolution imposed for its own benefit.
The same goes for infirmity. Certainly, physical infirmity is something that is being and ought to be pushed back by biotechnology. These changes are most welcome. But what I find most interesting is the idea of pushing back mental infirmity. The idea that human intelligence is infinitely plastic—again, often shared by humanists like Sagan et al.—is a silly liberal conceit. Intelligence is highly heritable and most people inherit rather little of it. Again, this is something that has been decided by evolution. Smart enough to become the apex predator on planet Earth. But the competition is chimpanzees. What is out there in the cosmos that even the best human intellects cannot grasp? To his credit, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who usually sticks to silly humanist talking points, considered this idea very seriously in "a fascinatingly disturbing thought":
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Essentially, he imagines an alien species analogous to us in the following way:
chimpanzees : humans :: humans : Tyson's aliens
In other words, NDT imagines something whose neural genome is as advanced beyond ours as ours is advanced beyond that of the chimpanzee. We—even the Nobel Prize winners—would look like chimpanzees in their eyes, mental midgets. This is a very interesting thought experiment. If the NASA scientist and historian Steven Dick is right about the so-called "postbiological universe", then this may be the case throughout the cosmos.
So, why not make it the case here? If humanism wallowing in a backwater of ignorance for millions of years to come, you can count me out. I think our sights should be set higher. A lot higher.
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=266322&goto=newpost
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