[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Teilhard de Chardin - Truth or Dare

[Brett Paatsch]

Natasha wrote:

> Most transhumanists are spirited toward life and learning,
> but leave the soul on the bottom of our shoes.  Indeed a
> sense of  compassion and understand[ing] is often veiled
> by a strong desire to push forward out of humanity's womb,
> but it is deeply rooted in transhumanism nonetheless. It this
> enough in itself, or do we need to leave an open place for
> religious views, or are they really a throw back to ingrained
> defaults?
>
> I don't think we need it.  I think we need more love and
> understanding, story-telling, poetry, imagination, laughter, fun
> and companionship, not .. religious mysticism?

I don't need religious mysticism to tell me life is worth living,
friends are worth having, sensations can be pleasant, emotions
are enriching. And I know that some others don't but I'm always
please to find one more.

Still, I don't think we need be concerned about leaving an open
place for religious views any more than we need be concerned
about leaving safe places for bacteria to breed in. Religion,
theism are natural phenomenon with causative bases. A-religion,
a-theism, rationalism, (also natural phenomenon) came later
(sometimes) and as a much smaller subset. Multi-cellular life
succeeded from unicellular life but uni-cellular life is not extinct
nor is it a spent force clinging onto life only at the forbearance
of multi-cellular life. At least not so far as I can tell.

Functionally, adaptively, memetically, science is the new paradigm,
the shorter less proven method or experiment, religion is old (ie.
"proven"). Historically (and pre-historically) people have been
studying each other and playing politics (by extrapolating and
projecting their own needs and desires onto others and using the
insight) far longer then they have been engaging in science. Indeed
science to some folk of earlier eras was The Great "S" Word rich
in promise of dreams to be fulfilled with ever continuing and greater
enlightenment. How many scientists died I wonder thinking well not
me, not quite, I could not beard the d word dragon, but maybe my
children or their children....

Christianity is around 2000 years old, Judaism maybe 6000, and
most of the worlds other big religions are even younger than that.
Cults that succeed for a time in the meme wars become religions.
*Functionally* religions will be around for as long as people
*believe* in things, because nature is not the only thing that abhors
a vacuum (rational mortal power brokers do too) and *believing*
in things has the political effect of leaving one at least *potentially*
in thrall to some more rational and more calculating sentient. If one
has a tendency to believing one is likely to wake up at some time
and discover that ones particular types of beliefs are serving
someone else, even someone else in particular ;-)

When one announces one "believes", one is announcing (whether
one realised it or not) both ones limits and that one is potentially
available for manipulation. I am sorry that the "proof" on that one
*really* does not fit in the margin but as I am not trying to be a
wiseass but to be genuinely provocative and perhaps instructive
to some young extropes of less than 120 summers I will expand a
bit on this even in this already long post.

I think there is a species of naiveté that holds that the social 'sciences'
are somehow less important or less influential in ones life than the
natural sciences. This is an easy error for a bright young mind born in
the age of science to make but it is an error nonetheless. And it can
also be a fatal one.

The social sciences are in an important sense also natural sciences
in so far as what they teach can be apprehended by a mind that is
willing to reason. The key practical difference between the study
of people as opposed to the study of insentient things is that people
as object-subjects do not so readily stand still for re-examination.
Evolution has tended to filter out those who are too readily
understood *because* they are readily understood and then they
are anticipated and consumed by predators who are all too happy
to take the resources in the condensed refined form that they are
provided.

Because people don't stand still for each other to study, the detailed
study of other people is necessarily a solitary one. One cannot prove
ones insights into people-in-general in the same way as one can tell
another scientists how to set up and reproduce ones work in their own
lab. But simply because the lessons of studying other people are not
easily communicated does not mean that they are not able to be well
learnt by some that make the necessary solitary effort. The study of
other people is a rational thing for one to do but it is not a moral
(nor is it an immoral thing) in itself.

Let me now hook back to religion.

Most independent confident minds in the course of their development
will consider and study both the world of things (insentients) and the
world of sentients (other people and to some extent animates or
animals) because both matter profoundly.

Homo-sapiens are born needy and yearning and they are born dying.
They need warmth and nourishment and stimulation. Most of us
understand that and we understand that others understand it too
but few seem emotionally able to draw things out to there logical
conclusion. Perhaps the blackness and solitude of the existential
abyss we look into when we consider our own mortality (and other
things -there are multiple chasms) scares most folk too much and
they have to clamber back to the security and false comfort of
group delusion (which ironically is still a cluster of individual
delusions that just *seems* like group delusion).

Some people get that religion is used by the selfishly (I don't selfish
to have a negative connotation) rational to enthral the selfishly
less-rational and some don't. And from the ranks of those that get
that comes the new cultists and the next generation of religious
leaders (though not necessarily only these people - self professed
atheists make for poor cultists and indeed may sideline themselves).
The battle for political power is a battle to enthral  "believers" or
compliant confederates kept in confidence of later payment and
to add their force be it physical (or their vote or their wealth and
influence) to ones own.

Atheism is something that a political leader cannot overtly carry,
yet ironically god (if he/she/it existed) would not need to merely
*believe* in him/her/itself - it would *know* him/her/itself
profoundly). God would be an a-theist, as indeed are I suspect
most of the worlds true wielders of power, though the toggle
switch may flicker from time to time even amongst the very
powerful, indeed it may be better (more adaptive) if it does flicker.

Now for real spice add in the element of death and the modern
possibility of a "reprieve". Historically death has placed a reliable
upper limit on how long a lieutenant thrall had to wait to get to
succeed their master. Succession planning was important to keep
capable lieutenant thralls from launching revolutions. They could
bide their time if they were younger than the master they served
because they had a chance to replace (usually) him when he
died. But if he did not die the lieutenant thrall could not hope to
succeed and they would instead be stuck forever in thraldom
(until death). It is not hard to imagine (and indeed we frequently
do give voice to such imaginings in fiction and fable and nursery
rhymes given even to our children perhaps out of  some desire to
empower them whilst not crushing their 'spirits' for the world of
politics that awaits) what a deathless overlord means to a
lieutenant thrall. It means permanent endless thraldom.

If one wants to get a taste of what the overthrow of death might
do to large structures and societies (and why it scares the s**t
out of some folks  for what it might do to the "fabric of society"
one need consider little further than the breaking of the nexus and
the changing of the bargain (often implicit) between capable and
patient lieutenant thrall and mortal (and so passing on sometime)
kings of the hill.

Plans and theories are fine but to think that implementing them is
just 'one more thing', just another mere intellectual detail or
something to be wished away is, well - Forest Gumpish.

The implementation step involves actualising *in practice* a
conception of reality that is going to remove in many cases someone
else's hoped for reality. The thing about the future is that we all have
*aspirations* and dreams about it that so long as we are content
to keep purely as dreams will pose no problems for others, but if
we wish to put them into reality we will find the instantiation destroys
or makes impossible the simultaneous instantiation of someone else's
incompatible dream.  And often the deepest most conventional
aspirations of some very capable lieutenant thralls is not the
replacement of thraldom (that would scare and overstretch them
greatly) but rather their ascendance to king of the hill.

Ever notice how religious peoples conceptions of heaven (to give
one example) are distinctly lacking in shared detail? Its because a
detailed promise even a false one is impossible to sell to multiple
parties with multiple and inconsistent aspirations. The illusion works
better if it is kept fuzzy. Evolution (or selection) prunes away that
which doesn't work in religious illusions too. It keeps what works
though - it keeps belief and recycles it from one generation of
suckers (babies, innocents) to the next.

To go from great idea to actualised reality is alas, not just 'one
more small thing'. Each of us has our own perception of the future,
of how soon we would wish to get there and what price we are
willing to pay. In the end perhaps the hardest thing to achieve is
a sustained genuine "we", as theory and idea move into practice
and as some folks are determined to take along favourite childish
notions with them. Notions like "love" and "spirituality" for instance
have preceded this and countless other generation of homosapiens
into the world. Words are like coins as well as like labels and they
can and have been historically used to purchase thralls. 'We' may
not be able move forward whilst carrying some words like 'spirituality'
without first unpacking them to see if they containing anything valid
at all. If they do then 'we' may do well to repackage just the valid
bits into new words or we may find that by using the old debased
currency we are in fact only enthralling ourselves yet again and our
rate of progress will accordingly stay more pedestrian, incremental
and ... evolutionary - which suits those who collect thralls just fine
as they may collect or employ us.

One can of course  *dream* but people have been dreaming for a
long long time and the intellectual baggage that we carry effects the
speed at which we can travel forward and the extent to which we
can stay 'we'. Beliefs are ultimately the perogative and the affliction
of the inidividual (reasoning can be conveyed through language and
is social, beliefs are presentable only as the static place holders on
thought that they are and they are not ultimately social but anti-social)
though they may be psychologically sustaining to the individual for a
time. Religion ultimately needs little more to work with than belief so
the forms of religion may morph but religion as a phenomenon is here
for a good while yet. As long I predict as the proclivity to proclaim
"I believe". Their will always be some amongst the more rational that
will happily accept the power conceded them by the less rational true
believers, but what the weilders of power are concerned about is
mainly other selfish rationals (sometime pretending to be believers)
by with (hard to hide) thrall armies of their own.

Sorry, I widely digressed.

Truth or dare ?  Truth and daring together - naturally, as one only
lives once, but the unanswered question is how well and how long?
And history has not done with us yet. Nor we with it - I reckon.

Brett
(Pan-critical non-believer).