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

[JDP]

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> Samantha, you have too damned little faith in humanity if you think that 
> the tiny fragments of light to be found in religion *must* have their 
> origin *somewhere*, *anywhere* outside the ordinary evolved human 
> spirit.  Why must Buddha be the mouthpiece of a future civilization to 
> be respected?  Why can't he be an ordinary human, absolutely no 
> different from you, in the midst of squalor and ignorance, who decided 
> *on his own and without any help* to be nice to people?

I would agree with Eliezer that the origin of religion doesn't need to
be seeked outside of the human mind (though I would stay open to
Samantha's or other suggestions), and I would agree with Samantha that
there is much more to it than "being nice to people". In fact when I
think of religion, this is not at all what I think of.

When contemplating transhumanist possibilities, one cannot help to
wonder how religions could somehow anticipate such things. Take the
transmigration of souls. Given our understanding of the mind-body, this
is a totally hopeless theory. When the body dies, there is nothing that
escapes the body and goes into another body: the whole body-mind gets
lost. So our best scientific knowledge makes transmigration of soul
something utterly absurd, based on a gross misconception of what a mind
is. But, at the same time, the same scientific knowledge seems to be on
the verge of giving us an actual transmigration of minds, the mind going
from one body to another body. So we go back to the original religious
vision and we wonder: did they stumble on this by pure accident or what?
How could they form such ideas, which may now happen to be true?

And the answer is not that they were informed by civilisations of the
future, but that the human mind is really that strange animal thing for
which an animal body is too tight a dress. A human being can imagine
much more that what he is; and his situation, and the limits of this
situation, appear to him as bizarre. It is an "unexpected" consequence
of brain evolution through social interaction and language. The human
mind sees things from above, from outside; it can still assist the human
being to make fire, hunt animals and find mates, like the minds of his
ancestors, but it has a power of imagination and distanciation that is
so much larger that it is not really adapted to the body anymore (or the 
other way around if you prefer).

Behold, this is our story: we accidentally became too imaginative for 
what we were, and, after developing knowledge for centuries, we are now 
finally going to bring the being to the level of the imagination.

Jacques