[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Social Equality and Politics

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, David Lubkin wrote:

> I found your typically insightful posting marred by an inaccurate
> generalization --

Ok, yes David, I was generalizing.  I did attempt to qualify
the statements but may not have done so sufficiently because
I was attempting to make the points as short as possible.

> Perhaps we need the disambiguation that Spike and I discussed not long ago.
> By your examples, you suggest that faith refers to "a system of religious
> belief" [1] but then use it in its sense of "belief not based in proof" [2]
> and present it as incompatible with reason.
[snip]

Let me attempt to qualify.  I have no problems with a system of beliefs.
We may require these because they provide shortcuts for how to think
about things (I believe it was recently demonstrated that the thought
processes in the brain will take the short cuts when they are available --
this only makes sense as it consumes less energy.)

Where I have a problem is as you point out "belief not based in proof"
and where I get particularly annoyed is with the "fiction" that may
be involved in the Christian gospels (the recent PBS special I observed
documented how the gospels were written long after Christ may have been
alive, were selected from multiple histories available for political
purposes, and so on and so forth).  The situation in the Iraq at
this time is probably little different (multiple factions fighting
for their beliefs when there are nothing but hand-me-down stories
that their beliefs are accurate much less reasonable).

I think this all goes back to "tribalism" and perhaps even further
to reproductive opportunities.  (In other words I think it may be
rooted in our genes.)  As you point out it is in large part about
survival and that in turn is linked to opportunities to procreate.
Obviously the more resources that one can control the better are
ones opportunities in that respect.  And so of course the desire
(or genetic need) to control resources leads to politics and
then power structures.  [Iraq is a classic case in point in
this respect now -- the old power holding elite have been
or are being thrown out and they aren't happy about it.]

My perspective is that extropianism and/or transhumanism
are going to have to come to grips with this.  We have strong
drives to exist in "tribes", tribes want to eliminate or
disempower other tribes to gain power.  Once in power they
want to reproduce.  It doesn't work.  You can go all the
way from Malthus to Dyson to my work on MBrains -- you
will at some point hit the reproductive wall.  The most
recent book by Kirkwood had an interesting solution -- that
parents were bound by contract to end their lives after a
certain amount of time so that their children might live.
I think there may be other solutions but it is going to
require a fair amount of work to define and implement them.

So here is the short form:

- We are probably driven by genes to group ourselves into
  "tribes", "clans", "families" and behave in ways that
  support such.

- Such behavior cannot probably survive in the long form
  due to environmental limits (witness the degree to which
  humanity is stressing the ecology of the planet already).
  [Oh yes -- technology development can deal with it in
   the short term but that doesn't deal with the fact that
   sooner or later there are limits.]

- Even limited immortality and reproduction are inherently
  not compatible.  And I'd enjoy watching the survival
  time of any politician that attempts to present that point.
  [One would be placing two primary instincts -- survival and
   reproduction up against each other.]

But David's points are well taken -- the problem really is
the survival of people who are alive now.  I've pointed out
previously how to deal with this -- just use Nanotech to
duplicate Israel.  Unfortunately as Mike has pointed out
to me offlist we do not have Nano-santas today.  But the
question to ask just might be how do we get them here
a bit sooner?  I do not fully agree with people who would
kill big government that can execute genome projects ranging
from 50 million to 3 billion dollars.  At the same time
I don't agree with big government that hasn't figured out
how to balance its books with respect to entitlements.
I do not think these problems are easy to resolve.

Robert