[extropy-chat] Religious fanatic? Blame it on 'god gene'

[Damien Broderick]

Just to elaborate on this exchange a little:

>[me to Kevin Freels:]
>
>>>4) Then you should go and read the great novel using this very idea, 
>>>Jamil Nasir's DISTANCE HAZE (Bantam, 2000), where a reductionist 
>>>scientist of considerable subtlety edits out such genes, in vitro, from 
>>>his daughter's genome. The fictional outcome to this thought experiment 
>>>might give even an ardent atheist pause.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky:]

>>Logical fallacy of generalization from imaginary evidence.

[me to Eliezer:]

>Do you really wish to see this inappropriate mantra trotted out every time 
>you offer one of your own parables? Don't be a philistine, Eliezer. Those 
>who fail to learn from literature are doomed to repeat Lit 101.

Of course I don't object to the point that Eliezer was making, only to its 
appropriateness under the circumstances. He and I agree that nothing is 
more futile than someone shouting `Frankenstein!' as if that were evidence 
of something salient, let alone knock-down, to, e.g., stem cell work or 
cloning. Mary Shelley made up that novel two hundred years ago, before 
anything substantial was known about biology; her opinions as manifest in 
fiction are not useful evidence in today's debate (although they do have 
lessons to teach us about other matters). Indeed, when Eliezer drew upon 
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON some years ago in his analysis of the downside of 
tinkering with the brain, I was the first to claim that this was an 
instance of the fallacy of generalization from imaginary evidence.

In the present case, Mr. Freels was talking about the fictional story he 
planned to write based on the genocidal postulate of killing all those with 
`god gene/s'. My advice was to read the existing excellent fictional work 
on the subject of tampering with `god genes'. This is neither a 
generalization or a fallacy. What's more, I'd recommend Nasir's novel to 
anyone interested in pursuing this thought experiment and others like it, 
in the same spirit that impelled Dennett and Hofstadter to include fiction 
alongside the philosophy and cogsci in THE MIND'S I.

Damien Broderick