[extropy-chat] John C. Wright finds god

[Brett Paatsch]

Damien Broderick wrote:

> Take care--it could happen to *you*.

Phenomena such as belief in the supernatural (heaven, reincarnation,
happy hunting ground, nirvana) must itself have a basis in something.

In my late teens while wondering how so many people including some
very intelligent ones could be so wrong in their worldviews (conflicting
religious ones could not all be right) I figured that in all of us are
tensions between the need to be rational (which helps us understand
the world and each other) and the need to deny mortality with pleasing
to ourselves delusions. As we get older or closer to dying (no atheists
in foxholes) I figured the trade off would shift more and more to the
pleasing delusion side.  

I can't see I have a lot of necessarily persuasive evidence for this
view (it doesn't seen falsifiable) but I still think its true. I wondered 
how I would fare as I aged. I wondered if I would be able to stave
off a natural bias towards pleasing unconventional religiosity.  

Nowadays when I consider cryonics and drextech (the hugh amounts
of work and life effort expended in writing Nanosystems and
Nanomedicine) I think I see in them the same sort of  bias towards
unconventional religiosity.  The authors of Nanosystems and
Nanomedicine are very intelligent clearly. But massive amounts of
work spent and intelligence applied doesn't make something true
(or false).

The pyramids were build by intelligent people who did not want
to die either.  The size of a work, and the intelligence and ingenuity
manifest in it is evidence of something, but not necessarily the 
veracity of the ideas behind it perhaps, but rather evidence of the
desire of the creators of the work great desire to avoid their own
mortality. 

Brett Paatsch