[extropy-chat] The Cassini Division

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:04 PM 3/31/2005 +0100, Dirk Bruere wrote:

>>I didn't see the original posted context of this MacLeod quote, but lest 
>>anyone get the wrong impression I'll point out that this view, attributed 
>>to insane post human super intelligences...

>Actually, it is the philosophy of the Socialist heroes who do the ass kicking.
>Called the 'True Knowledge'.

Oops, my bad. I hadn't read the book for six or seven years, and got 
tangled up in MacLeod's many levels of irony. Just to clarify, here's a 
passage that precedes the mad rant Dirk cited, and one that follows it:

<a group of Japanese and Korean `contract employees'... had acquired their 
modern enlightenment from battered, ancient editions of Stirner, Nietzsche, 
Marx, Engels, Dietzgen, Darwin, and Spencer, which made up the entire 
philosophical content of their labour-camp library. (20th century 
philosophy and science had been excluded by their employers as decadent or 
subversive...) With staggering diligence, they had taken these works -- 
which they ironically treated as the last word in modern thought -- and 
synthesised from them, and from their own bitter experiences, the first 
socialist philosophy based on totally pessimistic and cynical conclusions 
about human nature...

<This is the true knowledge.

<On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the 
most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass 
self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our 
liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery 
with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with 
anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true 
knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed the universe of things.

<Things we could use.> [pp. 89-90]

Not quite a ringing endorsement.

Interestingly, that paragraph is followed by: "It's the Rapture for nerds!"

Damien Broderick