[ExI] Atheism again

[Giulio Prisco]

Yes, Jason, scientific imagination brings us to contemplate visions
that are indistinguishable from religion. Rejecting these visions
brings us to reject scientific imagination, and the resulting
"science" is too dull and boring to be worth paying attention to.
I am a member of the MTA (of course).

On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 7:46 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>
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> On Monday, April 20, 2020, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>> Thank you, bill w, for putting much more clearly and concisely than I've been able to do, why religion and transhumanism are not compatible.
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> I'm curious what you make of the Mormon Transhumanist Association: https://transfigurism.org/
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> Are they not religious or not Transhumanist?
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> Why couldn't one have, for example, the religious belief that one day we will create or become God?  For example:
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> Ray Kurzweil says, “Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and infinite love. Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially, it certainly moves in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal."
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> Frank Tipler, in his book The Physics of Immortality writes, "Any cosmology with progress to infinity will necessarily end in God."
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> David Deutsch writes, "In the final anthropic principle or if anything like an infinite amount of computation taking place is going to be true, which I think is highly plausible one way or another, then the universe is heading towards something that might be called omniscience."
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> These transhumanist ideas have a conception that we are evolving towards God. And that one day we may be "Gods" from the perspective of life/universe/simulations we create. For example, we might have the power to create a black hole computer (which in a sense is a pocket universe cut off from our own), in creating the blackhole we control the inputs and the computation it performs. Would that make the beings who designed and created such a universe a God from the perspective of those beings who might arise within it? Are we gods to the Game of Life gliders that wiggle across our screens, or the worm brains that we've uploaded into the Worm Matrix?
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> Jason
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>> And thank you, Ben.  Thanks are extremely rare in the group (???).
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>> I think you cannot get more basic than epistemology.  "Hyou know?" is the most basic question.  I wish school children were taught the ways to answer this.
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>> bill w
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>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 10:40 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>>> On 19/04/2020 19:46, billw wrote:
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>>> Empiricism is science and its methods and belief has no place in it.  We don't believe in Darwin's ideas:  we follow them because they are the best at predicting and explaining phenomena we study.  Empirical facts like the finches.
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>>> There is no way a person who is basically an empiricist and another who uses authoritarianism and intuition, to have a debate.  They are accepting things based on entirely different criteria and so are talking at cross purposes.
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>>> Thank you, bill w, for putting much more clearly and concisely than I've been able to do, why religion and transhumanism are not compatible.
>>>
>>> This doesn't mean that a religious person can't also be a transhumanist, or vice-versa, but just as with the civil engineer that Spike was talking about, they are going to have two incompatible world-views going on (assuming that 'religious' and 'transhumanist' keep their normal meanings, as I've discussed before), and just like Spike, I can't really imagine what kind of mental gymnastics you'd have to go through to sustain that and not go crazy. In fact, I suspect that 'crazy' is really the only sensible way to describe such a person.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Ben Zaiboc
>>>
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