Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, July 26, 2009

A Robot Cultist Has a "Thought" and Engages in Some Projection Along the Way

Giulio Prisco (find it yourself, I won't link to him) indulges in a curiously revealing thought-experiment:
I wonder… what [Carrico] would say if extreme life extension and mind uploading were to become available during his lifetime. Perhaps he wouldn’t believe it, like those who think Apollo 11 never happened? Or would he refuse these inventions of the devil?

It should be quite easy to find one's way to a confident answer to this "puzzle."

After all, do I indulge in anti-Moon landing conspiracy theories now? No, I do not.

Do I disbelieve actually effective medical therapies now? No, I do not.

(I actually strongly disapprove the peddling of pseudo-scientific remedies like laying on of hands and homeopathy and crystal healing, so presumably there might be some quibbling around the question of "effective" here.)

As a rather conspicuous, repeatedly, publicly, insistently reiterated atheist, it seems rather strange to imagine that I would phrase skepticism of something in terms of its being "of the devil," certainly.

What on earth would inspire such musings on the part of our poor perplexed Robot Cultist, then?

It is intriguing to grasp that it is precisely because I refuse to share his marginal True Belief in the viability of the superlative technodevelopmental outcomes with which he personally identifies (the digital uploading of his soul into cyberspace, his near-immortalization via this or other techno-transcendentalizing means, his paradisical vision of a robotic, virtual, or nanotechnological superabundance on earth, his expectations about the arrival among us of a superintelligent post-biological Robot God who, if Friendly, might solve our problems for us) that he is provoked into wondering if I might deny mainstream commonsense notions only marginal conspiracists deny.

It is precisely because I refuse to share his True Belief in non-existing hyperbolic projections about "The Future" that he is provoked into wondering if I am incapable of describing present realities.

It is precisely because I do not share his faith that he is provoked into wondering if I am moved by a faithful fear of the diabolical.

Needless to say, it is the Robot Cultists who would cloak their transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasies as a kind of sooper-science that is the furthest thing from actual consensus science. It is the Robot Cultists who denigrate the open futurity of the present to peddle their fantasies of The Future with which they parochially identify. It is the Robot Cultists who dis-identify with the human plurality of stakeholders with whom they actually share the world and its problems to identify instead with a parochial vision of a more "optimal" "superior" post-human species they fancy will co-habit that Future.

It isn't hard to recognize who it is who is actually promoting the faith-based discourse, who is indulging in denial, who is caught up in a full froth of reactionary panic here.

Projection, much?

3 comments:

jimf said...

> Giulio Prisco (find it yourself, I won't link to him) indulges
> in a curiously revealing thought-experiment:
>
> > I wonder… what [Carrico] would say if extreme life extension
> > and mind uploading were to become available during his lifetime. . .

What would there be to say? "Well, whaddya know! Cool!"

What would there be to say in any unlikely scenario believed
in by a vocal minority of fundamentalists?
E.g., http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0001/0001_01.asp

"Uncle Claudius, I wasn't the Messiah after all, would you
believe that? Could have knocked me over with a feather when
they told me that."

-- John Hurt, as Caligula's ghost, in _I Claudius_

Extropia DaSilva said...

Giulio's point is that the man in the desert who swears the water on the horizon is nothing but a mirrage will surely drink from it, should it turn out that his beliefs were wrong.

Dale Carrico said...

Yeah, and if Jeebus arrives and the Rapture happens I'll be sorry then, too, just like my hick zealot neighbors growing up always said. So what? They're wrong and stupid and so are Robot Cultists in much the same way.