Don't Even Try To Draw Me In

Upgraded from the Moot:

"Martin," from the Moot: SENS is a different issue from the Methuselah Foundation.

I'm not going to split hairs about the precise relations between SENS and the Methuselah Mouse Project, that is to say, between endeavors so closely associated within the archipelago of superlative futurological crackpot campaigns, organizations, and figures. Some are surely marginally more interesting than others, some are marginally more credible than others, some actual scientists and respectable figures nibble around the edges of some of it, but what matters most is that it has all taken on the stink and coloration and tonalities of Robot Cult bullshit and technofetishizing fanboy wanking through its explicit association with transhumanist/singularitarian/techno-immortalist forms of superlative futurological discourse.

For every smidge of sense or near-respectability one can squeeze from any of these efforts -- IEET, SIAI, SENS, Alcor, Foresight, Extropy, Humanity+, Lifeboat, and on and on and on -- one need only turn one's head the least bit to find whole worlds of incomparably greater usefulness and sanity outside these superlative futurological circle jerks. There is quite simply nothing of use to be gained by being drawn into debates about which transhumanist or techno-immortalist or singularitarian is slightly less batshit crazy than which other one.

This is revealed especially as so when one grasps that there is a world of actually sensible and intelligent medical researchers, bioethicists, progressive healthcare policy wonks, media theorists, network security wonks, computer scientists free from the taint of cybernetic totalism, environmental justice theorists and activists, science and technology studies academics, eco-city and urban agriculture practitioners and academics, polyculture researchers, legitimate climate scientists, saltwater economists, theorists of democracy, and so on to devote one's time and energy to who address every single thing of actual relevance and substance that any pop futurologist or superlative futurologist or Robot Cultist ever manages to stumble on in the midst of a full froth of hyperbolic handwaving or delusive wish-fulfillment fantasizing and true belief, but without the derangements and deceptions introduced by the latter.

Superlative futurology and its variations and various exemplars are most relevant when treated as pathological extremities revealing structural connections and assumptions and aspirations of corporate-militarist global developmentalism in particularly clear forms precisely through their extremity, which makes them amount to a kind of techno-developmentalist reductio. It is wrong to make such points in a way that provides cover or the appearance of actual legitimacy to these sad, skewed, and often sociopathic figures and discourses on their own terms.

Robot Cultists should be taken seriously as irrationalist symptoms and as hindrances to sensible thinking on developmental questions, and as occasionally good for a laugh, that is all.

"Martin," from the Moot: My specific disagreement in these comments was on the importance of computer models

Since it should now be clear that I agree there is obviously a place for computer models in science, presumably you are satisfied now?

I don't think my initial and repeated point that superlative futurological subcultures are filled with coders speaking disdainfully of the material incarnation of life and intelligence and history in at once reductive and hyperbolically expansive digital/informational terms unsuited to the matter at hand (bodies, embodied minds, social struggle), nor my point that futurological hyperbole and immaterialism is actually historically and ideologically connected to a more prevailing neoliberal hyperbole and immaterialism, strictly speaking, would properly lead anybody to think I must therefore believe that there is never any applicability for computer models in science.

But since you seem to have drawn that conclusion for whatever reason, let me assure you again that of course there is a place for computer models in contemporary science, but that there is in my view no place for cybernetic totalism, for informational construals of selfhood, for digital/spiritual aspirations toward godhood or transcendence, unless that place is a church, a poetry reading, a bar, or an asylum of some kind. Certainly none of that nonsense is properly construed as consensus science or sensible policy-making.

That's what matters to me, I don't know what else to say.