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Sunday, March 02, 2014

Gennady Stolyarov You Are Going To Die

Robot Cultist Gennady Stolyarov has written a children's book entitled "Death Is Wrong" and is now soliciting funds to distribute copies of this techno-immortalist twaddle to kids and libraries for free.

Of course, the fear of death is sadly quite commonplace, and frankly foolish behavior indulged in the denial of it is no less commonplace: losing oneself in the delusive promises of red sports car salesmen, for instance, or late-nite boner pill hucksters, or plastic surgery butchers, or priestly con-artists peddling their various heavens.

Like so many transhumanists, Stolyarov wants to pretend that facing the fact of mortality somehow makes mortality the fact that it is, and so that indulging in death-denialism renders that mortality less inevitable in some way. Of course, this is flagrantly irrational. And especially in those who become fixated on their fear of death and fervent over its denial this irrationality can all too readily yield the grim paradox of a death in life prior to the still inevitable arrival of death itself. Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect, to the contrary, like to decry any such common sense reconciliation with the inevitable as a matter of what they call deathism. It is as if they believe human beings have been mortal all these millions of years mostly because we lack the can-do attitude of Robot Cultists. I cannot say that the superlative futurists' curious amplification of consumer fandoms into faith-based initiatives presumably promising techno-transcendence of all error, mortality, and scarcity is really even still recognizably a form of "optimism" given the zany fever of its pitch.

Needless to say, there are very good reasons to insist that greater public investment in medical research to cure disease and ameliorate suffering, to enable the treatment of neglected but treatable conditions in overexploited regions of the globe, and to build and maintain infrastructural affordances to basic health and nutrition and support to everyone on earth (it pays to remember, as Mike Davis said well over a decade ago, access to clean water is the closest thing to a real miracle drug of the kind the techno-utopians are always idiotically blissing out about) are all worthy efforts for the common good. But it is crucial to grasp that the preoccupations of the techno-immortalists veer into the margins of pseudo-science (Stolyarov is a booster for Aubrey de Grey, for example, a software guy whose biology sounds like a textbook from the seventies the Robot Cultists have declared a sooper-longevity guru) and outright incoherent wish-fulfillment fantasy (Stolyarov seems a bit ambivalent about those of his fellow faithful who think a picture of you can be the same you and even the same as an eternal you somehow if the picture is a "scan" that can then be "uploaded" as a cyberangel avatar in Holodeck Heaven, since he seems to count on sooper-medical longevity and eventual "upgrading" into a nano-magickal shiny robot body because that is ever so much more reasonable).

I mention this, because while techno-immortalists like to commandeer the progressive commonsense intuitions of the majority who think healthcare and social support are good things, Robot Cultists seek in fact to distract public attention away from real science into pseudo-science, away from real research and organizing into marginal concerns, away from shared problems into wish-fulfillment fantasies, and in so doing actually make it more likely that more people will suffer and die needlessly in the name of "ending death."

Gennady Stolyarov's efforts to indoctrinate young people into fearful pseudo-scientific death-denialism is a stupid and vile. His robo-cultic child indoctrination screed "Death Is Wrong" should be titled "How To Die in Life through Death-Denialism" or "Killing People With Death Denialism."

6 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

I must say the North Suburban Math League trophy inspires confidence.

Mark Plus said...

I have to question Stolyarov's competence as an actuary, his stated day job. He must know that if you have a population where the individuals have a constant probability of death per year regardless of age, instead of ones where the probability increases monotonically per year past the age of ten or so, the individuals could have a "half life" from an actuarial extrapolation of a few centuries, at most.

Specifically, if you stopped your mortality rate at age 25 and had a constant probability of dying every year from then on, you would have odds of 1 out of 2 of surviving 500 years - an interesting advance on current life expectancies, but hardly "immortality." Though that sort of calculation doesn't mean anything empirically unless a whole lot of people could survive at least that long.

Dale Carrico said...

Be that as it may, that the techniques on which Stolyarov presumably bases his expectations/fantasies are bullshit matters more still.

jimf said...

> Of course, the fear of death is sadly quite commonplace,
> and frankly foolish behavior indulged in the denial of it
> is no less commonplace. . .

From yesterday's New York Times, a review of a Kurzweilian
"thriller", from the son of Paul Theroux:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/strange-bodies-by-marcel-theroux.html
----------------
Sunday Book Review
Sparks of Life
‘Strange Bodies,’ by Marcel Theroux
By STEVE ALMONDFEB. 28, 2014

. . .

The academic who narrates Theroux’s new book, “Strange Bodies,” . . .
is — well, perhaps we should let him speak for himself:

“My name is Nicholas Patrick Slopen. I was born in Singapore City
on April 10, 1970. I died on Sept. 28, 2009, crushed in the wheel
arch of a lorry outside Oval tube station. . . . I will have to
commit myself to some details with a certain, and perhaps wearisome,
degree of exactitude in order to provide evidence to support
the contention contained in the first paragraph of this testimony:
that I am Nicholas Slopen, and that my consciousness has survived
my bodily death.”

That, folks, is a hook of Frankensteinian proportions.

Our collective fear of death, and the hovering possibility of resurrection,
tug the reader through this ingenious if sometimes vexing novel far
more than the protagonist’s personality. . .

[T]he explanation of the Malevin Procedure, when it finally arrives,
is slapdash. We are asked to believe that scientists can map “every nuance”
of consciousness by a “judicious and sophisticated” examination
of someone’s linguistic patterns. (They create a proxy version of
Samuel Johnson, in fact, because he committed so much of his life
to paper.)

But we never get a coherent accounting of the physiological
exactitudes of this operation. What portions of the brain, exactly,
are removed from the host body and what is implanted? Instead,
we see a mosh of images (“the redness of everything, that bucket
with its unspeakable contents . . .”). It remains murky, as well,
how this magic linguistic code might transfer actual memories
from the donor to the recipient — a crucial question given that
our memories are the essential building block of our identities. . .
=====

jimf said...

> I cannot say that the superlative futurists' curious
> amplification of consumer fandoms into faith-based initiatives
> presumably promising techno-transcendence of all error,
> mortality, and scarcity is really even still recognizably
> a form of "optimism" given the zany fever of its pitch. . .
>
> Robot Cultists seek in fact to distract public attention
> away from real science into pseudo-science, away from real
> research and organizing into marginal concerns, away
> from shared problems into wish-fulfillment fantasies, and
> in so doing actually make it more likely that more people
> will suffer and die needlessly in the name of "ending death."

Also from yesterday's New York Times, a squib about the
dark side of "optimism":

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/business/rose-colored-words-but-gray-outcomes.html
----------------
Th[e] bad news for unbridled optimism was laid out in a
paper published in Psychological Science online in February.
The study looked at the relationship between economic
malaise and language in newspaper articles and presidential
addresses. The finding was stark: Optimistic language was
a predictor of poor performance.

“A cultural climate of positive thinking about the future,
may have contributed to low economic achievement,” the
article concludes.

The paper, by scholars from New York University and the
University of Hamburg, speculates that widespread optimism
could cause people to discount the risk of trouble ahead,
make unwise investments. . .

The finding is a correlation, not causation, meaning it doesn’t
show that optimistic language causes downturns. . .

But, broadly, a body of research supports the study’s hypotheses.
Previous research has found that people with elaborate fantasies
not tempered by a realistic assessment of challenges are
less likely to get results than are people with more modest
visions. . .

Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at N.Y.U. and
a co-author of the paper in Psychological Science, said that
when people have a fantasy, they tend to imagine that
fulfilling it will be easy, and are thus unprepared to work.
She also said their fantasies become a satisfying distraction,
a warm feeling that takes the place of reaching the goal.

“The proposition in self-help literature is: Dream it and then
you’ll do it,” she said. The research doesn’t support that idea.
Rather, to succeed, “you need to have a dream, but at the same
time you need to understand what is it in you that stands
in the way of fulfilling that dream.”
====

Dream along with me.
I'm on my way to a star!

jimf said...

Sign the Petition!

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2014/03/killed-by-bad-philosophy.php
----------------
Killed By Bad Philosophy
by Reason
04 Mar 2014

. . .

If we die due to aging, it will be because we collectively chose
not to make a serious effort to build rejuvenation treatments. . .

> In one hundred years they will ask in disbelief,
> "Our grandparents had the technology to preserve the precise
> neural circuitry of their brains for long‐term storage.
> The best science of our grandparent's era stated unequivocally
> that this unique patterning of neural circuitry was the seat
> of the self; in it was written all memories, skills, and personality.
> Our grandparents seemed to grasp the quickening pace of
> technology, and understood that full brain scanning and
> simulation was around the corner. Why then did grandpa and
> the rest of his generation reject brain preservation and mind
> uploading as a means of overcoming death? . . .
>
> By the year 2110 such mind uploading will probably be as
> common place as laser eye surgery is today. . .
>
> It is notoriously difficult to get people to clearly articulate
> the reasoning behind their rejection of mind uploading - it is
> often stated as simply an intuition that it will not work.
> However, it is important to clearly articulate the reasoning
> behind this intuition so that it can be evaluated in light of
> the available scientific facts. . .
====

Save the date.

> Stolyarov seems a bit ambivalent about those of his fellow
> faithful who think a picture of you can be the same you. . .
> if the picture is a "scan" that can then be "uploaded" as a
> cyberangel avatar in Holodeck Heaven, since he seems to count on
> sooper-medical longevity and eventual "upgrading" into a nano-magickal
> shiny robot body because that is ever so much more reasonable. . .

Well, I guess Stolyarov just isn't as Reason-able as he thinks
he is:

----------------
[Killed By Bad Philosophy]

> It is notoriously difficult to get people to clearly articulate
> the reasoning behind their rejection of mind uploading - it is
> often stated as simply an intuition that it will not work.
> However, it is important to clearly articulate the reasoning
> behind this intuition so that it can be evaluated in light of
> the available scientific facts. . .
====

"The best science. . . stated unequivocally. . .
. . .in light of the available scientific facts. . ."

YMMV.