tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post717648141230757440..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: "What Is the Difference?"Dale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-15811798769964613812009-02-01T09:43:00.000-08:002009-02-01T09:43:00.000-08:00Giulio, you sound like a tot throwing a tantrum, n...Giulio, you sound like a tot throwing a tantrum, not any kind of radical. Delusive insistence that the Robot God will immortalize you by digitizing your "mind" (I don't think that word means what you think it means...) or barnacling your body in righteous prosthetics isn't "improving people's lives" just because you say it is, any more than a Pentecostal's harangue about hellfire for homosexuals is "improving people's lives" just because he says it is. What other violations of logic, consensus knowledge, commonsense do you subsume under the heading of "improving other people's lives by overcoming current limits"? An eager world wants to know more!<BR/><BR/>You can pout and stamp your foot at your mind's incarnation or your person's vulnerability and mortality or at the frustrations occasioned by sharing the world with a diversity of peers, but it is all to no purpose. <BR/><BR/>Like most cocksure capitalists -- and your transhumanism really does sound more than anything like some steroidically plumped variation on late-nite informercial hype -- sooper-brains! robot-slaves! virtual paradise! cyberspatial immortality! -- conjoined to can-do corporatist self-help literature -- do the math! just do it, man! no limits, man! to the extreme! -- crowing about a "world without limits" you just end up being an eternal adolescent who feels sure there will always be other people around to clean up after your messes for you.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-35668063912152183552009-02-01T07:36:00.000-08:002009-02-01T07:36:00.000-08:00[A] = The aspirations of persons who want to impro...[A] = The aspirations of persons who want to improve their and others' lives by overcoming current limits.<BR/><BR/>[B] = The aspirations of persons who want to improve their and others' lives by overcoming current limits.<BR/><BR/>I am consistent: I say fuck all limits, all kinds of fundamentalists and all kinds of bigots. I say fuck poverty, fuck helplessness, fuck oppression, fuck authority, fuck discrimination, fuck disease, fuck vulnerability, and fuck death. I don't make artificial differences that, at the end, only amount to say I like this and I don't like that.Giulio Priscohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13811681020661409028noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-373863817386191322009-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:002009-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:00Shorter Michael Anissimov: "If this idea that does...Shorter Michael Anissimov: <BR/><BR/>"If this idea that doesn't make any sense (embodied human intelligence can be "digitized") is treated as "true" then all sorts of other ideas that also don't make any sense and have no connection to reality (techno-heaven, sooper-brains, sweet sweet soma, whole earth as wilderness park for robot tourists, magic for realz, telepathy, borg-collectives, and immortality) suddenly seem worthy of serious consideration as well even though they aren't, except as science fiction."<BR/><BR/>Classic Robot Cultism. And I'm not at all "sorry" to say this.<BR/><BR/>I recommend you go back to church with the rest of the Robot Cultists and continue to congratulate yourselves on how "right" you -- and only you -- are to insist that actually embodied intelligence could or will somehow migrate into cyberspace or that human life could or will somehow manage to be prosthetically immortalized or that history could or will be end through nano-cornucopia, paradisical virtuality, or the singularitarian arrival of the Robot God.<BR/><BR/>If your silly handwaving didn't compel the attention of the unwary to the cost of us all through its activation of irrational passions -- mostly panic and greed -- always occasioned by disruptive technoscientific change, though its facile oversimplifications of technodevelopmental complexities, through its misleading pseudo-priestly neologistic and guru-friendly mumbo jumbo masquerading as "cutting edge science," through its dramatic media-ready framing of issues of general concern, through its easy appropriation of incumbent interests ever eager for rationalizations for elite-technocratic control and corporate-militarist responses to political problems, if the Robot Cultists were not positioned to do so much damage at a time when sensible deliberation about technoscientific change has never been more urgent in fact, then it would be better just to ignore your idiocies altogether, along with the few hundred mostly North Atlantic white guys who preach it. <BR/><BR/>Unfortunately, your extreme positions both filter out into the mainstream in dangerously deranging ways while, more fortunately though no less tediously and embarrassingly, represent in their very extremity clarifying crystallizations of reductionist, elitist, eugenicist tendencies that prevail more generally already in mainstream neoliberal development discourse.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-31737873427842961942009-01-31T15:48:00.000-08:002009-01-31T15:48:00.000-08:00I must feel sorry to say this, Mr. Carrico, but Mi...I must feel sorry to say this, Mr. Carrico, but Michael Anissimov is right:<BR/><BR/>http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/01/what-are-the-benefits-of-mind-uploading/#commentsAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com