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May 17, 2006 John Waters wants to know how a skeptic such as myself could support the 11 Chapters that t411sh is always writing about. John's issues involve the mentioning of transhumanism (and by implication Ray Kurzweil), involving concepts such as living forever, coming back from the dead, the Singularity and so forth. First, what's my connection with the 11 Chapters? I know t411sh. Not in real life, though we actually live only an hour apart in the real world. We met at an atheist forum years ago, and have kept in touch ever since. He started writing his book and solicited help from various atheists and I agreed and sent him a few quotes. Here is one of them: Being dead is like the time before you were born. Most of your time has been spent in a state of non-existence. When you die your energy and atoms will reform into new things, just as you were made from bits which used to be dirt, other animals and stars. Transhumanism is the idea that we as humans will take a pro-active approach in our own evolution, extending our lifespan and enhancing ourselves in various ways. The Singularity and Kurzweil have to do with specific human enhancements involving computers - augmenting our brains at first and eventually, living as data within virtual worlds altogether. As a skeptic (and therefore, as an atheist), I see the human mind as a machine made of atoms, molecules and chemical reactions. There is no evidence that there is anything ethereal going on in our heads, and various incidents of brain damage seem to confirm that the soul and mind are just the hardware and software of the biological brain. Mankind already lives three times longer than we naturally "should", thanks to cooked food, medicines, healthy diets, hygiene, civilization and so forth. We already have some artificial organs, and the promise of more are on the horizon, custom organs (maybe grown inside pigs to be genetic matches), and/or totally artificial organs made of plastic, metal and circuitry. We already have chip-implants which enable the deaf to hear, pacemakers, and artificial bones of various types. It doesn't take much imagination to see this process moving forward and that the human lifespan will continue to gradually increase from a technological point of view. Of course, society could be a limiting factor, maybe a global recession, maybe a nuclear war, who knows? But longer lifespans are certainly plausible - no faith required there - we are OK as skeptics to think about these things. As for enhancing ourselves, well, living longer is itself an enhancement, of course, but we also have the possibility of replacement organs which will, at some point, outperform the natural ones. Tiger Woods is one of many to have better than 20/20 vision. There is already talk of designer babies. My dentist told me that one of my kids is going to have a gap between her two front teeth. As a result, when she's eight, she will have a surgery which will prevent this. Nature is slowly losing its grasp on the fate of man. Moving forward in time, again, assuming that society continues to advance technologically, we can expect implants in our brains which may act as calculators, allowing us to do complex math rather easily. They already have many working interfaces which operate on thought control - nothing supernatural, they merely pick up changes in brain wave activities - you learn to use them by concentrating. The founder of Atari had a video game system designed which would use this type of interface years ago, but the reaction times were too slow to be practical. Anyway, it again doesn't take all that much imagination to suppose that eventually, we can reach a stage where we can offload our memories onto computers and back, especially if we already accept that memories are stored in the material world, which, again, various brain damage studies indicate. At first, such offloading may resemble notes in a word processor perhaps, but eventually, it could carry the actual emotional weight and other associations and connections which our natural memories encompass. Given that there is nothing supernatural going on in the brain, it's just a matter of unraveling the tech behind these biological machines. We can then augment our brains with implants so sophisticated that we could learn another language, for example, just via a simple download. Since consciousness itself and emotion are also part of the hardware of our biology based on atoms, there is no reason to suppose that we couldn't upload ourselves into a computer entirely and back. Or, eventually, exist as just data in computers altogether. Why not? You can lose your arms, legs and everything else besides your head and still remain "you". Eventually, the idea of a biological body might be silly - how fragile they are, and how expensive in terms of physical requirements! A narrow temperature range, massive amounts of food and water, a bit of sunlight, etc. It would be far easier to exist as data and manipulate the world from the safety of a virtual world, or inside avatars. We have remote controlled airplanes right now. NASA is also working on a remote controlled astronaut. It has a humanoid form for various reasons, but mainly to be easy for a human to operate. An astronaut can control such a machine with the same dexterity as a human, but with safety and reduced cost. Imagine us in the future as software-beings. We could simply enter the computing systems of such avatars, connect with the sensors in those machines, and "assume them", a bit like ghosts invading the bodies of humans and assuming control in so many movies. We could make our bodies fit the task in the real world - a plane, a digging machine, a car. Inside such an avatar, we could walk on Mars, "barefoot", and feel the Martian soil. The avatar would pass along information to our brains directly, such that we could feel the dust between our toes, but without the utter cold and other nasty realities. We would have our minds and therefore, be the same thinking and feeling humans that we are now. The singularity merely refers to several branches of technology which seem to be making headway and which are thought by some to soon advance to certain degrees. The convergence point, when many separate technologies advance enough to work together along these lines, could very well usher in a new era. When spoken about in those terms, it sounds like good material for skeptics to attack, but when you take a close look, it's nothing all that magical. Nanotechnology is slowly coming along and modern CPUs are already nano-tech for all practical purposes. Biotech is also coming along - we can expect artificial eyes and other amazing advancements relatively soon. Computer technology continues to improve. They already have the storage capacity available, rather cheaply, such that you could record every sound, every conversation, every bit of music you've ever heard in your entire life. Imagine giving your baby a sound-activated recorder and capturing a record of her entire life, at least the audio portion! Moore's "law" states that computer processing power doubles every 18 months. Amazingly, this has held for some time now, and we have right now no reason to assume this won't continue. At that rate, Intel predicts that it will be able to model an entire human mind within 50 years. Kurzweil quotes this often. Others such as Bill Gates quote Kurzweil often, because he's not just a tech-soothsayer, he's a tech-innovator and prophet, having invented key tech himself, and having made predictions which have panned out. Does this mean that everything is going to pan out just as Kurzweil predicts? Who knows? But there is no reason to doubt that man will continue to live longer, that we will continue to enhance ourselves, and that we will interface with computers in more and more direct ways. Previous "singularities" might be the combination of industrial revolutions coupled with democratic, capitalistic, governments, or, the realization that climate can be predicted well enough to make for stable farming, which freed societies to develop civilization. If you read between the hype and understand the underlying tech, there is nothing magical about any of this. If one considers how the Internet has changed society in just ten years, one can see how technology or other inventions can drastically, and, quickly, change or touch everything. Kurzweil himself does not consider his future-view a utopia, any more than democracies can be so considered. Many pesky problems will be solved, new pesky problems will arise. Overall, life will be better. Humans are humans, and humans existing as data will still have many of the same personality issues that they do in the non-virtual world. There are many good science fiction books which deal with many of these potential problems. For example, in the world painted by Greg Bear in "Eon", there are two rivaling philosophical factions, much like the Conservatives and Liberals of today. The future liberals want to move away from the human form, and folks of that persuasion choose all manner of funky bodies for themselves. The conservatives put a premium on humanity, and, generally choose very human-like bodies for their corporeal lives. In that world, folks are entitled to two corporeal lives, if I remember right, and then get to live forever (or until their society fails and their computers are no longer maintained) inside the virtual world. Anyway, it features a moderate conservative, who chooses a slimmed-down, pseudo-female body shape, without tear ducts. She regrets the lack of tear ducts later on in the story. Pure and utter science fiction, sure. And despite the common myth, specific science fiction authors are horrible at predicting the future. Combined, however, much of what does happen has been predicted by science fiction where technology is concerned. Clarke is often noted for being a good predictor of future trends: 2001 came out before we landed on the Moon. In the novels, he correctly predicted that China would be a space-power - this is happening right now, but he also predicted that the USSR would still be around. He predicted never-ending global news feeds, which we have with the Internet, but he also predicted that countries would continue to invest heavily in space technology, which hasn't happened. Eon and similar works which deal with the possibility of humans in this state are healthy reads, as they expose a plethora of potential problems, for example, utter invasion of privacy which could happen if you exist as data. We could sit down and say, "What if computers could think? What would the implications be?". This is what good scifi does, while entertaining us at the same time. There is value in tossing around these potential realities, for certainly, a modest amount of the predicted future tech will confront us sooner or later. The life after death/eternal life scenarios are no more implausible or magical. Again, the brain being just a machine, death for an atheist is merely the malfunctioning of that machine. Depending on the malfunction, repair may be possible some day. I don't believe that death turns on a universal switch " death isn't a major and permanent cosmos-wide transition. Freezing folks right before or even right after death is a good example. There is severe brain damage inside every cell, and this damage may well be ridiculously difficult to repair. My thought on this is that such technology should be a goal, even if a distant one, even if an unreachable one. Think what we will learn along the way. Proponents of cryogenics hope for future nano-technology in the form of small machines, which can go into each cell and repair the damage. Personally, I'm more hopeful about using anti-freezes, which should allow us to freeze people without this cell damage, which results simply from ice crystals which expand and slice through delicate cell structures. Other animals can, right now, freeze solid and "come back" via natural anti-freezes. There are many implications. People never just "die". Death comes as a failure of our natural machinery. I can imagine everyone clamoring to be preserved until their particular ailment or combination of issues has cures. Where would we keep all of these people? Many countries are "turning graves" right now because of too little space for the dead as it is. Nevertheless, such technology would have amazing benefits, long distance space travel, perhaps, or short term stasis, perhaps allowing folks waiting for an operation or organ to be grown or donated to temporarily "die". Of course this version of atheistic resurrection requires that someone has been carefully frozen. Another version has to do with the laws of physics and the permanence of information. Every thing has information, and when a thing is "destroyed", its information is not. This is partially because matter cannot be destroyed, merely changed. If you rip a piece of paper or even burn it, you are changing and switching atoms around. The paper is not really destroyed, merely altered. An easy example is a pool Table - one can look at the position of the balls and work backwards to reconstruct the original position of the thing, the thing in this case being that triangle of racked balls. A human body also obeys the laws of physics and it should be theoretically possible for a very distant future super-race of extreme technological power and knowledge, to reconstruct any of us at will. Yeah, that is, of course, as pie-in-the-sky as it gets. It is possible, though, if extremely improbable. Finally, if we can exist as software, then we should be able to remain alive for long, long periods, meaning we would be immortal for all practical purposes. Personally, I think there is a very very small chance that I will live a very very long time " the odds are somewhat better for my kids, however. The chance that future beings will choose to bring unimportant little old me me back from the dead is virtually zero and the chance that humans will live inside of virtual worlds within the next 50 years is slim at best. If the current tide of fundamentalism continues to rise, expect any further efforts to transhumanize to grind to a halt. Assuming a continuing increase in technology, however, and given that our brains and bodies are just machines, the notion that we will never completely reverse engineer them requires real faith in my view. The more we try to predict a specific path technology will follow, the more we are likely to fail, but the basic idea behind all of this, super-long life, is entirely plausible one way or another. In any case, I think that humanism and skepticism are quite compatible with these various notions. I can think of many reasons why these ideas would be scary, shocking or offensive to the world view of those which accept the supernatural. Lets imagine I scan myself into software and exist in a virtual world. To the Christian, would I be dead? Where would my soul be? If I had any special abilities tied to the metaphysical, would I retain those abilities, or would this prove once and for all that such abilities are delusions? What if I copied myself - have I created life? Have I split my soul in two? As we approach some of these technologies, the true nature of man will become all the more clear and the resulting knowledge alone will cause drastic shake ups to the current scheme of things on this rock. It will become ever harder for Christian apologetics to stretch the Bible and make it "fit" the modern world. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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