Christian altruism—e.g. the attempt to make heaven possible for everyone—burns out when you see that most people don’t want this “help”. In the beginning it’s not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed to them by technology in the material world.
Your values and your ideas of what’s possible make you a member of an extreme cognitive minority
The guy is dedicated to cryonics and “existential risk”, among other things. Those are extremely uncommon interests, so just in terms of cognitive content, he is clearly in a minority.
On the other hand, it could be a bit ostentatious to claim to be a “cognitive minority” just because you believe uncommon things. To me, “cognitive minority” suggests that your process of thought is unusual, not just its contents. (Although the two aren’t completely separate; unusual cognitive content can have consequences for process, if you regularly end up arriving at unusual conclusions because of your unusual premises.)
Now maybe the point of your religious/transhumanist analogy is that the “burnout of a transhumanist altruist” is not as unique as it sounds; that it’s just a secular manifestation of a weariness with saving the world and spreading the good news, that might affect anyone with utopian or transcendent aspirations that society refuses to support. I will concede this much, that the same feeling might be felt by an exhausted Christian evangelist, or by an exhausted Marxist evangelist.
But the basis of the specific hopes does make a difference. The Christian hope is based on emotion, coincidence, a sense that the soul is distinct from the body, rumors of miracles, and faith in authority. The Marxist hope is based on the excitement of revolution, belief in progress, the theory of history as class struggle, and optimism about the nature of life in high-tech collectivist societies. The transhumanist hope is based on science and technology. In its individual flavors it may be naively optimistic, naive about politics, wrong about human psychology, wrong about specific scenarios. But the progress of science and technology is giving us a lot of reason to think that something like rejuvenation is materially possible. I can’t say the same for the Second Coming of Christ, or the moneyless harmony of the Venus Project.
But the basis of the specific hopes does make a difference. The Christian hope is based on emotion, coincidence, a sense that the soul is distinct from the body, rumors of miracles, and faith in authority. The Marxist hope is based on the excitement of revolution, belief in progress, the theory of history as class struggle, and optimism about the nature of life in high-tech collectivist societies. The transhumanist hope is based on science and technology.
That’s what transhumanists like to tell themselves, much like Marxists talking about “scientific socialism”, or some brands of Christians with their “creation science” and “intelligent design”.
Transhumanists are the spiritual grandchildren of the sixteenth century (edited) alchemists who tried to make the Philosopher’s stone and the Homunculus. They can dress it with scientific-sounding language and speculative technology, but the irrational cognitive processes that underlay the formation and maintenance of such beliefs are the same of other religious or religious-like belief systems.
But the progress of science and technology is giving us a lot of reason to think that something like rejuvenation is materially possible.
Sure, but that falls in the scope of medical science: My grandma had walking difficulties because her knee had worn out with age. So her knee was replaced by an artificial one, and now she walks like when she was younger. Is she a transhuman cyborg?
When a medical procedure of proven effectiveness becomes available, it is applied without much fuss. This has nothing to do with freezing corpses and dreaming of brain uploads and godlike AIs.
Transhumanists are the spiritual grandchildren of the sixth century alchemists
We have space travel, robots, instant communication with the other side of the world, instant access to most art and most writing ever produced, weapons based on the reactions that power the stars, systems of wires that transmit an invisible energy that makes our mechanical slaves operate, face transplants, X-rays, cloning… and you think those people were irrational?
And still no Golem or Homunculus (AGI) or Philosopher’s Stone (arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech) or Elixir of Life (transhuman life extension). I see no rational reason to believe that these things are likely technological developments in the foreseable future any more than they were in the 16th century.
In the 16th century they didn’t have computers or the theory of computation, they didn’t know about neurons, they didn’t know about quantum mechanics or atomic orbitals, they didn’t know about genes or DNA or molecular biology. We’ve gone from da Vinci enclosing the human form in a circle, to genome projects and cortical simulations and artificial organs. We can synthesize a bacterial genome from raw ingredients with molecular precision. We have understood the genetic causality of embryonic differentiation. What would be irrational, would be to know all that, and still think that intelligence, the interactions of individual atoms, and the aging process, will remain beyond technological intervention. Humans are the tool-using primate, and it turns out that our evolutionary role is to use our old tools to make new tools that will then remake ourselves and the world. You can’t give a tool-using monkey access to its own blueprint and then expect nothing to happen.
In the 16th century they didn’t have computers or the theory of computation, they didn’t know about neurons, they didn’t know about quantum mechanics or atomic orbitals, they didn’t know about genes or DNA or molecular biology. We’ve gone from da Vinci enclosing the human form in a circle, to genome projects and cortical simulations and artificial organs. We can synthesize a bacterial genome from raw ingredients with molecular precision. We have understood the genetic causality of embryonic differentiation.
Sure. What’s your point?
What would be irrational, would be to know all that, and still think that intelligence, the interactions of individual atoms, and the aging process, will remain beyond technological intervention.
Indeed, and that’s what my artificial knee example was about.
But unless you expand the definition of “transhumanism” to the belief that there will be progress in medicine, computer technology and chemistry, in which case I dare you to find someone who is not a transhumanist, this is not what we are talking about.
What we are talking about are things such as cryonics, which institutions like the Society for Cryobiology, actual domain experts who know what they are talking about, consider pseudoscience. And yet, there are prominent transhumanists who are willing to give tens of thousands dollars to people who do this (and in case you are wondering, Alcor isn’t much better).
So please, spare me the claim that transhumanism is based on science and technology.
What we are talking about are things such as cryonics, which institutions like the Society for Cryobiology, actual domain experts who know what they are talking about, consider pseudoscience.
The cryobiologists long ago forfeited any reason to take them seriously as critics, with such dogmatizing as their bylaws banning cryonicists and public lies about ‘exploding lysosomes’. Fruit of the tainted tree etc.
Accusations made by a totally uninterested party like Mike “Darwin” ( * ) based largely on anonymous testimony. I don’t know about lysosomes, but he could have got just one incorrect claim in a private letter.
If cryobiologists think that cyronics is pseudoscience and possibly a fraud, then it seems perfectly reasonable that they want to distance themselves from it. The point is, why do they believe that cyronics is pseudoscience in the first place?
Mike “Darwin” says that it’s because they are prejudiced and they have a personal grudge against him, but that sounds quite unlikely, expecially given that, as even he claims, cryobiologists have been indifferent or even supportive of cryonics in the early days.
What likely happened is that the evidence that cryopreservation of whole human bodies (or heads) was not viable accumulated, and cryobiologists did what proper scientists are supposed to do: discard the failed hypothesis. Mike “Darwin” and his ilk, on the other hand, clinged to it like the homeopathists inventing stories about “water memory” when they learn about Avogadro constant.
I don’t have the expertise to evaluate all the technical claims in the article, but Mike “Darwin” lecturing cryobiologists about cryobiology sounds like creationists lecturing evolutionary biologists about evolutionary biology.
If I have to apply the authority heuristics I’m certainly defaulting to the mainstream authority, not to some guy who sells a fringe practice that (a) appears to be unviable in the light of my knowledge, (b) looks very much like a religious ritual (c) has been the subject of confirmed scams in the past, and is now offered by questionable organizations.
( * why this guy doesn’t use his real name instead of trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist? It’s like calling yourself Einstein or Newton)
“Based largely”? Are we reading the same page? I see plenty of papers, articles, FOIA lawsuits, TV programs, quotes from published bylaws etc.
The point is, why do they believe that cyronics is pseudoscience in the first place?
Yes, that’s a good question, especially when their original criticism—exploding lysosomes—is now on the ash-heap of history, and when their entire field demonstrates the success of cooling and vitrifying techniques. One you don’t answer.
Mike “Darwin” says that it’s because they are prejudiced and they have a personal grudge against him, but that sounds quite unlikely, expecially given that, as even he claims, cryobiologists have been indifferent or even supportive of cryonics in the early days.
Really? Let’s look at what Darwin himself wrote in response to this exact question:
But beyond this particular incident, it is clear that the Society had a long history of less focused enmity toward cryonics. What was responsible for this enmity and lack of cooperation between cryonicists and cryobiologists? The answer is: a lot of things.
‘A lot of things’. I see.
What likely happened is that the evidence that cryopreservation of whole human bodies (or heads) was not viable accumulated, and cryobiologists did what proper scientists are supposed to do: discard the failed hypothesis. Mike “Darwin” and his ilk, on the other hand, clinged to it like the homeopathists inventing stories about “water memory” when they learn about Avogadro constant.
I don’t have the expertise to evaluate all the technical claims in the article, but Mike “Darwin” lecturing cryobiologists about cryobiology sounds like creationists lecturing evolutionary biologists about evolutionary biology.
So you haven’t bothered to read anything that Darwin has produced carefully, as demonstrated by your repeated mischaracterizations, you know the cryobiologists have been either wrong or lying about why cryonics wouldn’t work, and your best guess is to compare cryonics to memory water and creationism.
If I have to apply the authority heuristics I’m certainly defaulting to the mainstream authority, not to some guy who sells a fringe practice that (a) appears to be unviable in the light of my knowledge, (b) looks very much like a religious ritual (c) has been the subject of confirmed scams in the past, and is now offered by questionable organizations.
Darwin isn’t selling anything now; and I’ve asked him what he thinks of that particular 1991 essay of his, and he mentioned nothing like ‘oh, I made all that up so I could sell ALCOR memberships’ despite his fierce recent criticisms of CI and ALCOR.
Does that make you take him any more seriously and in favor of cryonics, or are Darwin’s criticisms just going to go through your one-way filter and come out as ‘cryonics is bunk, even Darwin says so!’?
( * why this guy doesn’t use his real name instead of trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist? It’s like calling yourself Einstein or Newton)
People change their names for all sorts of reasons; for Darwin, it’s admiration for the original back when he was a kid and defending Darwinism against Creationism, not ‘trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist’ although perhaps he was an unusually foresighted kid and adopted the name so decades later he could fool people into thinking he was someone from the 1800s?
(Which by the way is really ironic, since you’re the one comparing cryonics to Creationism! Why are you including such a lame criticism, anyway? Do you want people to dismiss you out of hand for ad hominems?)
( * why this guy doesn’t use his real name instead of trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist? It’s like calling yourself Einstein or Newton)
Well, I hadn’t suspected that that wasn’t his original last name.
First part (from computers to molecular biology): I was explaining why “AGI … arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech … transhuman life extension” are now likely, in a way that wasn’t in the 16th (or the 6th) century.
Second part: I’m trying to wake up your sense of change! You didn’t answer Aris when he asked you where you think 21st-century progress will stop. Do you think the human race can understand the causality of the atom, the gene, and the brain, and then only apply that knowledge superficially? Chemists routinely apply their understanding of how atoms interact, to create molecules that have never existed in nature, and that is the future of life and intelligence too: living things and thinking things that have been designed from the molecular level up, having only broad structural properties in common with their natural prototypes.
You did say all this won’t happen for “the foreseeable future”. So maybe you just mean it’s an affair of the year 3000, but not the year 2050. Let’s try to pin this down. Consider a scenario for the future solar system where most of it is inhabited by artificial life and artificial intelligence. In some places it’s still based on DNA, in some places it’s all solid-state. But there are many inhabited worlds, with their own chemical ecosystems and nonhuman cultural histories. Do you consider such a future flatly impossible? Possible but unlikely? Likely but irrelevant to this discussion?
And still no Golem or Homunculus (AGI) or Philosopher’s Stone (arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech) or Elixir of Life (transhuman life extension)
And yet we have crystal balls, flying chariots, and metallic servants that do our housework. There doesn’t seem to be any actual difference in kind between the type of “magic” you mock people of imagining, and the “magic” we have achieved.
If it’s an actual difference in kind, tell me why “ability to transmute elements” would be seen by a 16th person as more exotic or absurd than “the ability to communicate instantly around the world” or “the ability to travel to the moon”
I see no rational reason to believe that these things are likely technological developments in the foreseable future any more than they were in the 16th century.
What’s the limit of the technological development that you foresee in the e.g. 21st century? Human cloning? Robotic babysitters? Artificially grown organic limbs? Self-driving cars? Less than that?
I’m not saying that there are no inventions. But it is important to understand that there are two kinds of inventions; let’s call them “microinventions” and “macroinventions”.
Microinventions are inventions that have already been invented. Ordinary things, such as an airplane or an iPod. Nobody sane is denying that microinventions exist. Suggesting that would be committing a strawman fallacy.
On the other hand, macroinventions are inventions that haven’t been invented yet. Such as AGI or nanotechnology. By definition, there are no examples of existing macroinventions. Therefore speaking about their possibility is completely unscientific. Your faith in macroinventions is like a faith in Santa Claus.
(To avoid misunderstanding in the absence of non-verbal signals: This comment is sarcastic, it expresses its author’s frustration from reading this thread, and does not represent the true beliefs of its author.)
Scrying is a divinatory practice akin to tarot reading. Crystal balls as magical television is a modern fantasy trope that might have originated with the “palantíri” in Tolkien’s legendarium, which is more recent than the actual invention of television.
flying chariots
“Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Kongming lanterns (孔明灯).”—History of ballooning
It’s not so difficult to immagine a bigger version of something that already exists.
metallic servants that do our housework
Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.
If it’s an actual difference in kind, tell me why “ability to transmute elements” would be seen by a 16th person as more exotic or absurd than “the ability to communicate instantly around the world” or “the ability to travel to the moon”
Why were the alchemists focusing on transmutation and life extension rather than remote communication or lunar travel?
My guess is that actual technological development is hard to predict with significant advance, while some human fantasies, such as immortality or the ability to manipulate matter in arbitrary ways, are more or less always the same.
Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.
Sure. I mean, they would have had to have a classical education to have heard of Vulcan’s metal servants, or have been rich before they could ever have heard of any clockwork automatons that were all the rage in the medieval, Renaissance or high Imperial ages. They could not possibly have imagined any thing like that...
BTW, the first patent for washing and wringing machine was issued in 1697. I suppose their imaginations were so stunted they couldn’t possibly foresee or desire this before 1697, nor in 1697 desire even more automated washing...
So that’s late 17th century, when the scientific revolution was already well underway and the industrial revolution (the closest thing to an actual technological singularity that ever happened) was about to start.
So you’re not going to give them any credit for not just imagining but patenting it a century before the American Revolution? You’re just going to move the goal posts and say that anything which is during the Industrial Revolution counts? (But when did the Industrial Revolution start, since some economists and historians date the uptick in technology to as late as 1800, Gregory Clark remarking that “the average rate of expansion of technology before 1800 was extremely slow.”)
By the way, Francis Bacon only wrote Novum Organum in 1620. You want to move the goalposts even more?
We were talking about what innovations 16th century people, and particularly alchemists, were able to imagine, and you produced a patent from the late 17th century.
Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that everything changed instantaneously from the 16th century to the 17th century, and this restriction was absolutely crucial to the discussion.
I apologize for wasting your time.
(BTW, the robot servant example still stands even if my washing machine example produced after a minute in Google doesn’t meet your exact specifications.)
Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.
...okay, I’m not really clear about what point we’re disputing anymore. Yes, the actual result is different that what is envisioned four centuries in the past. If it had been envisioned perfectly it would have probably occured in a few decades, not centuries in the future. But imagined plausible paths of inventing something eventually close in to the actually successful path of inventing something.
In the 1st century CE Lucian first (that I know of) wrote about lunar travel by just having a whirlwind lift a ship to the heavens.
By the 19th century, Julius Verne was thinking about giant cannons, but the mode of travel (with the need to have oxygen supplies and the like) had become closer to what would eventually be reality.
When in the 20th century rockets developed, the actual method that we’d use to go to the moon was pretty much known by every science fiction writer before we ever went there, and then it was just a matter of technical details to work out...
Again how is this different from imagining about golden apples in ancient times, and elixirs of life in medieval times, and currently our imagining nanotech providing medical immortality? Nanotech (and computing) is a currently-being-fast-developed technology, much like the early 20th century had the fast-developing technology of rocketry.
You’ve not really made an argument that the world isn’t closing in to AGI or medical immortality. What makes you argue that the difference between us and medical immortality is larger than the difference between some 1930s science fiction writer who writes about lunar travel, and the actual success of lunar travel?
I agree with your guess. I additionally suspect that the ability to move without restraint (e.g., flying chariots) and the ability to spy on one’s neighbors without being seen (e.g., invisibility and/or clairvoyance) are also human fantasies of long standing which precede the development of hot air balloons or television.
Agreed. In some sense you can always trace any technological innovation to some long-standing need or desire, but it would be an historical distortion to read ex-post any expression of these desires as a technological prediction.
A paleolithic man could easily have said: “I would really like to hear from my cousin Urk who went the other way when our tribe split.”
That doesn’t mean he’s predicting Facebook.
Completely unrelatedly, the narrative conceit of paleolithic speakers who are capable of complex syntax but nevertheless use grunts for names never fails to entertain me.
Scrying is a divinatory practice akin to tarot reading. Crystal balls as magical television is a modern fantasy trope that might have originated with the “palantíri” in Tolkien’s legendarium, which is more recent than the actual invention of television.
IIRC, Dante’s Purgatorio did have things strongly reminiscent of flat-screen TVs, playing back scenes from dead people’s lives or something.
Christian altruism—e.g. the attempt to make heaven possible for everyone—burns out when you see that most people don’t want this “help”. In the beginning it’s not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed to them by technology in the material world.
Are you sure?
The guy is dedicated to cryonics and “existential risk”, among other things. Those are extremely uncommon interests, so just in terms of cognitive content, he is clearly in a minority.
On the other hand, it could be a bit ostentatious to claim to be a “cognitive minority” just because you believe uncommon things. To me, “cognitive minority” suggests that your process of thought is unusual, not just its contents. (Although the two aren’t completely separate; unusual cognitive content can have consequences for process, if you regularly end up arriving at unusual conclusions because of your unusual premises.)
Now maybe the point of your religious/transhumanist analogy is that the “burnout of a transhumanist altruist” is not as unique as it sounds; that it’s just a secular manifestation of a weariness with saving the world and spreading the good news, that might affect anyone with utopian or transcendent aspirations that society refuses to support. I will concede this much, that the same feeling might be felt by an exhausted Christian evangelist, or by an exhausted Marxist evangelist.
But the basis of the specific hopes does make a difference. The Christian hope is based on emotion, coincidence, a sense that the soul is distinct from the body, rumors of miracles, and faith in authority. The Marxist hope is based on the excitement of revolution, belief in progress, the theory of history as class struggle, and optimism about the nature of life in high-tech collectivist societies. The transhumanist hope is based on science and technology. In its individual flavors it may be naively optimistic, naive about politics, wrong about human psychology, wrong about specific scenarios. But the progress of science and technology is giving us a lot of reason to think that something like rejuvenation is materially possible. I can’t say the same for the Second Coming of Christ, or the moneyless harmony of the Venus Project.
That’s what transhumanists like to tell themselves, much like Marxists talking about “scientific socialism”, or some brands of Christians with their “creation science” and “intelligent design”.
Transhumanists are the spiritual grandchildren of the sixteenth century (edited) alchemists who tried to make the Philosopher’s stone and the Homunculus. They can dress it with scientific-sounding language and speculative technology, but the irrational cognitive processes that underlay the formation and maintenance of such beliefs are the same of other religious or religious-like belief systems.
Sure, but that falls in the scope of medical science: My grandma had walking difficulties because her knee had worn out with age. So her knee was replaced by an artificial one, and now she walks like when she was younger. Is she a transhuman cyborg?
When a medical procedure of proven effectiveness becomes available, it is applied without much fuss. This has nothing to do with freezing corpses and dreaming of brain uploads and godlike AIs.
We have space travel, robots, instant communication with the other side of the world, instant access to most art and most writing ever produced, weapons based on the reactions that power the stars, systems of wires that transmit an invisible energy that makes our mechanical slaves operate, face transplants, X-rays, cloning… and you think those people were irrational?
And still no Golem or Homunculus (AGI) or Philosopher’s Stone (arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech) or Elixir of Life (transhuman life extension). I see no rational reason to believe that these things are likely technological developments in the foreseable future any more than they were in the 16th century.
In the 16th century they didn’t have computers or the theory of computation, they didn’t know about neurons, they didn’t know about quantum mechanics or atomic orbitals, they didn’t know about genes or DNA or molecular biology. We’ve gone from da Vinci enclosing the human form in a circle, to genome projects and cortical simulations and artificial organs. We can synthesize a bacterial genome from raw ingredients with molecular precision. We have understood the genetic causality of embryonic differentiation. What would be irrational, would be to know all that, and still think that intelligence, the interactions of individual atoms, and the aging process, will remain beyond technological intervention. Humans are the tool-using primate, and it turns out that our evolutionary role is to use our old tools to make new tools that will then remake ourselves and the world. You can’t give a tool-using monkey access to its own blueprint and then expect nothing to happen.
Sure. What’s your point?
Indeed, and that’s what my artificial knee example was about.
But unless you expand the definition of “transhumanism” to the belief that there will be progress in medicine, computer technology and chemistry, in which case I dare you to find someone who is not a transhumanist, this is not what we are talking about.
What we are talking about are things such as cryonics, which institutions like the Society for Cryobiology, actual domain experts who know what they are talking about, consider pseudoscience. And yet, there are prominent transhumanists who are willing to give tens of thousands dollars to people who do this (and in case you are wondering, Alcor isn’t much better).
So please, spare me the claim that transhumanism is based on science and technology.
The cryobiologists long ago forfeited any reason to take them seriously as critics, with such dogmatizing as their bylaws banning cryonicists and public lies about ‘exploding lysosomes’. Fruit of the tainted tree etc.
Accusations made by a totally uninterested party like Mike “Darwin” ( * ) based largely on anonymous testimony. I don’t know about lysosomes, but he could have got just one incorrect claim in a private letter.
If cryobiologists think that cyronics is pseudoscience and possibly a fraud, then it seems perfectly reasonable that they want to distance themselves from it. The point is, why do they believe that cyronics is pseudoscience in the first place?
Mike “Darwin” says that it’s because they are prejudiced and they have a personal grudge against him, but that sounds quite unlikely, expecially given that, as even he claims, cryobiologists have been indifferent or even supportive of cryonics in the early days.
What likely happened is that the evidence that cryopreservation of whole human bodies (or heads) was not viable accumulated, and cryobiologists did what proper scientists are supposed to do: discard the failed hypothesis. Mike “Darwin” and his ilk, on the other hand, clinged to it like the homeopathists inventing stories about “water memory” when they learn about Avogadro constant.
I don’t have the expertise to evaluate all the technical claims in the article, but Mike “Darwin” lecturing cryobiologists about cryobiology sounds like creationists lecturing evolutionary biologists about evolutionary biology.
If I have to apply the authority heuristics I’m certainly defaulting to the mainstream authority, not to some guy who sells a fringe practice that (a) appears to be unviable in the light of my knowledge, (b) looks very much like a religious ritual (c) has been the subject of confirmed scams in the past, and is now offered by questionable organizations.
( * why this guy doesn’t use his real name instead of trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist? It’s like calling yourself Einstein or Newton)
“Based largely”? Are we reading the same page? I see plenty of papers, articles, FOIA lawsuits, TV programs, quotes from published bylaws etc.
Yes, that’s a good question, especially when their original criticism—exploding lysosomes—is now on the ash-heap of history, and when their entire field demonstrates the success of cooling and vitrifying techniques. One you don’t answer.
Really? Let’s look at what Darwin himself wrote in response to this exact question:
‘A lot of things’. I see.
So you haven’t bothered to read anything that Darwin has produced carefully, as demonstrated by your repeated mischaracterizations, you know the cryobiologists have been either wrong or lying about why cryonics wouldn’t work, and your best guess is to compare cryonics to memory water and creationism.
Darwin isn’t selling anything now; and I’ve asked him what he thinks of that particular 1991 essay of his, and he mentioned nothing like ‘oh, I made all that up so I could sell ALCOR memberships’ despite his fierce recent criticisms of CI and ALCOR.
Does that make you take him any more seriously and in favor of cryonics, or are Darwin’s criticisms just going to go through your one-way filter and come out as ‘cryonics is bunk, even Darwin says so!’?
People change their names for all sorts of reasons; for Darwin, it’s admiration for the original back when he was a kid and defending Darwinism against Creationism, not ‘trying to hijack the reputation of a great scientist’ although perhaps he was an unusually foresighted kid and adopted the name so decades later he could fool people into thinking he was someone from the 1800s?
(Which by the way is really ironic, since you’re the one comparing cryonics to Creationism! Why are you including such a lame criticism, anyway? Do you want people to dismiss you out of hand for ad hominems?)
This seems denotatively true.
Well, I hadn’t suspected that that wasn’t his original last name.
First part (from computers to molecular biology): I was explaining why “AGI … arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech … transhuman life extension” are now likely, in a way that wasn’t in the 16th (or the 6th) century.
Second part: I’m trying to wake up your sense of change! You didn’t answer Aris when he asked you where you think 21st-century progress will stop. Do you think the human race can understand the causality of the atom, the gene, and the brain, and then only apply that knowledge superficially? Chemists routinely apply their understanding of how atoms interact, to create molecules that have never existed in nature, and that is the future of life and intelligence too: living things and thinking things that have been designed from the molecular level up, having only broad structural properties in common with their natural prototypes.
You did say all this won’t happen for “the foreseeable future”. So maybe you just mean it’s an affair of the year 3000, but not the year 2050. Let’s try to pin this down. Consider a scenario for the future solar system where most of it is inhabited by artificial life and artificial intelligence. In some places it’s still based on DNA, in some places it’s all solid-state. But there are many inhabited worlds, with their own chemical ecosystems and nonhuman cultural histories. Do you consider such a future flatly impossible? Possible but unlikely? Likely but irrelevant to this discussion?
And yet we have crystal balls, flying chariots, and metallic servants that do our housework. There doesn’t seem to be any actual difference in kind between the type of “magic” you mock people of imagining, and the “magic” we have achieved.
If it’s an actual difference in kind, tell me why “ability to transmute elements” would be seen by a 16th person as more exotic or absurd than “the ability to communicate instantly around the world” or “the ability to travel to the moon”
What’s the limit of the technological development that you foresee in the e.g. 21st century? Human cloning? Robotic babysitters? Artificially grown organic limbs? Self-driving cars? Less than that?
I’m not saying that there are no inventions. But it is important to understand that there are two kinds of inventions; let’s call them “microinventions” and “macroinventions”.
Microinventions are inventions that have already been invented. Ordinary things, such as an airplane or an iPod. Nobody sane is denying that microinventions exist. Suggesting that would be committing a strawman fallacy.
On the other hand, macroinventions are inventions that haven’t been invented yet. Such as AGI or nanotechnology. By definition, there are no examples of existing macroinventions. Therefore speaking about their possibility is completely unscientific. Your faith in macroinventions is like a faith in Santa Claus.
(To avoid misunderstanding in the absence of non-verbal signals: This comment is sarcastic, it expresses its author’s frustration from reading this thread, and does not represent the true beliefs of its author.)
Scrying is a divinatory practice akin to tarot reading. Crystal balls as magical television is a modern fantasy trope that might have originated with the “palantíri” in Tolkien’s legendarium, which is more recent than the actual invention of television.
“Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Kongming lanterns (孔明灯).”—History of ballooning
It’s not so difficult to immagine a bigger version of something that already exists.
Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.
Why were the alchemists focusing on transmutation and life extension rather than remote communication or lunar travel?
My guess is that actual technological development is hard to predict with significant advance, while some human fantasies, such as immortality or the ability to manipulate matter in arbitrary ways, are more or less always the same.
Sure. I mean, they would have had to have a classical education to have heard of Vulcan’s metal servants, or have been rich before they could ever have heard of any clockwork automatons that were all the rage in the medieval, Renaissance or high Imperial ages. They could not possibly have imagined any thing like that...
And still they didn’t imagine a washing machine...
A stunning reply, thanks.
BTW, the first patent for washing and wringing machine was issued in 1697. I suppose their imaginations were so stunted they couldn’t possibly foresee or desire this before 1697, nor in 1697 desire even more automated washing...
So that’s late 17th century, when the scientific revolution was already well underway and the industrial revolution (the closest thing to an actual technological singularity that ever happened) was about to start.
So you’re not going to give them any credit for not just imagining but patenting it a century before the American Revolution? You’re just going to move the goal posts and say that anything which is during the Industrial Revolution counts? (But when did the Industrial Revolution start, since some economists and historians date the uptick in technology to as late as 1800, Gregory Clark remarking that “the average rate of expansion of technology before 1800 was extremely slow.”)
By the way, Francis Bacon only wrote Novum Organum in 1620. You want to move the goalposts even more?
We were talking about what innovations 16th century people, and particularly alchemists, were able to imagine, and you produced a patent from the late 17th century.
Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that everything changed instantaneously from the 16th century to the 17th century, and this restriction was absolutely crucial to the discussion.
I apologize for wasting your time.
(BTW, the robot servant example still stands even if my washing machine example produced after a minute in Google doesn’t meet your exact specifications.)
...okay, I’m not really clear about what point we’re disputing anymore. Yes, the actual result is different that what is envisioned four centuries in the past. If it had been envisioned perfectly it would have probably occured in a few decades, not centuries in the future. But imagined plausible paths of inventing something eventually close in to the actually successful path of inventing something.
In the 1st century CE Lucian first (that I know of) wrote about lunar travel by just having a whirlwind lift a ship to the heavens. By the 19th century, Julius Verne was thinking about giant cannons, but the mode of travel (with the need to have oxygen supplies and the like) had become closer to what would eventually be reality. When in the 20th century rockets developed, the actual method that we’d use to go to the moon was pretty much known by every science fiction writer before we ever went there, and then it was just a matter of technical details to work out...
Again how is this different from imagining about golden apples in ancient times, and elixirs of life in medieval times, and currently our imagining nanotech providing medical immortality? Nanotech (and computing) is a currently-being-fast-developed technology, much like the early 20th century had the fast-developing technology of rocketry.
You’ve not really made an argument that the world isn’t closing in to AGI or medical immortality. What makes you argue that the difference between us and medical immortality is larger than the difference between some 1930s science fiction writer who writes about lunar travel, and the actual success of lunar travel?
I agree with your guess. I additionally suspect that the ability to move without restraint (e.g., flying chariots) and the ability to spy on one’s neighbors without being seen (e.g., invisibility and/or clairvoyance) are also human fantasies of long standing which precede the development of hot air balloons or television.
Agreed. In some sense you can always trace any technological innovation to some long-standing need or desire, but it would be an historical distortion to read ex-post any expression of these desires as a technological prediction.
A paleolithic man could easily have said: “I would really like to hear from my cousin Urk who went the other way when our tribe split.” That doesn’t mean he’s predicting Facebook.
Yup.
Completely unrelatedly, the narrative conceit of paleolithic speakers who are capable of complex syntax but nevertheless use grunts for names never fails to entertain me.
Tradition. Why do you have the name of some Jewish king who lived 3000 years ago? XD
IIRC, Dante’s Purgatorio did have things strongly reminiscent of flat-screen TVs, playing back scenes from dead people’s lives or something.