The Immortalists

Yeah. Look at your neighbor, you know that Tea-party guy who annoys everyone. There he is putting another Glen Beck quote on his SUV. You want to live with him as your neighbor - Forever? Is he allowed to be a god? Let's be clear here. The nanotechnology revolution could, theoretically, usher in an age of immortality - but we have little evidence complex microscopic machines will work in the hostile environment of our bodies, or that they could keep up with our constant degradation. Finally this guy, and everyone probably reading this, will not get a chance to buy the devices to make one a god. You will be denied this. What is the point of being a god with no followers? The masses of earth will not get this, the stratification, classes and castes of selfish ignorant man will be permanent, and the CEOs, wealthy and their few fellows will be gods, forever, and we will be fodder for their whims, like now, but with no hope for tomorrow. For an Atheist, why would he want to make gods? 6 Tektite Serpent ---------------------------- "That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly" - Thomas Paine "We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing" - Seneca

Kurzweil is a soulless moron. I'm disappointed to see this on this site.

This reminds me of Orbital's "You Lot" off the blue album... 6 Tektite Serpent ---------------------------- "That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly" - Thomas Paine "We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing" - Seneca

Making it so that people can live forever is only the first step; After that, we need to bring back all the people who have died. From there, we need to bring back all sentient beings.

I basically believe in this.  We can conceive of how to make it so that people in the future could have some sort of biological immortality, but we can't conveive of how to bring back those who have died.

Still, I think that the impulse is there, somewhere in the universe's heart;  And I think that somewhere, out beyond known physics, a way to do it is there.

This is my basic faith and trust in the universe.

I think that reincarnation -- reincarnation in which we basically forget all of our past lives -- I think it is basicaly identical to extinction of the personality, of the person.

We're all comfortable talking about the self as a disembodied consciousness, but we're uncomfortable talking about the self as a person:  a body, a mind, a personality, a nature, etc., complete with a history, a past, dreams, and a future.  We all have an infinite evolution with each other.

I think that the disembodied "I Am" is an important part of the question, but it's only half of the question.  The other half is that you are you, your own particular uniqueness, your particular configuration in existence.  Without that second half, you're not you -- you're just not you.

My premise is that you, the particular you, is precious and beloved to the universe.  Even if you vote conservative or republican or what have you -- the universe doesn't even blink at this kind of thing.

And I think that that love will begin with your resurrection, some point in the future or outside of time.  I say "being", rather than "end," because that great reunion will be much more like a beginning than an ending.

This is what I believe.

Transhumanism is interesting, there are many features of it that are quite profound and obviously have immense positive potential. After all, one of the Big Idea notions of transhumanism is to improve the quality of our lives, albeit almost exclusively through technological applications. Unfortunately, that idea of improving our experience of existence, along with pretty much all the approaches transhumanist-leaning researchers and thinkers like Kurzweiil and Harrington take in addressing the Big Picture aspects of life (more metaphysical aspects of existence like death), are extremely limited and based on some narrow assumptions. Once again, they take the finger to be the moon instead of a tool to guide our awareness toward directly apprehending the actual moon.

For example, on p. 372 of The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil states, "A primary role of traditional religion is deathist rationalization - rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing." He then goes on to say, "But the explosion of art, science, and other forms of knowledge that the Singularity will bring will make life more than bearable; it will make life truly meaningful." Other than the assumption that life isn’t truly meaningful as it is now, with the impertinences of death and by extension religion still a part of life, there are many other assumptions regarding life and its value that are at work within the paradigm that Kurzweil, along with Alan Harrington, Ronald Bailey, and many others, take to be the Truth. One of the biggest is the rationality of this paradigm, which implies a universe that is cold, mechanistic, “messy” and “slow” and “imperfect” as Kurzweil states many times throughout Singularity. Essentially, death is seen as unhealthy, something that can and must be overcome, and true spirituality is what we create when the really meaningful life begins for us once our materialistic philosophies get translated into technologies that transcend us human meatware, self-organize, and permeate the universe with ubiquitous higher intelligence.

Is death unhealthy? Is life meaningless, much less the universe we’re embedded in, and the other sentient beings who share this space with us? I remember the despair I felt when I tried to embrace the same seemingly progressive, narrowly rational, reductionist perspective Kurzweil espouses. Logarithmic graphs with straight lines and exponential charts with smooth, detinite curves both shooting upward to unending heights pretty much showed me that technology was where it was all going to come together. Sure, there are dots outside the inevitable lines and curves of progress, but these phenomena are pretty much “negligible deviants” that will someday fall in line through properly designed experimentation or just simply explaining away to the point that they are removed from our psyches, perhaps via a blandly frustrated and comic spectacle by James Randi or Penn and Teller. Out of sight, out of mind, out of evolution (or so some of us hope).

At the heart of materialist reductionism – where the universe is cold, mechanistic, essentially brutal and indifferent, fundamentally meaningless, fundamentally heartless, with consciousness and things that are nearly universally experienced as positive like love and creativity and communion with others and generosity and humor are either fundamentally emergent properties derived from utilitarian survival and reproductive mechanisms or are only meaningful within the happy accident of our human consciousnesses – at the heart of this useless, random, meaningless universe and existence is the assumption that life and the universe is, well, just that. There is also a huge assumption that we know essentially everything there is to know about how life works, what it is, and what death is. We know everything there is to know about physics and biology and chemistry, much less “lesser” subjects like spirituality (which is just a delusion according to the likes of Dawkins and Dennett and even Kurzweil, other than for him a true spirituality that will stem from the inevitable mastery of the universe we and our AI supergods will enjoy via the Singularity), and that which we do not know will, once again, fall in line with proper experimentation and acceptable analyses of the results. But those are assumptions, and many scientists do recognize that there is much that we do not understand about the workings of life and the universe. What about some of those “negligible deviants” that mainstream science hasn’t gained control over yet? For example, near-death experiences. There are thousands of studies of such experiences, and even cases of NDEs during brain death, such as that of Pam Reynolds. Many, many of these studies also involve unusual phenomena, such as accurate descriptions of places, thoughts, etc. that were inaccessible to the involved individual’s bodily senses even if they had possessed some unconscious retention of their surroundings.

Death can be one of life’s most emotionally intense and challenging experiences. However, I do not agree at all that religion or spirituality are merely rationalizations, essentially fantasies, to merely lessen the impact of death on our lives and minds and hearts. Sure, we do replace body parts now and perform other procedures and take other actions to ensure greater health and comfort. Longevity is no goal in itself, however. Quality of life is. Certainly, much can be said about the evolution of technology and the improvements that materialistic science and a narrow type of rationality has brought us. And much can be said about how alienating and destructive environmentally (as well as destructive to those in poorer classes or countries) and psychologically such progress has also been for humanity. It’s not just that crazy shit could happen on the material levels, like gray goo or evil Terminator AI destroying humans as Bill Joy pointed out in Wired magazine ten years ago. It’s about really looking into the depths of life, not just creating complicated surfaces and attempting to convince ourselves that these are depths – like getting hungry and painting a picture of a delicious meal and standing back to admire it and pretend you’re full, instead of actually using one’s energy to prepare and eat and savor an actual meal. Perhaps the difficult challenge is that of the deepest communion with nature, not domination and manipulation of it. Appropriate technology that is aligned with that challenge is a blessing and is very beneficial. And there is plenty of valid research that supports this perspective, even if it’s not as easily accessible or popular as the notions of a life limited by narrow notions of the workings and fundamental features of nature.

We are already gods. We don't live in a material universe. At our very essence we are conscious inspirited beings. These futurists are arrogant to think that we really understand nature. Most of western medicine's technological fixes fall very short. They are great during emergency situations but incredibly poor at building health. Why? They don't understand that life is fundamentally not a competition but really an elegant and vast series of relationships. This arrogance is what has brought us to our current state of environmental and financial collapse.

It seems like one would have to be a staunch athiest to be a dedicated transhumanist. And definitely stay away from DMT! Spend too much time in the immaterial realms and you might be cured of your fear of death and all of your delusions of granduer. Has anyone seen/heard about the Souix prophesy? It is depicted visually as a forked path with one fork leading to death and decay and the other a rejuvenation of life. The two forks represent two different perspectives. One seeks to control life through intellectual cleverness and technology. The other seeks to return to a proper relationship with nature and life itself. The clash of these two perspectives brings up all the most interesting and terrifying questions. Should life be accepted as perfect or should it be manipulated to suit our fancy? Are you even in control? Really? Are you sure? What is it that wants control? What is it that dies? What are you if not the mind and body? What is the point of life? What is the true nature of reality? The issue seems to center around the issue of control. The transhumanists have decided that death is a bad thing and should not be outside the realm of human control. They may or may not succeed in their quest but if they do succeed they surely will not stop with death. No we must create a technological utopia! but to do so will take alot of work. Better tackle this sleep problem so we can get it done more quickly. And resources are so costly and time consuming to extract, process and assemble. We must create nano factories to assemble matter from molecules and then we will truly rule the material plane. We will create robots to do the work for us and make them sentient so we won't even have to tell them what to do anymore. We will send self replicating ai robots out to conquer and populate the universe for us. We will tailor our genetics to suit our wishes and have nano bots to fix up our bodies so we never get sick. We will control the weather. We will control everything! And live FOREVER!!! The future begins to sound like the most exciting, unbelievable, orgasmic explosion of human potential ever. Until one thought brings it all down like a house of cards; we are not in control and never have been. This is the terrifying truth that no one wants to face. "Thats b.s." my friend says. "I'll prove it to you right now." "I'm just going to sit here, in the intersection, at this green light, because I can." No I say, we are sitting at this green light because you have been conditioned by various factors to be stubborn and disagreeable when you think you are right. What we call free will is actually only one choice; to act out of conditioning (ego) or to let go and let life be as it is; in which case life acts through you. Ask any true artist or athlete about their most profound performances and whether "they did it" or whether something else acted through them. If they are truthfull, they'll probably tell you; "I was just along for the ride." My hypothetical friend of course lets me know that this is a bunch of pompous psychobabble. But what seems pompous and arrogant to me is the belief that we can improve upon life itself when we have no understanding of what it is. We can't even fit the question into our standard intellectual framework. That we label death as bad when we can't understand its purpose while living. That we seek to create and control new life forms when we don't even know what we are and historically have not even been able to control ourselves. "If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder, and acts of extreme violence and cruelty." When I think about transhumanism I think of the last man in the world on his 10000th birthday. He is alone because all the other humans have been murdered. They killed each other because as their control over existence grew greater they became deeply pained by the fact that there was always something that was out of their control. Each other. Each person's reality impinged on the reality of the others. Competition for control lead to the extinction of the human race. And when the last man killed himself out of boredom and the wish to experience the unknown there were no words to describe his astonishment. It was the greatest surprise birthday party ever! As someone said earlier, the transhumanists (along with the rest of us most of the time) mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. We mistake a thought or an idea for the truth. But thoughts and ideas are just symbols. they can never be what they represent. And so we become trapped in a world of symbols unable to see outside our own dream. Terrified of the unknown; some people wish to prolong the dream and shape it to suit their liking. Its hard to blame them. Although its worth keeping in mind that the most devastating thing that can happen to a human being is to get everything that we want. Because sooner or later, one is faced with the fact that none of it brought any real, lasting happiness. And the question arises; now what? Have you ever noticed that as one's diet becomes more and more unnatural one developes more and more health problems? It is the same for society. The farther out of accord we are with nature; the more problems will develope. The dreamer will awaken when the dream either becomes unbearable or when it comes to its natural conclusion. No ego ever gave up its belief in control and let go into the unknown until it damn well had to. Is this something we have to go through?

Imagine the caterpillar rejoicing in being able to hang around forever and ever ...at the expense of becoming a butterfly destined for greater heights...

Beautiful comment voyager1, sums it up perfectly.

I personally think it's great to have stuff like this on RS.

I was cringing my way through most of that short film, I was amazed by the arrogance of it, and upset but the clear fear of death being shown. I found the style of the 'interviewing' distasteful at best, an interviewer just egging on and agreeing with everything said by the interviewee does not make for interesting, challenging watching.

However, I think that this is the reason it should be on RS. If all of the articles published on this site are aiming for a reaction of 'Yes I agree thanks' then that's pretty poor. I'd far rather see articles that can get an empassioned response, 'FUCK NO! This guy's a nutter! What's he so afraid of!? Death is as beautiful as life!"

I agree with Daniel when he says that it shouldn't be positioned on the site in a way that suggests it represents their views, as it may be off putting to new visitors to the site.

However, Daniel also said: "My hope is that sites like Reality Sandich can inflect that evolution in a positive way by maintaining an ethical dimension in discussing the radical possibilities opening before us."

This subject is discussing a radical possibility, and although I disagree with pretty much everything put forward in the clip, I think it needs to be here so that we can discuss it and the ethical implications of it.

Really, having the same reverie of thoughts 20 million years from now, no thanks!