From: Nicq MacDonald (namacdonald@stthomas.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 14 2000 - 23:29:50 MST
> The future of science and technology are not mystical, not magick, not
> mysterious.
Arthur C. Clarke would disagree with that statement...
Anyway, since when is our destiny of a mundane nature? This notion has only
been commonly believed for a very short duration of humanity's existence-
I'd also argue that this notion is purely transitionary, a kind of
collective "dark night of the soul" (as a mystic would put it) before our
initiation into the Transhuman existence...
> A transhuman is not supernatural.
We don't know this. I, for one, think that it must be... if this wasn't the
case, we would certainly be awash in signals from alien civilizations and
others that still live tied to their mundane existence, eternally expanding,
conquering, warring... remember, there were numerous second-generation stars
that matured billions of years before our own Sun, and odds are that in a
self-organizing universe many intelligent races could have developed and
eventually reached their own singularity, in which, through technological
means, they advanced to a state that is beyond our comprehension, and could
only be seen as divine. The only way we could even hope to perceive a
slight bit of the nature of such beings is through mystical means. Even the
ever hard-nosed Carl Sagan proposed something to this effect in "Contact",
when he mentioned the idea of a species that had reached a state beyond our
imagination designing patterns in the physical universe that could only be
read through mathematical codes... maybe the Kabbalists are on to
something...
> Capital 'P' Powers are not amazing or incredible, they are merely
currently
> inscrutable.
If they're inscrutable, they very well could be amazing and incredible. You
don't know this- nor do I.
> Mystics read fantasy, extropians read science fiction.
> Get it?
I read both. My favorite genera, in fact, is Science Fantasy- Star Wars,
Shadowrun, the more recent Final Fantasy games, and several of my own
strange concoctions.
I'm one of those strange people who sees no contradiction between being
mystical and being scientific (and I don't even need some arcane
interpretation of quantum physics or feel the need to bend the rules of
probability to back me up).
-Nicq
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