From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Fri Jul 06 2001 - 18:31:20 MDT
---> J.R. Molloy
> > So I would say that your quest to get rid of religiosity would
> require you
> > to in fact ignore religiosity and focus your efforts on
> assisting a drive
> > for species-wide transcendence.
>
> Yeah, if only fanatics and zealots would quit getting into everyone's
> business.
Quite. Never said it'd be a simple juggling act :) But focus everything on
stopping the religious, and they "win."
> BTW, here's a related bit from SL4:
> <<Michael Korns coined the tern 'inloading' at Extro5 for the approach of
> adding artificial neurons to live humans to upgrade them. He sees
> inloading
> as a more likely, and preferable path to human super-intelligence. It is
> incremental, and less shocking than uploading - and will probably also be
> easier to achieve.
> Inloading involves gradually adding silicon/ nanotube/ quantum?! (or
> whatever) artificial neurons & connection to our brains, together
> with some
> technology to transmit all relevant information to an external
> computer for
> backup. Eventually, artificial neurons would vastly outnumber
> original ones.
> I like the meme: inloading - less threatening than uploading. 'Simply'
> the enhancement of brain function, but ultimately the same result.>>
>
> That's the best new idea I've read this year.
I've seen this talked about before, but more in the "human welded to big
computer as transition stage to becoming big computer" sense. As postulated
above -- no big computer, gradual, still looking human -- it's a very
logical and attractive end-conclusion for the discussion, with nice
parallels to the organic way in which we tend to "grow" our home computers
at the moment. Giving it a catchy name is good ("inloading" definately
sounds better than "loading up" :). Insofar as the wider stage goes,
concepts don't really exist until they have widely adopted, catchy names. So
everyone who maintains a site should add this definition up there and
propagate the meme.
Hell, I'd lay down a challenge to see if we can get an article on inloading
into abcnews.com's science section. Seems like the sort of thing they'd go
for, and all it would take is a speculative science paper handed to the
right people. The editors there got four days worth of space out of the
biotech super soldier stuff.
> > Although I do think that removing aging as a
> > more do-able first step would greatly mitigate one of the larger factors
> > driving the formation and evolution of organized religions.
>
> Yep, a good place to begin... before our brains succumb to a new
> generation of religionists.
You make them sound like B-movie zombies :)
Although; semantics. Religionists are fine. It's religionists (and others --
some economists fall into this category) that happen to be missionary
luddites and/or deathists that are problematic.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:32 MST