From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Mon Oct 01 2001 - 13:50:54 MDT
From: "Spike Jones" <spike66@attglobal.net>
> show up at the door
> of Alcor with a week's notice of needing their services. Would they be
> able to handle 10 of us? 20? What if we had something infectious? Would
> we be turned away? spike
Might we conjecture that those infected with the cryo-Luddite meme that
prompts them to preserve past mistakes instead of moving on to new solutions
are the only ones who would _not_ be turned away. Would Metaman (the
superorganism of the evolutionary phase transition) freeze dead acorns instead
of sprouting oak saplings (metaphorically speaking). Or, IOW, does extropy
freeze dead caterpillars rather than encourage the metamorphosis of others
into butterflies? No, being an extropic entity, a self-organizing and
spontaneously ordered complex adaptive system (a global brain, as it were),
Metaman selects the most promising units of organic intelligence to assimilate
into more highly evolved cognizance. Call it the Triage of Artificial
Intelligence which precedes the approaching Singularity, because this is (as
you've pointed out) war.
Before we can plan a first line of defense, we need to know the enemy, and the
enemy is the whole ugly past of the human race, which has fought five thousand
wars in the last three thousand years. The enemy is that sick memeplex that
would suck transhumans/extropians back into the psycho-vortex of tribal
warfare. You want tracer ammo to shoot down poison duster aircraft. Well, OK,
that's not a bad idea if it results in defeating terrorism. But can it?
Recent events have induced many people to undertake a crash course (get it) in
Islam. My favorite Islamic sect is the Sufis, who are to Islam as Gnostics are
to Christianity, or as Chassid are to Judaism, or as zenjin are to Buddhism,
or as Yogis are to Hinduism, or as beatniks are to Taoism. What the Sufis call
Islam is comparable to what transhumanists call extropy. It is an organic
transformation, and the combination and flowering of intelligent energy which
can derive from any source including technology.
Sufis are called the people of the path, because their approach to life feels
like a long walk, a journey on which there is a single way to go, and a single
destination. That they are on the correct path they try to verify by their
sense of reality in the presence of their sages, whom they regard as
enlightened, which means that they have gone beyond words to cosmic knowledge.
But even without the sages, just remaining on the path is enough to bring them
to understanding. This approach looks like mystical nonsense to inexperienced
outsiders. Similarly, science looks like a religion to those who don't
understand how experimentation verifies observation.
The Sufi's first line of defense is revolutionary:
life is not a puzzle to solve; it's a mystery to enjoy.
The extropian's first line of defense is evolutionary: adapt or die.
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment
We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
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