From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Tue Dec 01 1998 - 23:12:46 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> I, incidentally, am a fanatic Singularitarian. I want something smarter and
> more powerful and more ethical than I am to exist; I don't care how, or what
> happens to the human race or myself afterwards...
eliezer, you are not alone. i suspect that desire for something greater is
hardwired into our brains by way of genetics. reasoning: in times past,
when tribal warfare was pretty much constant, those groups of humans
that imagined an afterlife and some being greater than themselves would have
an easier time forming a hierarchy for battle, and would therefore be a
more formidable military force than groups of atheistic individualists, thus
deriving the advantage of differential reproduction.
you and i may be nonreligious by way of reasoning out the origins of
belief, yet i conjecture that the distant ancestors of you, dear extropian
reader, were highly religious, and therefore hardwired religious aptitude
into our brains. i, for one, had a hell of a time overcoming the religion instinct.
the above notion can explain why there are millions of grand churches, billions
of believers, countless idiotic religious memes running rampant thru the human
memeganism, while we extropians are a widely separated lonely few. spike
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