From: Dan Clemmensen (dgc@cox.rr.com)
Date: Sun Aug 05 2001 - 20:14:04 MDT
Mark Walker wrote:
> From: <JoshCahoon@cs.com>
>
>>Just out of curiosity, I'm wondering how many on this list feel they came up
>>with the idea of the singularity on their own. I feel like I did, and was
>>surprised to find an organization based, in large part, on the concept.
>>
> There is nothing new under the sun (I may not have been the first to say
> this). Transhumanism is a minor variant on an ancient theme. Plato and
> Aristotle said the (1) telos of humanity's best (i.e., philosophers) is to
> become godlike, (2) that we ought to become godlike, and (3) that
> dialectical reasoning is the means for philosophers to realize their telos.
> Unlike Plato and Aristotle (Hegel, etc.) we do not believe that there is a
> little divine element in us that needs to be nurtured. Darwin killed that
> idea forever. So, transhumanists substitute technology (most notably genetic
> engineering and AI) for (3). What separates us from Plato et al is a minor
> quibble about the means to become what we ought to be.
>
Sorry, but I respectfully and completely disagree. Our current concept
of the singularity is grounded in science, not philosophy. It is a
simple forward extrapolation of well-understood phenomena.
The concept that "we are simply re-discovering things that the ancients
already knew" became progressively less tenable throughout the
renaissance, and is now essentially invalid. It's true that modern
disciplines have ancient analogs when described qualitatively, but
this is basically coincidence. The ancients displayed brilliance,
but they did not have the tools, methods or results of modern
science, so their theories were not deeply grounded enough to be
more than superficially predictive.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:09:29 MST