Posted on 10/03/2007 1:31:45 AM PDT by B-Chan
Science Fiction has a lousy record of predicting the future. In the 1930s, for example, it was widely held that by 1970, toga-clad descendants of the Depression Generation would be living in giant art deco cities full of speeding Dymaxion Cars and dining on food pills. In the '50s and '60s, it was rocket belts and atomic-powered flying cars we were supposed to be enjoying by 2000. And today? In almost every extrapolation of the future I've read lately, the ultimate fate of mankind is uploading -- the transference of consciousness from biological to digital substrates. Such uploads, it is claimed, will be immortal and (within the environments they inhabit) omnipotent as well. "Ye shall become as gods," the futurists tell us, 'knowing Good and Evil... AND ye shall not surely die."
Leaving aside the soteriological results of our last gamble for that prize, one question always remains in my mind after reading the latest sci-fi scenario of our imminent apotheosis: so what?
The question seems facetious, but I'm asking in earnest: what's the point? Given unlimited power its environment and an eternity in which to shape it, the human mind is doubtless capable of creating paradises both gross and subtle. Yet, when spread over capital-E Eternity, surely even human creativity ends up as pretty thin gruel. And, when one factors in the exponential speed of thought that will supposedly be available to our uploaded selves, surely Eternity will end up being a lot longer than we might imagine. After all, eventually even the most creative of uploaded minds is going to reach the limits of its creativity, even if that creativity is expanded by collaboration with the creativity of the billions of other uploaded minds. It may take a million years, or a billion, but sooner or later every iteration of every creative idea is going to be experienced by the godlings that once were us. And then what?
(Some would argue that the AIs we're going to build will transcend our own intelligence and create godlike super-intelligences that will be "as gods", providing meaning and purpose for post-humanity. I myself don't see a market for such machines. To what purpose would people of today invest in their construction? "We're looking for investors to help us build a machine that will instantly render all human life obsolete, Mr. Bigbux. How much shall we put you down for?"
So we become immortal, all-powerful digital beings. What then? An eternity of reruns doesn't sound like much fun to me. A cosmic reset button, making us forget everything so we can start afresh? Sure, but that dooms us to an endless cycle of resets. It pains me to think that our deified, uploaded descendants may eventually decide to delete all backups and pull the plug on the whole works out of sheer ennui.
I hate to say it, but the Heaven promised us by Moore's Law sounds more like Hell to me. To my (admittedly limited) mind, a "heaven" that is limited by human ingenuity is always going to end up in a yawn. Perhaps this is why God's Heaven is described as being beyond human comprehension — to give us an eternity that goes beyond what we ourselves can create.
Don't get me wrong — I'm all for living as long as possible. I want to walk on the moon, for one thing, and I intend to stick around until I can. But living forever — as an uploaded mind or as a biological human — eventually leads to "So what?"
(And I haven't even discussed the effect of physical immortality on the human family. After all, people who live forever don't need to have offspring. I for one would not want to live forever in a universe without children.)
Nope, I don't buy it. I know that most SF writers are way smarter than I am, and I know they have Moore's Law on their side, but I've got to believe that there has to be something better as the end of existence than boredom. I may be a Luddite, but I'm hoping that the future of uploads and artificial gods that we're being promised now ends up looking as silly as the rocket-belt-and-toga future we looked forward to Way Back When
(AI = "Artificial Intelligence")
I’m guessing the AI-worshippers haven’t taken into account the possibility of Rampancy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampancy
It’s a pretty simple test. Do you want to live or die?
Nature tells us to struggle to survive. Liberals tell us to die when they choose.
I’ll go with nature on this one.
DK
I want my flying car .
You want a flying car, I want a rocket belt!
But, I am completely sure that an immortal man would be an insane man.
Any heaven we can imagine will become hell in eternity--consider 72 virgins (or raisins) for eternity. Unless the law of diminishing marginal returns has been repealed in heaven, it will certainly pale after repeated experience.
Jesus even suggested this in his response to the pharisee's question on the widow who was remarried to seven brothers (e.g., Mark 12:18-27):
18Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19"Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23At the resurrection[c] whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"
24Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'[d]? 27He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"
Jesus describes heaven in non-rational terms, I suspect, because his listeners couldn't grasp the concepts or the language lacked the descriptive capacity beyond "it's heaven."
This doesn't mean that it's all hippie-based "expand your mind, I'm ok, you're ok" irrationality. God gave us reason, imagination, and free will, arguably as tools to search for understanding about God. But just like I used to mock and ridicule Christians and Christ because it seemed wholly irrational from a liberal/leftist college kid standpoint, Christianity only made sense after I got saved. Heaven will only make sense when we get there.
Beware arrogance. Consider that we are but bottom dwelling worms in a fragile air-ocean/biosphere. Astronomers see incredibly violent explosions of energy, thankfully far away. A mere cosmic twitch(an asteroid/comet hit like SL9 on Jupiter in 1994, a nearby supernova...)and we’d all be gone in an instant. Beware arrogance....
Look, being conservative and a scientist aren't mutually exclusive. Just like being religious isn't a prerequisite for being conservative. The reason science and religion have such a hard time getting along is because in the past, the church was the highest authority on all things, not just spiritual. Remember, things that we take for granted now (i.e. Earth is not the centre of the universe) almost got people like Galileo killed in their time because of the church.
You can attribute whatever you want in your life to Jesus and that's just fine with me. Different strokes for different folks. But generally there's a real explanation for everything. It's another reason why I never try to argue science with the religious. I was born a catholic, I consider myself agnostic. Some of the hard core Christians here on FR would call me an atheist or a heathen (and probably some other not very nice words too, whatever happened to "Love thy neighbour."?).
Unfortunately, party because of religion, some things look to be inevitable. Most people who grew up in the 60s and 70s took it for granted that we would expand our reach from this rock to the moon and Mars and even beyond. The days of Apollo. Now, look what religion has done. We're wasting money dealing with a group of fanatics (who have been told by their religious leaders that we are the enemy and are to be destroyed at all costs) rather than advancing the species. Now don't get me wrong, you've gotta do what you've gotta do, and we have to protect our way of life. But my argument is that we shouldn't have to.
I'm all about freedom of expression (and religion). That also means that I have the freedom to disbelieve in your belief.
As to your point about the limitations of human intellect, I will post only a quote by Robert A. Heinlein:
"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run these are the only people who count."
I think one reason that futurists are so maligned by the religious is that it would prove that either Nietzsche was right ("God is dead.") or that he/she/it never existed in the first place. Imagine what immortality would do the human psyche! Here's another one, by Ray Kuzrweil:
"Take death for example, a great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it, we make extraordinary efforts do delay it and often consider it's intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinitely put off, the human psyche would end up...well...like the gambler in the Twilight Zone episode."
Now...for posterity's sake I'll tell the story of the Twilight Zone episode that Kurzweil references. In that episode, a man is shot (after shooting a few other people) and goes to (what he presumes is) Heaven. He gambles and always wins no matter what. But he becomes bored with this "existence." He begs his "guardian angel" to send him to Hell. Then the "angel" tells him that he's in Hell.
In Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines (recommended reading by the way) he suggests a thought experiment. Say sometime in the next 30 years, we have the technology to replace a single neuron in your brain with a microchip. It's a cure to Alzheimer's among other degenerative diseases. Great, everyone's happy. But let's let the process go a little further. As each neuron fails, we replace it. One by one, all of your brain's neurons become electronic. You don't lose any of your memories that you haven't lost, presumably your cognitive ability is even enhanced.
The question is this: At what point do you cease to be Human? It's a rhetorical question. If you take the view of most Christians that life begins at conception, then the logical follow-on is that as soon as that first microchip is implanted, you're a machine. Now assuming we have the ability to replace individual neurons, then we probably have the technology to replace other organs, lungs, livers, kidneys. Say I take a mechanical kidney implant, or a mechanical liver, at what point do I become a machine? Are patients with artificial heart valves machines? Or how about hip replacements? These are fundamental questions that I'm pretty sure scare the heck out of the religious. Because it means immortality. And I'm sorry to say it, but the basis of religion is that you will find comfort after you leave the physical world. What happens when the consciousness never LEAVES the physical world? Religion falls apart.
I'm going to leave it at that, I'm getting long-winded.
But you would have a flying car, a rocket belt, and, of course, a laser beam. And you’d be mad. Think of the possibilities!
This is why Kilgore Trout is my favorite science fiction author. He never pandered to popular book trends.
This article, while making some valid points, blissfully ignores an entire vast Universe that’s there to explore.
That might take some time. ;-)
You do know that Kilgore Trout is a character from several Kurt Vonnegut novels, don’t you?
“Say I take a mechanical kidney implant, or a mechanical liver, at what point do I become a machine? Are patients with artificial heart valves machines?”
Pacemakers! Instruments of the devil, I say! heh
Interesting question, if neural “plugs” become available to directly jack in to computers, will anyone who gets one be excommunicated in some religions? After all, its a _very_ small step between jacking in like that and having integral computer augmentation.
I don't know - watch "Blade Runner" again. ;)
I have it on good authority that Kurt Vonnegut was a Kilgore Trout character. If either of them was alive, you could ask him (them.)
The whole replacing neurons with chips thing stands or falls based upon a single idea: that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter (brain activity, to be precise). If our essential selves are nothing more than computational processes — if the soul is northing more than software running on the computer called the brain — then there is no reason why duplicating neuronal functions wouldn’t allow us to seamlessly copy our minds into a virtual format.
However, there is as yet no scientific definition of consciousness, and no way of demonstrating that it is a side-effect of brain activity. In fact, there have been several well-documented cases of persons who were born without brains as such, yet who survived and functioned normally. This suggests that there is more to consciousness than mere electrified meat.
In every historical era, the definition of the universe and mind have borne the impression of the major technology of the day. In the clockwork era of the Enlightenment, the universe was a clockwork mechanism; in the Machine Age, the universe became a great machine. Today, in the Information Age, the dominant technology is the computer, and so the best minds all agree that the universe is a computer and the mind a piece of software. Now, it may be that we — alone of all the men who have ever lived — have reasoned our way into the discovery of the One True Nature of the universe and the mind. It may also be that we haven’t. Basing my opinion upon history, I’d tend to side with the latter.
Still and all, the philosophical question remains. If matter, energy, space, and time are all that exists, and if there is neither purpose nor meaning to our existence, we will eventually reach the cosmic So What?. Whether as biologically immortal beings or as uploaded state vectors in some ultimate version of Second Life, we will all eventually encounter the Wall of Futility at the end of the universe. The book of Ecclesiastes, rather than Revelation, may be the true apocalypse.
But I’m optimistic. No matter how fast our computers get, no matter how we manage to cheat death, the fact remains that Jesus lived and rose from the dead. That historical fact cannot be made to unhappen. Since it did happen, it follows that Jesus is God, as He said He was, and that everything else He said is true as well. With this in mind, I trust that God will preserve us somehow, and am therefore not afraid of anything technology might build or science might reveal.
And if He doesn’t? If the Universe really is a meaningless cloth of futility? Then I’ll die, and good for me. I’d rather be dead than an immortal living in a pointless eternity.
The American and European science fiction vision of the future predicts a state of being beyond the comprehension of modern-day humans. This is a very Buddhist mindset: future as Nirvana. Ironically, in Japanese science fiction, the future is basically the same as the present, a finite and comprehensible world, only with cooler toys. This is a very Western version of tomorrow. Why this inversion of futures has occurred, I can’t say, but I do know that deep down I find the Japanese vision of a future world where people still have bodies and smoke cigarettes and have limitations to be much more satisfying than the American/European future where we all become insubstantial ghosts in a great machine.
But that’s just a question of taste. My guess is that underlying sensible reality and the biological mind is an absolute Reaity and and Absolute Mind. I can’t prove it — but my gut says it’s the truth.
I agree. “The Tao that can be described is not the true Tao” — Laotse
Ghost in the Shell, and Stand Alone Complex worry this to death. Good SciFI tho.
Maybe not, but the current state of Los Angeles is pretty close to what the movie depicted. ;)
Still and all, the philosophical question remains. If matter, energy, space, and time are all that exists, and if there is neither purpose nor meaning to our existence, we will eventually reach the cosmic So What?. Whether as biologically immortal beings or as uploaded state vectors in some ultimate version of Second Life, we will all eventually encounter the Wall of Futility at the end of the universe. The book of Ecclesiastes, rather than Revelation, may be the true apocalypse.But I’m optimistic. No matter how fast our computers get, no matter how we manage to cheat death, the fact remains that Jesus lived and rose from the dead. That historical fact cannot be made to unhappen. Since it did happen, it follows that Jesus is God, as He said He was, and that everything else He said is true as well. With this in mind, I trust that God will preserve us somehow, and am therefore not afraid of anything technology might build or science might reveal.
You're right where you say that the whole idea stands and falls based upon what consciousness is. They say that a dog isn't conscious because he knows he's in a room, but he doens't know that he knows that fact. Whereas humans are self-aware. (Although some would argue that we have no proof of either of those points and a hypothetical "higher being" would consider us to not be self-aware.) So there is a scientific idea of consciousness, but I can't say that there's a definition.
As far as the other stuff goes. My opinion tends to lean towards the fact that we are here, and the odds say that we're not alone. There are too many planets around too many stars for this one to be the only one to harbour life. I also agree with your point, and i often wonder myself, that in the past, science did not jive with what we now consider the body of scientific knowledge. But there is also a largery body of scientific knowledge now than there ever has been in history. We still don't know exactly what it is that makes up the universe and many people spend their entire lives searching for this "stuff". (M. Kaku, S. Hawking, A. Einstein, etc.)
We could also debate the events that happened around 2000 years ago. You call them fact. I accept that there is an element of truth to the story. But I wonder how much of this has been lost and misinterpreted over the ages. But then again, we each go through life with a set of beliefs. Most people get very defensive when their beliefs are challenged, think confronting a liberal with facts...same idea.
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