BS watch --- Not mean, but false

Over at Amor Mundi Dale Carrico calls me out in a comment. I am touched by the honor, so I will reciprocate and comment in this very first BS Watch.

First, some context. Dale is basically a good fellow and a very good writer. I must confess that I read him often, and often agree with him. I cannot comment on his blog because a couple of years ago he told me, in public, that I was no longer welcome. The reason he hates me so much is that I am a “Robot Cultist” who “believes that his organismic brain might be “digitized” and thereupon “migrated” (these already questionable metaphors he treats altogether more questionably as scientific hypotheses, of all things) into cyberspace or into a robot body, and thereby quasi-immortalized.”

Carrico is really obsessed with Robot Cultists. He used to participate in 
the Robot Cult
 transhumanist online discussions, and he used to be a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, but one day he started attacking us with nonsense and lies like an intellectually and emotionally -challenged fool.

Now he asks his readers:

• Is this critique of transhumanism mean?
• If yes, does its meanness undermine the force of the critique?
• If yes, can you think of ways to reformulate the critique so that it retains its substance but becomes comparatively immune to this charge of meanness?

I don’t find the post in question so mean, nothing compared to other posts that I have seen. In general, meanness and personal insults often make things more interesting and fun to read, and I must admit to enjoying a good, mean and dirty verbal fight now and then. Meanness also generates page hits and attracts readers, and I know some persons who have decided to join 
the Robot Cult
 technoprogressive and transhumanist interest groups after reading about us on Amor Mundi, so I think Dale is doing very good work for us.

Of course, those who write mean articles about others should be prepared to take meanness in return. They should also do their homework, stick to verifiable claims, and be very careful to avoid false claims and faulty logic. Otherwise, nobody will take them seriously.

Carrico is a Grand Master of strawman arguments, and a consummate liar who never pays any attention to what his “targets” really say. A typical discussion with him goes like this:

DC: Everyone knows that roses are pink, but Robot Cultist X says that roses are green.
X: I am sorry, but I never said that roses are green.
DC: Yes you did, you moron, you and your Robot Cultist friends.
X: I never said that roses are green and I challenge you to find an actual quote, even just one. I have said that most roses are pink or red, but many roses are white or yellow, and some roses have other colors.
DC: Fuck you, asshole. Perhaps you never said that roses are green, but you Robot Cultists want to genetically engineer green and blue roses, and this goes against the finitude and interconnectedness of Nature, and your discourse reinforces the industrial-military-libertropian complex, and… (pages and pages of logorrhea).

Of course, after a few exchanges like this, X stops paying attention and moves on. The problem is not that Carrico’s critique is mean. Mean is tolerable, if it is also interesting and fun. The problem is that it is totally BS. The meanness cannot undermine the force, because there is no force to be undermined. Let’s see:

The post in question is divided into ten separate claims, which I will comment below one by one.

One: Enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy.

Carrico can only think in black and white, mutually exclusive categories, and is unable to understand overlapping categories. Many science fiction fans are also very literate in science and have advanced degrees and a long list of peer-reviewed publications to prove it, and many top scientists and science policy wonks are also science fiction fans.

Of course enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy, but this does not disqualify persons interested in science fiction from doing science or making science policy, if they have the inclination, skills and qualifications.

I could list many examples, but it would be kind of useless because Carrico ignores facts when they get in the way of his sophistry.

I find it very strange that a person who teaches at a top college is unable to understand the simple words “and, also.”

Two: Indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies is not the same thing as analysis.

Same as above.

Three: Extrapolating from speculations and stipulations mistreated as data will yield serially failed predictions, none of which amounts to foresight.

Foresight is about speculations on interesting outcomes that may follow from current facts, trends and theoretical models, not about detailed predictions with a date. Those who stay on the beaten path never find new places, and that’s why we need also scouts.

Four: There is nothing brave or useful or distinguished or progressive about saying magic would be cool if it were real, especially since there are so many real problems and real possibilities in the world that need all our bravery, pragmatism, special effort, and progressive struggle.

See comment to One. Many persons who say that magic would be cool if it were real, and try to make some magic real, are also actively engaged in more proximate problems and possibilities. Similarly, many persons who primarily focus on proximate problems and possibilities are also open to and interested in “future magic” speculations.

Five: Promoting as “experts” people with no training in actual professional or academic disciplines, celebrating the “genius” of high-tech billionaires of no real distinction, who have simply appropriated the invention and effort of countless uncelebrated others, and providing rationalizations for the “indispensability” of corporate-military elites who will presumably deliver us medical immortality, offer us nano-abundance, geo-engineer away our environmental catastrophes, and code for us perfect software god parent-substitutes, is not even remotely the same as having real thoughts, doing true philosophy, or making serious policy.

While I might agree with parts of this claim, other parts are just hate speech with no content. Labeling imaginative speculations on emerging technologies “rationalizations for the “indispensability” of corporate-military elites” makes very little sense.

Six: Subcultures that remain very static, very small, very marginal, very megalomaniacal, and very defensive tend to look and conduct themselves more like cults than subcultures.

Very true. I think one of the best examples is the Amor Mundi blog, where Carrico holds court with a handful of brainwashed followers who believe everything he says, and bans those who dare to disagree.

Seven: People who buy a Volkswagon, an Apple computer, or Diesel Jeans aren’t actually joining a political movement no matter what advertising executives say to the contrary, nor are people who watch BSG marathons, write Janeway shipper fanfic, work on a Steampunk casemod, or enjoy CLAMP cosplay actually engaging in political agitation no matter how personally resonant and edifying their experiences may be, or how interesting to ethnographers, nor are people who are invested in “The Future” of the futurologists — which amounts in some respects precisely to such marketing phenomena and in others precisely to such fandom phenomena — really joining or sustaining a political movement or engaged in political agitation in any remotely serious way.

See comment to One. Many persons who enjoy speculating about the future are also engaged in politics, and many political activists also enjoy speculating about the future.

It is interesting to note that, like many other transhumanists, I actually agree with most of Carrico’s politics. I support basic income, wealth redistribution, civil rights, abortion, gay marriage, etc. I do not share Carrico’s totalitarian though-policing attitude typical of the dullest “intellectual” left, but I have similar positions on most actual, concrete issues. I find it strange that Carrico dedicates so much energy to attacking and insulting persons with similar political ideas.

Eight: “The Future” is not Narnia, it is not Middle Earth, it is not the United Federation of Planets, it is not Hogwarts, it is not Heaven, it is not Hell — it will be a shared present attesting to stakeholder struggle just as this present is.

Also, water is wet.

Nine: What we mean by life happens in biological bodies, what we mean by intelligence happens in biological brains in society, what we mean by progress happens in historical struggles among the diversity of living intelligent beings who share the present — and to say otherwise is not to be interesting but to be idiotic.

I agree with the last point, “what we mean by progress happens in historical struggles among the diversity of living intelligent beings who share the present.” But the first two points are total BS based on a very weak and very stupid non-argument: “this is how things have always been, and therefore this is how things will continue to be forever.” Wake up, Dale. Nobody walked on the Moon before 1969, and same-sex persons could not marry in the U.S. before 2004.

Ten: We are all vulnerable, we are all promising, we are all more ignorant than we need to be, we are all more capable than we can know, we are all error-prone, we are all interdependent, we are all subject to chance, and we are all going to die.

Probably most persons alive today will die, but I look forward to science and technology permitting a very radical extension of the lifespan of future generations, in biological and non-biological bodies, beginning with today’s toddlers. The other points are true but, given the choice, I prefer being less vulnerable rather than more, less dependent on others rather than more, less ignorant and error-prone, and I will try to live as long as I can by using all available options and without any reverence and respect for the wisdom of nature and similar crap. This is just common sense.

Interview with venusplusx - Alison Gardner and Dan Massey

I interviewed venusplusx.org polymaths Alison Gardner and Dan Massey on sexual freedom, the occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights and quantum entanglement in the same talk. Thanks to Khannea Suntzu for filming. Thanks to Hank Pellissier for transcribing part of the interview for the IEET, and join the discussion at IEET | Sexual Freedom - an interview with VenusPlusX.

For this first teleXLR8 show using an interview format I have invited two Renaissance persons interested in everything. All these topics and many others will be explored in forthcoming interviews and talk shows on highly imaginative technologies, science, art, culture and society, hosted by show leaders (to be announced soon), with one or more guests and a selected audience. The videos will be edited and posted online a few days after the shows.

Transcendent Engineering - Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness

My essay Transcendent Engineering ha just been published on the Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. A version of the essay is forthcoming in the Transhumanist Reader edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More.

The image above is part of a beautiful picture taken by Terasem editor Lori Rhodes to illustrate the article. Thanks Lori!

Expanding previous essays, I argue that science may someday develop the capability to resurrect the dead and build (and/or become) God(s), and propose to base a transhumanist religion (or, better, mythology) on this idea.

Read the rest here...

Discussion: you are welcome to join the ongoing conversation on the Turing Church Facebook group and/or the IEET site: Transcendent Engineering - IEET

Turing Church Online Workshop 2

In the picture above taken in teleXLR8 I am with Frank Tipler, in a preparation meeting for the Turing Church Online Workshop 2. I am a big Tipler fan, see for example Interview with Frank. J. Tipler (Nov. 2002), and Review of The Physics of Christianity, by Frank Tipler.

Frank gave a great talk at the Workshop (see also this video for the full Q/A session).



Quotes from Tipler’s talk and Q/A:

“If we don’t move into space, if we and our downloads and our art int siblings do not move into space, the entire biosphere is doomed. if we are so foolish as to remain on the planet earth then we and the entire biosphere will be annihilated. Fortunately I don’t expect this to happen, I expect that the human race and its artificial intelligences and downloads will eventually move out into space and ultimately take over the universe.”

“Everything can be reduced to the laws of physics, in particular to the laws of physics which we now know.”

He mentions that we are used to think that Newtonian physics has been superseded by general relativity and quantum mechanics, so we cannot rule out that the physics which we now know will be superseded by new physics, but he thinks general relativity and quantum physics are implied by Newtonian physics.

“Newton was correct!”

“General relativity is really Newtonian mechanics made consistent with the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, which is an automatic consequence of maxwell’s equations.”

“As it was proved by the great mathematician Elie Cartan in the 1920s, gravity is curvature for Newton also, and once you combine that with the insights of Enstein and Lorentz then the Newtonian equations automatically become the Einstein equations.”
Ref.: General Relativity As an Aether Theory, arxiv.org/pdf/1007.4572

“Quantum mechanics really is a subset of Newtonian mechanics in its most general form called Hamilton-Jacobi theory, that means there was no scientific revolution in the 1920.”
Ref.: Hamilton-Jacobi Many-Worlds Theory and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, arxiv.org/abs/1007.4566

“We already have a theory of everything.”

“Reality is deterministic.”

“There are parallel universes out there. Many world, many universes, is already built into the laws of physics, was in the laws of physics in the early 19th centuty, physicists would just not admit what their own equation were screaming at them.”

He says that lack holes cannot evaporate because of unitarity, but in an ever expanding universe they would necessarily evaporate, which would violate the laws of physics.

He concludes that it is not possible for the universe to expand forever, it must eventually expand to a max size and then re-contract. but this would also lead to contradictions with thermodynamics. Only one possible re-contraction mechanism is consistent with all the laws of physics:

“Intelligent life manipulating the entire universe, forcing it into a series of patterns that allow this intelligent life to continue to exist.”

“Only this makes the laws of physics mutually consistent.”

“The laws of physics have dictated that we will survive.”

“If the laws of physics are for us, for the biosphere, for the eventual existence of human downloads and the eventual exist of artificial intelligence, what on earth can be against us. Inevitably we will take over the entire universe.”

“As we approach the final singularity, the laws of physics also dictate that our knowledge and computing capacity is expanding without limits. Eventually it will become possible to emulate, to make a perfect copy of, every previous state of the entire universe.”

“We will be brought back into the future, brought back into existence as computer emulations in the far future.”

“Since the computer capacity must by the laws of physics expand without limits as we are going into the final singularity, that means these emulations can also continue to exist forever and also interact with the various versions of themselves.”

“When we emulate basically all possibilities consistent with the laws of physics, we will actually get the particular one of you and I which are actually here in this auditorium.”

“These all possibilities are already there currently. This is called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I claim it is not one interpretation, it is really the only interpretation consistent with the laws of physics.”

In the Q/A

“The expansion of the universe will be turned off by our human download descendants plus our artificial intelligence siblings.”

“The universe cannot expand forever because this would be inconsistent with the laws of physics.”

“What the mathematics is telling us is that actually there are three singularities out there, a final singularity, an initial singularity, and a third singularity, which you can see only if you look at the universe from the multiverse point of view, which connects the other two. So, really you have got three singularities, which, you can show mathematically, are one and the same. So, we have in other words a tri-une God, a God who is three but is one.”

“Christianity can be experimentally confirmed.”

The other speakers, James Hughes, Martine Rothblatt, Remi Sussan, Lincoln Cannon, Brent Allsop, Dan Massey, Mike Perry, Andrew Warner, Fred & Linda Chamberlain, and Ben Goertzel, gave great talks. The full videos of all talks and Q/A sessions are available online. The Workshop explored transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″, the convergence of science and religion, highly imaginative future science and technologies for resurrection, emerging science and technologies for immortality, social and memetic engineering. It was held on December 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the death of my mother, and I cannot think of a better memorial.

I could not deliver my own talk because my Internet connection was vary bad (it has been very bad for a few weeks after a power surge that must have damaged something in the router). The slides of my presentation are below.

Turing Church Online Workshop 2

View more presentations from Giulio Prisco

The Turing Church Online Workshop 3 will be held in the winter of 2012 and focus on the elusive concepts of time scanning and resurrection by copying-to-the-future, often called Quantum Archaeology.

La Voz de la Ciencia - Is the Singularity Near?

A spectre is haunting the world - the spectre of the Singularity. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: The Pope and the ayatollahs, the banks and the political parties, and "bioethicists" of both the right and the left.

Read more on La Voz de la Ciencia (in Spanish)...

The futurists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Singularity. Humans 1.0 have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a universe to win.

Between the opening and closing paragraphs adapted from the Manifesto of Karl Marx, my article ¿Está cerca la Singularidad? (in Spanish), published by La Voz de la Ciencia.

The article is a simple and fairly standard overview of the Singularity, with some (less standard) considerations on Singularity politics and spirituality.

La Voz de la Ciencia is an open multidisciplinary project of Aviador Dro on the scientific and technological challenges of the XXI century, from the perspective of their impact on society and the human mind through a unified double vision, scientific and artistic.

Aviador Dro (short for El Aviador Dro Y Sus Obreros Especializados) is an electronic band from Spain formed in Madrid in 1979 with influences such as Gary Numan, Devo and Kraftwerk. They were part of the Movida Madrileña. The article includes the lyrics of their forthcoming musical El momento de la Singularidad.

In this video interview after a talk of Ray Kurzweil in Madrid, my good friend Alejandro Sacristán (aka Aviador Dro's CTA 102) outlines the Singularity (in Spanish).

IEET - Hank Pellissier interviews German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband

IEET - Hank Pellissier interviews German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband

Last week, the Pirate Party of Berlin, Germany, garnered a shocking 8.9% of the votes in the city-state’s election to place 15 representatives in Berlin’s parliament. In a story on the result, the New York Times described Pirate Party leaders as "disarmingly honest… in their 20s and 30s… with no lack of confidence."

Hank Pellissier has interviewed the German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband. Read the interview on the IEET website...

Buoyed by their Berlin success, the Pirate Party is sailing full speed towards the next German national election, scheduled in two years. A poll by the Forsa Institute indicates that 7% of the population aims to vote for the upstart new movement. Founded just five years ago in Sweden, the Pirates have quickly become a global force with chapters in more than forty nations.

The interview has been translated in many languages, here is an Italian translation.

I am persuaded that this young "Party of the Internet, and of the Future" is the best political outlet for H+ and technoprogressive policies. Why H+ and technoprogressives should join the Pirate Party? I can think of many reasons.

Perhaps the main reason is that Pirates want to combine personal liberty and social farrness, and clearly affirm the importance of both. Pirates are for BIG, and many of us here are for BIG. But Pirates are also for personal freedom and a slim administration.

The Pirate Party is the party of the Internet, and by extension it is the party of disruptive and revolutionary technologies, not afraid of radical change. The PP is the party of the future. It is the party of the young (like Marina), and I am one of those who think that the young are always right.

It is the only political party that I can see, in a future when these issues will be raised, clearly and openly embracing total self-ownership and morphological freedom.

My talk on Transhumanism and Religion, Manhattan College, Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4pm

I gave a talk on Transhumanism and Religion at Manhattan College, Thursday, October 13, 2011. Thanks to Robert Geraci for organizing the talk, and thanks to all participants for the great questions and comments.

Slides of the talk:

Transhumanism and Religion

View more presentations from Giulio Prisco

Interview with Stefano Vaj on Biopolitics and Transhumanism

Interview with Stefano Vaj on Biopolitics and Transhumanism
by Adriano Scianca (ed.). Translation from Italian by Catarina Lamm

Catarina Lamm has translated from Italian the booklet "Dove va la biopolitica?", by Stefano Vaj, interviewed by editor Adriano Scianca. The booklet is a summary of Stefano's "Biopolitica. The new paradigm".

See also my reviews:
Dove va la biopolitica? (Italian)
Review of Stefano Vaj's Biopolitica (English)

My talk at the Humanity+ community event in Second Life

See "Transhumanist Avatars Storm Second Life" on H+ Magazine: "More than 80 transhumanist avatars stormed the virtual world of Second Life for a community event organized by Humanity+ on September 15. This has been by far the largest virtual transhumanist event that I have seen, and I believe I have seen them all..." Read more on H+ Magazine, and see my presentation and the full video of the event below.

As I noted in my talk, we should forget the pessimism of the last decade, whose tone was set by 9/11, and go back to the solar and positive optimism of transhumanism in the 90s, occasionally naive, often politically incorrect, but always vibrant, full with energy and inspiring visions. Also, back to space, and why not back to the sixties (a truly magic decade.) I have been very happy to find the same spirit also in the talks of the other speakers, and the comments from the audience. Is this the beginning of a transhumanist Renaissance?

My presentation on Slideshare:

Let's make transhumanism FUN again

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Video on Youtube



This video beginning with Ben’s talk (sorry Natasha, your opening talk is missing) was recorded from a fixed point of view behind the lectern. There is also a lower resolution but longer version of the same video, including the last part of the Q/A session. Thanks to Kim and Jack for recording the videos.

Socrates Had Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea

Initially published as a comment to Mike Treder's excellent article Will you die? @ IEET.

I just found this gem of our old friend Carrico. He criticises this article because "That you are going to die is part of what it has always meant to be human..."

Inspired by previous debates (see below) I have taken the liberty to re-write his apology of death, changing a couple of words:

Everybody who has ever lived has suffered from haemorrhoids and diarrhea. Everybody has haemorrhoids and diarrhea. You have haemorrhoids and diarrhea. That you have haemorrhoids and diarrhea is part of what it has always meant to be human. If you didn't have haemorrhoids and diarrhea, you wouldn't be living a legibly human life. But of course you have haemorrhoids and diarrhea so there is no reason to belabor the point, and to do so is probably just to indulge in pathetic panic-stricken distraction or denialism about it anyway.

Mike Treder, Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (long-time readers may recall that I tend to call it "stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET" and tend to call its high level muckety mucks as "Very Serious Futurologists" or, alternatively, "White Guys of 'The Future'"), asked the question in a post yesterday, Will You Continue to Have Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea? (The answer, for you kids keeping score at home, is: "Yes, Mike, yes, you will continue to have haemorrhoids and diarrhea, as will every single person who reads these words.")

It doesn't seem right to make fun of people this desperate and deluded and dumb, but, well, I say, go ahead. Especially rich for regular readers will be the robotic predictability with which the Robot Cultists and the industrial-militarist complex continue to announce the arrival of a Cure For Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea, Artificial Intelligence, Drexlerian Nanotech, Designer Babies, Clone Armies, Immersive VR, the Paperless Office, Energy Too Cheap to Meter, Orbital Space Hotels, the Cure for [insert disease], and the history-shattering Singularity when the Robot God inaugurates Tech-Heaven or eats the world for lunch (you decide). No less enjoyable is the accompanying illustration for the piece of drawing-board nanobots on graph paper backgrounds just like real engineers use and with orange arrows indicating the immortalization action, and also, too, the reference to cyber-immortalization via "uploading" presumably involving something called your "essence." Science!

It is interesting to note that in previous debates Carrico has, instead, considered haemorrhoids, diarrhea and similar things related to what he considers as the noblest parts of the sacred human anatomy and the holy human biology as better examples of your "essence." See for example:
Cyborg Angels Live Forever and Never Ever Have to Poop
The Power of Poop; or, Prisco Responds

Dale, my boy, please feel free to live a legibly human life and to pursue happiness and meaning your own way. If this means continuing to suffer from haemorrhoids, diarrhea and death, so be it. I would not wish these things upon my worse enemy, but you are the best judge of what is good for you and makes you happy.

But I hope you will forgive me for choosing to do my best to avoid haemorrhoids and diarrhea. And death. If these things must remain part of legibly human lives, then fuck legibly human lives.

Transhumanism: a “secular spirituality” of life extension and cosmic consciousness finds mainstream hearing

RELIGIOSCOPE has an interesting article on "Transhumanism: a “secular spirituality” of life extension and cosmic consciousness finds mainstream hearing": "A broad-based movement pressing for life extension and radically enhancing human consciousness through technology is gaining mainstream support and adopting a unique kind of “secular spirituality.”"

The article is centered on the field work of Abou Farman (City University of New York) who, at a conference on non-institutional spirituality at Columbia University in New York, presented a paper on a fast-growing network of technological thinkers and groups that he called “informatic futurists” that both borrow concepts from religion and spirituality while seeing themselves in competition with traditional faiths. Farman is also the author of "The Intelligent Universe": "The next stage in evolution -- a machine consciousness able to manipulate time and space -- is just around the corner. The catch: humans will no longer be in charge."

The conclusion of the RELIGIOSCOPE article: "Farman says that the influence of the informatics futurists and their promotion of a convergence between science and human consciousness will “shape more and more of our lives, whether it be through neuroscience research, NSF priorities, Silicon Valley venture capital or popular conferences and ideas.” These challenges will likely change the shape of the relationship between religion and secularism. He concludes that it may be the case that “secular humanism and religion will find each other closer than ever before as the informatic cosmologists try and move away from both gods and humans, as well as from the earth itself.”"

Engineering Transcendence: Addendum from 2011

My article "Engineering Transcendence: Addendum from 2011" has just been published on H+ Magazine. In this sequel to my old article "Engineering Transcendence" I discuss transhumanist spirituality, its parallels with religions and its potential as a better alternative to religion. The inspiring picture above is taken from Extropia DaSilva's very good follow-up post, also posted to KurzweilAI Forums with some interesting comments.

Magical thinking

What the fuck is wrong with magical thinking? It is what got Columbus to America.

This has been my first reaction to the article What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part One: Artificial Intelligence, by Alex Knapp on Forbes.

I define magical thinking as imagination applied to overcoming obstacles that are very difficult (or impossible) to overcome according to current science and common sense. Science and common sense used to say that you cannot fly and you cannot talk to people far away, but magical thinking gave us the telegraph, the telephone, air travel, the Internet, mobile phones and Facebook. And I am confident that someday before the end of the century magical thinking will give us brain implants, telepathy and mind uploading. There are many comments to the Forbes article by transhumanist friends (notably, some very cogent comments by Ben Goertzel) who insist that transhumanism is not magical thinking. Well, I think it is - magical thinking in its purest and noblest form, the kind of magical thinking that has taken us from caves to the Moon, and will take us to the stars and beyond.

Note on mind uplaoding: The second part of the article What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part Two: Uploading the Brain is just out. I will just make one comment at this moment: denying the possibility of mind uploading is crude dualism, because it assumes that carbon biology has some mystical property that science will never be able to explain and engineering will never be able to replicate and improve. With this attitude, we would be still living in caves. I will to comment to both articles and I have just created an account on Forbes.

Both articles are inspired by an article by Charlie Stross on Three arguments against the singularity. The article is very interesting and written by someone who understands these things much better than Knapp. I just left this comment:

Charlie, I am more optimist than you on the feasibility of and timeline for strong AI and mind uploading, but I am probably closer to your cautious assessment than to the wild optimism of, say, Kurzweil. I think both technologies will be developed someday because they are compatible with our scientific understanding of reality, but not very soon.

In reply to: "I can't disprove [the Simulation Argument], either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife... it would make a good free-form framework for a postmodern high-tech religion. Unfortunately it seems to be unfalsifiable, at least by the inmates (us)."

My question is, what is wrong with this. Some persons function better _in this life_ if they can persuade themselves to contemplate the possibility of an afterlife compatible with the scientific worldview. They become happier and better persons, help others, and try to make the world a better place.

In other words, the pursuit of personal happiness without harming others. Charlie, what the fuck is wrong with this?

Read Charlie's reply and many other interesting comments on Charlie's blog.

Now also the third article of Knapp's series is out: What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part Three: A Simulated World. There is an interesting discussion on quantum mechanics, of all things. My last comment:

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe does not compute things that nobody is observing, but leaves them in a undetermined state to be defined only when somebody actually observes them. This makes sense from a computational perspective (why waste useful resources to compute useless things?) and this is why we use the same strategy in our own synthetic worlds like World of Warcraft. So, without stretching the analogy too far, I rather consider quantum mechanics as suggestive evidence in favor of a simulation theory.

Technological Transcendence: An Interview with Giulio Prisco, on H+ Magazine

Technological Transcendence: An Interview with Giulio Prisco, by Ben Goertzel, is on H+ Magazine.

From Ben's introduction: "While transhumanism differs from traditional religions in being based around reason more centrally than faith, it does have some commonality in terms of presenting a broad vision of the universe, with implications on the intellectual level but also for everyday life. And it does present at least some promise of achieving via science some of the more radical promises that religion has traditionally offered -- immortality, dramatic states of bliss, maybe even resurrection. A host of transhumanist thinkers have explored the connections between transhumanism and spirituality, seeking to do so in a manner that pays proper respect to both"

From me: "Our universe is a very big place with lots of undiscovered and unimagined “things in heaven and earth” which science will uncover someday, and perhaps in this mysterious and beautiful complexity there is room for spirituality and even for the old promises of religions, such as immortality and resurrection... I am persuaded that these glimpses into veiled future possibilities are basically compatible with our best understanding of how the universe really works. And they give me beautiful visions of future worlds, and the hope, drive and energy that I need to try living a good and productive life, in this world. And this, I believe, is what really matters." The interview is long, and we discuss many related ideas and the work of spiritually inclined transhumanist groups such as the Turing Church, Terasem, the Society for Universal Immortalism, and the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

At the end Ben gives some very interesting ideas "about how to start a Confederation of Cosmists – i.e. some sort of active organization centered around Cosmism aka “strong transhumanism” as a practical philosophy. Not a religion but something vaguely analogous to a religion, founded on rational radical transhumanism rather than traditional faiths."

I have written a lot on transhumanist spirituality, but I have often been misunderstood, which probably means that I have never been clear enough. I hope in this interview, and with Ben's valuable help, I have managed to be more clear.

VIDEO - my talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010

The video of my talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church (at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010) is online on Vimeo. The conference explored the intersection of religion, science, spirituality and technology, from a transhumanist perspective. See this post for the slides of the talk on Slideshare. I also gave a similar talk at the Turing Church Online Workshop 1 on November 20, 2010.

The Turing Church of transhumanist spirituality, online in virtual reality for people and pets

The Turing Church Online Workshop 1, on Saturday November 20 2010 in Teleplace, explored transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″ as a coordination-oriented summit of persons, groups and organizations active in this area. See my report with pictures and videos.

Here I prefer to show this picture of three participants with their pets before the formal start of the workshop. On the left video screen I am holding my sweet little Sacha, who is NOT a cat like the other two pets but a Shih-Tzu doggy with her own Facebook page. En passant, last week we webcast Sacha's 12th birthday party on Facebook via Livestream, see the picture below and the video on YouTube.

Back to the Turing Church Online Workshop 1. Topics and issues discussed:

- To discover parallels and similarities between different organizations and to agree on common interests, agendas, strategies, outreach plans etc.
- To discuss whether it makes sense to establish a umbrella organization, or to consider one of the existing organizations as such.
- To develop the idea of scientific resurrection: our descendants and mind children will develop “magic science and technology” in the sense of Clarke’s third law, and may be able to do grand spacetime engineering and even resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future“. Of course this a hope and not a certainty, but I am persuaded that this concept is scientifically founded and could become the “missing link” between transhumanists and religious and spiritual communities.
- And of course, how to make our our beautiful ideas available, understandable and appealing to billions of seekers.

The workshop made evident that the participants, persons and groups, share very similar, overlapping and compatible ideas. It is also evident that there are different approaches to transhumanist spirituality, each with its own focus and priorities. Some participants observed that, since all of the spiritual transhumanist groups represented at the workshop are inclusive, it makes sense joining all (I am a member of all the groups represented at the workshop which have a formal concept of membership, and I consider myself a member of the others as well). The idea of establishing a umbrella organizations for spiritually inclined transhumanists was discussed. An alternative is one of the existing groups, or perhaps Humanity+ (subject to their interest of course) as umbrella organization. The MTA and Terasem reported significant growth.

My own presentation was very similar to my talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010, with some new elements. In particular I added a few references to Possibilianism, a middle, exploratory ground between religion and atheism first defined by neuroscientist David Eagleman in relation to his book of fiction Sum. Eagleman: "I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now... Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion… with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story." This makes a lot of sense to me, and I consider myself as a Possibilianist and a Cosmist. Our universe is a very big place with lots of undiscovered and unimagined "things in heaven and earth" which science will uncover someday, and perhaps in this mysterious and beautiful complexity there will be room for the old promises of religion.

This was a great workshop of 4 very intense hours and a lot of interesting things were said. I don't have the time to write a full report, please watch the videos.

Turing Church Online Workshop 1, Teleplace, Saturday November 20, 9am-1pm PST

Turing Church Online Workshop 1, in Teleplace, Saturday November 20, 9am-1pm PST (noon-4pm EST, 5pm-9pm UK, 6pm-10pm EU). The workshop will explore transhumanist spirituality and "Religion 2.0" and it will be a coordination-oriented summit of groups and organizations active in this area.

Format:
Online-only workshop in Teleplace. Those who already have Teleplace accounts for teleXLR8 can just show up at the workshop. There are a limited number of seats available for others, please contact me if you wish to attend.

Panelists:
- Lincoln Cannon (Mormon Transhumanist Association)
- Ben Goertzel (Cosmist Manifesto)
- Mike Perry (Society for Universal Immortalism)
- Giulio Prisco (Turing Church)
- Martine Rothblatt (Terasem)

Agenda:
- Talks by the panelists in the first 2 hours.
- Discussion between the panelists in the last 2 hours, with the participation of the audience.

Objectives:
- To discover parallels and similarities between different organizations and to agree on common interests, agendas, strategies, outreach plans etc.
- To discuss whether it makes sense to establish a umbrella organization, or to consider one of the existing organizations as such.
- To develop the idea of scientific resurrection: our descendants and mind children will develop “magic science and technology” in the sense of Clarke’s third law, and may be able to do grand spacetime engineering and even resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future“. Of course this a hope and not a certainty, but I am persuaded that this concept is scientifically founded and could become the “missing link” between transhumanists and religious and spiritual communities.
- And of course, how to make our our beautiful ideas available, understandable and appealing to billions of seekers.

My own presentation will be a revised and expanded version of my talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010. The main point can be summarized in one sentence (Slide 4): "A memetically strong religion needs to offer resurrection besides immortality."

My favorite Dawkins quote

Via the Transcript of Lincoln Cannon's Presentation at Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010: In his book, "The God Delusion", the talented evolutionary biologist and leading voice of the New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins, writes:

"Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods . . . In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way. Science-fiction authors . . . have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution..."

Of course, I completely agree with Dawkins and these are precisely the arguments that we use in support of a new transhumanist spirituality or, if you like, religion. See for example my own presentation at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010, titled "The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church".

TransVision 2010 Update: program, abstracts, TVirtual online extension

TransVision 2010 Update: program, abstracts, TVirtual online extension

After the change of conference venue announced last week, the preparation of TransVision 2010 is in full swing.

We have updated the conference program with new speakers and the abstracts of Miriam Ji Sun, Francesco Monico, Roberto Guerra, Marta Rossi and Jacopo Tagliabue, Antonio Saccoccio, Randal A. Koene, Danila Medvedev, Valerija Pride, David Styles, Mike Treder, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Remi Sussan, Alex Lightman, Khannea Suntzu and Simon Deering, Fiorella Terenzi. Other speakers and abstracts will be added soon.

Those who wish to attend the TransVision 2010 conference and community convention (October 22, 23 and 24 in Milan, Italy) but cannot come to Milan will have the option to participate remotely in the TVirtual online extension, watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. TVirtual, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform, will be a mixed-reality event similar to the recent ASIM 2010 Conference. TVirtual tickets are available at a very reduced price.

TransVision 2010 is a global transhumanist conference and community convention, organized by several transhumanist activists, groups and organizations, under the executive leadership of the Italian Transhumanist Association (AIT) and with the collaboration of an Advisory Board. The event will take place on October 22, 23 and 24, 2010 in Milan, Italy with many options for remote online access.

Register now

post links to Twitter, your blogs and websites, and add your name to the TransVision 2010 Facebook page.

TransVision 2010 Conference to be streamed live interactively in Teleplace

Those who wish to attend the TransVision 2010 conference and community convention (October 22, 23 and 24 in Milan, Italy) but cannot come to Milan will have the option to participate remotely in the TVirtual online extension, watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers and other participants. TVirtual, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on the Teleplace online telepresence platform, will be a mixed-reality event similar to the recent ASIM 2010 Conference.

TVirtual tickets are available at a very reduced price. Those who register for the full 3-days TVirtual before or on Sunday, October 10, including of course those who have registered already, will receive a free yearly membership in teleXLR8. Those who register for the full 3-days TVirtual after this date will be offered a 50% discount for yearly membership in teleXLR8. Current teleXLR8 beta account holders will be welcome to participate in TVirtual.

If you choose to attend TVirtual, you will be able to watch all talks, see and talk to speakers and other participants, and attend special telepresence sessions during, before and after the conference. In the pictures above, a TV10 planning session and several TransVision 2010 speakers giving talks in Teleplace at recent events. Please see the teleXLR8 website for full video coverage of recent transhumanist talks.

For a more detailed description of the objectives of our online events program, see our mini-manifesto Telepresence Education for a Smarter World on the IEET site and the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita-More, on H+ Magazine. See also teleXLR8 Project News – a telepresence community for cultural acceleration.