absurd

Transhumanism? "Live long enough to live forever" etc.? Camus would be amused, and-- I must imagine-- happy.

final reports begin

We had a great start today with final report presentations. Alex M. offered a thoughtful comparison of Tolkien's Ring with Plato's (Gyges'). Alex S. presented a very thorough and, to some, chilling peek at the brave new world of transhumanism and "living long enough to live forever." Both prompted calm, civil, instructive discussion. So did Kimberley's "Office" report.

But Chris's "Boondock Saints" report and his discussion question-- Do we need people like this [vigilantes who storm a courtroom to murder a defendant, convinced that they're doing God's work] in the world today?"-- provoked a degree of heat that I hope will cool to a reflective glow. I admit I got a bit heated myself.

Do we need armed vigilantes? Like a hole in the head. But we've got 'em in spades. Hobbes would've called them agents of the bellum omnium, representatives of the state of nature and destroyers of the social contract. Some of us think the best name for them is simply "terrorist."

Commenting on Alex's transhumanist report, I mentioned Ray Kurzweil's teenage game show debut in 1965. Was he already thinking about living forever?

holy google

People have been thinking about the question Stephen posed in class yesterday for awhile, here's an excerpt from an old essay suggesting the possibility of an emergent Internet intelligence. Google's not God, but it's something. (Still working on the connection to Job and Ecclesiastes. I'll Google it.) 


The pooling of human consciousness may begin with the transferral of all our knowledge to computers. This is already happening on the Internet. At a later stage of scientific advancement, a physical connection of humans to the matrix at higher and higher levels (via advances in nervous/computer interface technology) will be possible. Thereafter, with humans completely interconnected through a network, questions might arise as to the relevance of the physical world. Could we simply upload all our consciousness to this virtual world? Would we then create a comparable world inside the network?
This advancement in interpersonal communications is set to continue, the ultimate stage being the development of a totally integrated system of human communication, which is likely to be achieved by highly advanced human--computer interface systems. Preliminary research on this subject is already being done, for example in the implantation of artificial retinas, connected to the opticnerve, into eyes of blind people. As computers are already interconnected, the merging of humans into a super-high-bandwidth computer network will bring about the next level of human evolution: a human-computermeta-network.

Just as the merging of a large number of individual cells ultimately led to the development of consciousness, the merging of humans into an interconnected computermeta-network will eventually create a collective consciousness for all the individual participants. The forerunner of this "global" consciousness is already evident: our world is already described as a global village...

"God will be written in C++"

Rebecca Goldstein identifies and critiques 36 arguments for the existence of God, one of which I note in today's dawn post. But a student's new blog announces #37... call it the Argument from Transhumanism? Hmmm...