Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 18:26:03 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: Re: Follow-up Conquest of Abundance


This version of the technoligcal singularity is another way of bringing god back to life (post-N....) science fiction endlessly engages in this strange activity primarily because it is a debased modernism... the reality is much more interesting...

sdv

Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

> hugh bone wrote:
> >
>
> > Instead of traditional stories of  the creation of homo sapiens, take the viewpoint of modern science .   This  viewpoint will not prevent a religious onlooker from concluding that the earliest origin discovered by scientific inquiry, including  atomic particles, waves, radiation, gravitational, nuclear and electro-magnetic forces, and  big bangs, was initiated by a divine creator.
>
> > True enough and beyond the abundant richness of the myriad worlds science creates, the scientific enterprise itself becomes religious as its various disciplines converge into one - a kind of Christogenesis where Jesus is the episteme made flesh - God becoming android in order that the android may become God (do electric androids dream of sheep?/the lord is my shepard/sheep like gods are cloned) - Chardin's Omega Point revisioned as the convergence of the new tecnologies developing at exponential rates - faster and faster till history blurs - noosphere as cyberspace - download your brain - I am the resurrection and the life - Heaven as the celestial city built upon crystal diodes. Arthur Clarke's law that beyond a certain level of development, science become indistinguishable from magic.
>
> Here is a FAQ I came across recently at a site devoted to transhumanism
>
> What is the singularity?
>
> The technological singularity is a hypothetical point in the future
> where the progress-curve becomes nearly vertical, i.e. where the pace of
> technological development becomes extremely rapid. The concept was
> introduced by Vernor Vinge who thinks that provided we manage to avoid
> destroying civilization beforehand, a singularity will happen because of
> advances in artificial intelligence, computer-human integration or other
> forms of intelligence amplification. Enhancing intelligence will,
> according to Vinge, at some point lead to a positive feedback loop: more
> intelligent systems can design even more intelligent systems, and can do
> so quicker than the original human designers. This positive feedback is
> assumed to be powerful enough that within a very short time (months,
> days, or even just hours) the world is transformed beyond recognition
> and is suddenly inhabited by superintelligent beings.
>
> Often associated with the singularity is the idea that it is impossible
> to predict what comes after it. The resulting posthuman world may be so
> alien that we can know absolutely nothing about it. One exception might
> be the basic laws of physics, but even there it is sometimes speculated
> that there may be undiscovered laws (we don't yet have a theory of
> quantum gravity) or poorly understood consequences of the known laws
> (traversible wormholes, spawning basement universes, time travel etc.)
> which posthumans can utilize to do things we would normally think of as
> physically impossible.
>
> It has been pointed out that what's unpredictable at one point may be
> predictable as you move closer to the event. A person living in the
> 1950's could predict more features about today's world than could a
> Renaissance person, who in turn could predict more than somebody from
> the stone age. Since the predictability horizon recedes as we are moving
> forward in time, maybe there will never be a leap totally into the dark.
> At each step you could foresee a lot of what was going to happen at the
> next step, although the endpoint might be completely invisible from the
> starting point.
>
> The issue of predictability is important because without the ability to
> predict at least some of the consequences of your actions, there is no
> point in trying to steer the development in a desirable direction.
>
> Transhumanists differ widely in the probability they assign to Vinge's
> scenario. Almost all of those who do think that there will be a
> singularity think it will happen in the next century, and many think it
> is most likely to happen within a few decades.