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elfsEvery once in a while you come across something time and again, and each time it just leaves you scratching your head. For me, it's the constant confluence of mystical, Self-obliterating ("Self" capitalized deliberately) religious practices with ideas of post-human Selfhood. Which is why I'm left scratching with both hands as I read Spiritual Transcendence in Transhumanism.
I know I'm deep into word salad[?] when I read lines like: "We are very quickly arriving at a stage where both religious indulgence and scientific achievement are being hyper-saturated. If indeed such a stage of human development as the Singularity could be realised, then what would our questions be?"
WTF does "scientific acheivement is being hyper-saturated" mean? I speak a pretty mean pomo[?] myself, and this is just beyond me.
And when he writes, "There is dogma in both religion and science, one of conviction offered by experience and the other of surety offered by concordant experimentation," he has lost my interest. Surely, the "surety of concordant experimentation" is received by experience: it doesn't happen in a vacuum and without observation; the results of experimentation lead to consensual conviction by providing utterly reliable consensual experience. To me, that's not dogma, that's a posteriori valuing the products of science because of their reliability. The fecundity of science in actually alleviating human suffering, far more than religion's classic role of excusing it, is a wonderful side-effect.
To my eyes, this article is little more than a "See? My pet theism and my pet futurism agree!"
I know I'm deep into word salad[?] when I read lines like: "We are very quickly arriving at a stage where both religious indulgence and scientific achievement are being hyper-saturated. If indeed such a stage of human development as the Singularity could be realised, then what would our questions be?"
WTF does "scientific acheivement is being hyper-saturated" mean? I speak a pretty mean pomo[?] myself, and this is just beyond me.
And when he writes, "There is dogma in both religion and science, one of conviction offered by experience and the other of surety offered by concordant experimentation," he has lost my interest. Surely, the "surety of concordant experimentation" is received by experience: it doesn't happen in a vacuum and without observation; the results of experimentation lead to consensual conviction by providing utterly reliable consensual experience. To me, that's not dogma, that's a posteriori valuing the products of science because of their reliability. The fecundity of science in actually alleviating human suffering, far more than religion's classic role of excusing it, is a wonderful side-effect.
To my eyes, this article is little more than a "See? My pet theism and my pet futurism agree!"
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Date: 2008-04-24 07:03 am (UTC)By loose analogy, it could mean that there is so much new stuff that anything could crystallise out of the solution. And, maybe, it's the management of business and finance that it the brake. The people who can arrange things to be done are overwhelmed.
That doesn't seem ridiculous to me. Here I am, half a world away, conversing with a notorious sex-geek, and the company I rely on to make it possible is so far behind the curve on internet traffic predictions that, for half the day, I can't read newsgroups because they're scrabbling to deliver web pages.
But hyper-saturated suggests that when things do change, it'll be pretty dramatic.