An interview with Douglas R. Hofstader of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame; he's long been one of my favorite thinkers, and it's nice to see him still in fine form. He also had a few pithy things to say about "singularists":
.... the vision that Kurzweil offers (and other very smart people offer it too, such as Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, perhaps Marvin Minsky, and many others — usually people who strike me as being overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts, I have to say) is repugnant to me. On the surface it may sound very idealistic and utopian, but deep down I find it extremely selfish and greedy. “Me, me, me!” is how it sounds to me — “I want to live forever!” But who knows? I don't even like thinking about this nutty technology-glorifying scenario, now usually called “The Singularity” (also called by some “The Rapture of the Nerds” — a great phrase!) — it just gives me the creeps. Sorry!
My feeling is that extropian thinking is a self-indulgence — it's on the order of planning how to subdivide the space on the dark side of one of Jupiter's moons when we don't even have a realistic plan for getting there yet. It's nice to think about, sure, but it doesn't really address the fact that for starters we still live in a world where people still hate each other's guts on pointless principle. To think that uploading ourselves into digital nerd-topia is a shortcut to brotherly coexistence is not to think at all.
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Immortality. It never ceases to amaze me that people chase after this particular pipe dream. The idea of existing as a thinking, feeling entity for all eternity strikes me as incredibly boring, but beyond that....
I'm going to discuss aspects of my faith now, so if that bothers anyone reading this, you might want to stop.
As a Christian, I believe the soul is immortal -- however, the soul is not the identity, and it is not the consciousness. The soul is what drives these things, but it is not the same, much as an engine is not, by itself, a car.
Downloading the human psyche might be possible -- replicating brainwaves and such. But the fact is, this is still not you. It is a carbon copy. Your awareness is keyed to your soul and self -- and when you die, that's the end of that. Whatever carbon copy you may create, will be a self-contained separate entity -- not a shot at immortality.
Indeed, I find any other concept in that nature more than a little ghastly.
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