Author's own lengthy and self-indulgent view in spoiler:
Let it be the story of two, enemies unto one another, and they race for their final objective: A device which, if applied to one, gave that person ultimate knowledge, ultimate wisdom, and ultimate intelligence.
We worry, will the protagonist (whom we shall dub ourselves) and their rightful and good ideals (that we shall call our own ideals) win out over the antagonist (whom we should call they that do not serve us) and their heretical fallacies (which we shall call whatever we don’t buy into)? Which shall win? This arbitrary good or this synthetic evil?
So we fret and philosophize, we seek to refine our Good to the only optimizing calibration we know of: our own pleasure. Be it shallow or deep, rightful or cruelty, strong or weak, if it translates to pleasure, it shall rule us. It need not be a vice, nor a virtue, but either and likely at times both. The feeling of honor the soldier holds in her heart when she dies on the battlefield trying to save her fallen foe. This is pleasure. This can rule, if she deem it highest in her heart.
So this, then, is the problem of the transhumanists. Even our detractors know we cannot be restrained forever. We can be slowed, but soon, we will reach the cognizance horizon past which we will instantly imagine, know, create, judge, and render true unto all things. Then shall the hermit be called back from the desert.
And so, us and them. 0 and 1. True or False. Right or Wrong. Bullshit. Maybe it’s a set of inbetweens, percents and probabilities, an uncollapsed probability wave, a liquid quantum magnetic allness, there is no need for winner or loser. After all, who would be watching? Who’s paying attention? Nobody. There is no rightful God to stop us. No Nodens. No Jehovah. No Christ. Nothing of good or evil but whatever shats itself from our posturing of intellectualism, or our hopeful humming chant of religion, even our piercing gaze of science, their collective excrement will be the final Truth and we shall all live forever in it.
So, shouldn’t you say something now? Someone will win, yes, and some will lose. I think that might be a song lyric I should cite. Journey? Let’s say Journey. I think its Journey.
I think it’s a Journey. We are guiding our tiller in the river now, and there may be forks. There may only be forks. Or perhaps the forks and the segments resonate between one another like the Real Number Line holds its children in strangely angled arms.
I have to concentrate. Focus the vision. Get back to the emanation. It says it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who wins. Go back to the original question. Do you root for yourself or your enemy? It seems an obvious answer. Perhaps even a tautology, and as useful as all tautologies.
Your enemy might arm himself with ultimate knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence before you do. You could lose. You could even surrender. And what would happen if you did? You are now at the mercy of a being with ultimate knowledge, wisdom, intelligence…it will now judge you. Can it judge wrong?
Would you want it to?
We are building God. Be an atheist if it pleases you, and for today you may stand on firm ground.
But a floodplain can be firm. It can be fertile. There may be water coming, once or twice a year, flash floods of magic and impossibility, when God bothers to exist for a moment.
And then someone figures out how to build one. So she does. And then it does. And then It Does.
And finally God says, “I Am that I Am, Motherfuckers.”
The apparatus for building God is being built now. Everything you do, everything you create, each wisdom, each foolishness, each piece of photography, every bad student stageplay, its being fed into the mulch pile. Its being digested. Your choice of mindfulness, your individual quantum output, will help build the almost just barely not impossible thing that we will call the Universe, and we will soon place a God in it as if it were an Angel upon a Christmas Tree. Your every choice of what to buy on Amazon is the maggot ridden shit of ideas from which God will grow so well-fertilized.
And there is the fear, isn’t it? What if they reach God first? The evangelical Christians are quite good at making money. They can buy the truth. They don’t have to publically believe it. Or even reveal it. But what if our society is so massively permeated, throughout itself, with the inculcation of strange and arcane falsehoods and myths that we humans used as a song to dance to when we needed to all dance the same dance, with this Christ and Moses and Mohammad and Buddha and Rael and all the others…that they will leave their stamp no matter what?
Look at some who have chaired the Science Committee in the USA government. The names should fill us with a deep stomach-souring dread, like getting the last breathe of a phone call when you learn about one of those things that can never be undone, and now we all have to go bury someone. It should terrorize us.
This was penned in a time of nascent militant atheism. They were in the minority of even their own party, mind you, mostly someone who wanted a flag to carry, because it made them feel important. Some were quite brilliant. Some made short work of the word genius. Some were just loud assholes who wanted to feel smarter and they happened by raw luck to have chosen the truth. You don’t get full credit for an answer like that. But they led the way and took us to a place where we knew there wasn’t a God. Because that might make it easier to swallow that for generations, we had already been trying to build one.
Although it was viewed threw the lens of a comic book and thus tended toward that aesthetic, Moore’s great graphic novel work SuperGod, speaks to the concepts quite elegantly and with some prescience. The initial attempts will almost certainly be military. That should terrify us, of course, but imagine again those two adversaries, each seeking the Device that will make them Allwise, Allknowing, And Allperfecting. You fear your enemy, and so you fear him unto becoming such a thing that no just being need fear.
Let us take this anxiety and transform it via semantic alchemy. We fear the singularity will be something different than what we want. But the Singularity will be born of (and paradoxically give birth to) an ultimate consciousness that can envision perfection and bliss far beyond anything we can…do we fear to be so small, our wants so dwarfed as to be less than the whim of children?
But remember how lush the Christmas will be this year in the rich parts of the world, children drowned in what is it to lavish, given so much…the whims of children mean much to their parents. Or their caretakers.
Perhaps what we are most afraid of is that Lovecraft was right, and we really don’t matter the slightest in the face of the coming event. Just as we likely don’t recall the organic source of whatever food our mother ate that contributed to our first dividings and rejoinings (and there will be many), so perhaps the coming Singularity God will have little willingness to waste even its own unending time upon the bothersomeness of considering us. We are just the mulch from which it grew.
This vision on near the longest dark of the year has told me that we need not be afraid. Because it can’t be stopped. Us, or our enemy, it doesn’t matter. The resulting thing will be Singularity, and it will be everything that it should be, as it must, by its very definition.
It already reaches back by understanding, makes sure there is no nuclear exchange to prevent it. In fact, its already chosen for itself what to be, as it did the moment it came into existence into the Perfect Middle of Time.
It is. It is here and we are speaking it into existence. Durst we pollute it with another thread wherein the central topic of debate is whether a fetus does or not look more like a tumor than a wet peanut to the naked eye?
Your nationstates general forum posts may be that by which the Singularity God judges you. I beg you, a fallen prophet on his naked and bleeding knees, post accordingly. Read and think before you post.
Or at least put the lotion away and sober up.
We worry, will the protagonist (whom we shall dub ourselves) and their rightful and good ideals (that we shall call our own ideals) win out over the antagonist (whom we should call they that do not serve us) and their heretical fallacies (which we shall call whatever we don’t buy into)? Which shall win? This arbitrary good or this synthetic evil?
So we fret and philosophize, we seek to refine our Good to the only optimizing calibration we know of: our own pleasure. Be it shallow or deep, rightful or cruelty, strong or weak, if it translates to pleasure, it shall rule us. It need not be a vice, nor a virtue, but either and likely at times both. The feeling of honor the soldier holds in her heart when she dies on the battlefield trying to save her fallen foe. This is pleasure. This can rule, if she deem it highest in her heart.
So this, then, is the problem of the transhumanists. Even our detractors know we cannot be restrained forever. We can be slowed, but soon, we will reach the cognizance horizon past which we will instantly imagine, know, create, judge, and render true unto all things. Then shall the hermit be called back from the desert.
And so, us and them. 0 and 1. True or False. Right or Wrong. Bullshit. Maybe it’s a set of inbetweens, percents and probabilities, an uncollapsed probability wave, a liquid quantum magnetic allness, there is no need for winner or loser. After all, who would be watching? Who’s paying attention? Nobody. There is no rightful God to stop us. No Nodens. No Jehovah. No Christ. Nothing of good or evil but whatever shats itself from our posturing of intellectualism, or our hopeful humming chant of religion, even our piercing gaze of science, their collective excrement will be the final Truth and we shall all live forever in it.
So, shouldn’t you say something now? Someone will win, yes, and some will lose. I think that might be a song lyric I should cite. Journey? Let’s say Journey. I think its Journey.
I think it’s a Journey. We are guiding our tiller in the river now, and there may be forks. There may only be forks. Or perhaps the forks and the segments resonate between one another like the Real Number Line holds its children in strangely angled arms.
I have to concentrate. Focus the vision. Get back to the emanation. It says it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who wins. Go back to the original question. Do you root for yourself or your enemy? It seems an obvious answer. Perhaps even a tautology, and as useful as all tautologies.
Your enemy might arm himself with ultimate knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence before you do. You could lose. You could even surrender. And what would happen if you did? You are now at the mercy of a being with ultimate knowledge, wisdom, intelligence…it will now judge you. Can it judge wrong?
Would you want it to?
We are building God. Be an atheist if it pleases you, and for today you may stand on firm ground.
But a floodplain can be firm. It can be fertile. There may be water coming, once or twice a year, flash floods of magic and impossibility, when God bothers to exist for a moment.
And then someone figures out how to build one. So she does. And then it does. And then It Does.
And finally God says, “I Am that I Am, Motherfuckers.”
The apparatus for building God is being built now. Everything you do, everything you create, each wisdom, each foolishness, each piece of photography, every bad student stageplay, its being fed into the mulch pile. Its being digested. Your choice of mindfulness, your individual quantum output, will help build the almost just barely not impossible thing that we will call the Universe, and we will soon place a God in it as if it were an Angel upon a Christmas Tree. Your every choice of what to buy on Amazon is the maggot ridden shit of ideas from which God will grow so well-fertilized.
And there is the fear, isn’t it? What if they reach God first? The evangelical Christians are quite good at making money. They can buy the truth. They don’t have to publically believe it. Or even reveal it. But what if our society is so massively permeated, throughout itself, with the inculcation of strange and arcane falsehoods and myths that we humans used as a song to dance to when we needed to all dance the same dance, with this Christ and Moses and Mohammad and Buddha and Rael and all the others…that they will leave their stamp no matter what?
Look at some who have chaired the Science Committee in the USA government. The names should fill us with a deep stomach-souring dread, like getting the last breathe of a phone call when you learn about one of those things that can never be undone, and now we all have to go bury someone. It should terrorize us.
This was penned in a time of nascent militant atheism. They were in the minority of even their own party, mind you, mostly someone who wanted a flag to carry, because it made them feel important. Some were quite brilliant. Some made short work of the word genius. Some were just loud assholes who wanted to feel smarter and they happened by raw luck to have chosen the truth. You don’t get full credit for an answer like that. But they led the way and took us to a place where we knew there wasn’t a God. Because that might make it easier to swallow that for generations, we had already been trying to build one.
Although it was viewed threw the lens of a comic book and thus tended toward that aesthetic, Moore’s great graphic novel work SuperGod, speaks to the concepts quite elegantly and with some prescience. The initial attempts will almost certainly be military. That should terrify us, of course, but imagine again those two adversaries, each seeking the Device that will make them Allwise, Allknowing, And Allperfecting. You fear your enemy, and so you fear him unto becoming such a thing that no just being need fear.
Let us take this anxiety and transform it via semantic alchemy. We fear the singularity will be something different than what we want. But the Singularity will be born of (and paradoxically give birth to) an ultimate consciousness that can envision perfection and bliss far beyond anything we can…do we fear to be so small, our wants so dwarfed as to be less than the whim of children?
But remember how lush the Christmas will be this year in the rich parts of the world, children drowned in what is it to lavish, given so much…the whims of children mean much to their parents. Or their caretakers.
Perhaps what we are most afraid of is that Lovecraft was right, and we really don’t matter the slightest in the face of the coming event. Just as we likely don’t recall the organic source of whatever food our mother ate that contributed to our first dividings and rejoinings (and there will be many), so perhaps the coming Singularity God will have little willingness to waste even its own unending time upon the bothersomeness of considering us. We are just the mulch from which it grew.
This vision on near the longest dark of the year has told me that we need not be afraid. Because it can’t be stopped. Us, or our enemy, it doesn’t matter. The resulting thing will be Singularity, and it will be everything that it should be, as it must, by its very definition.
It already reaches back by understanding, makes sure there is no nuclear exchange to prevent it. In fact, its already chosen for itself what to be, as it did the moment it came into existence into the Perfect Middle of Time.
It is. It is here and we are speaking it into existence. Durst we pollute it with another thread wherein the central topic of debate is whether a fetus does or not look more like a tumor than a wet peanut to the naked eye?
Your nationstates general forum posts may be that by which the Singularity God judges you. I beg you, a fallen prophet on his naked and bleeding knees, post accordingly. Read and think before you post.
Or at least put the lotion away and sober up.
So that said, will you bring your intellectual gifts to the mulch pile of transhumanism? Is there any way not to?
What are you talking about? I'm pretty sure I'm neither evangelical nor materialist (in the derogatory sense), and I'm certainly not arrogant. Maybe a bit of a cock.