People often talk about a bleak future for the planet and for humanity. What they fail to consider is the far-reaching potential of human ingenuity and creativity, as well as the implications of exponential growth in technology.
Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy.
Alan Harrington wrote in The Immortalist: "we must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody." His defiant manifesto against human mortality is as brilliant and biting as they come. Moreover, his prophetic words echo today when you hear people like physicist Freeman Dyson proclaim: "In the future a new generation of artists will write genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses."
These ideas turn me on; they remind me that everything is possible. For this reason I'm on a mission to inspire the planet.
The following concept teaser establishes the look and feel of a new documentary film project celebrating those mavericks and techno-optimists who challenge us to conceive of a world that just might be. We will look to visionaries like Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey and others to wax philosophical about what's next in this mind-bending journey exploring limitless human ecstasy.
Enter humanity 2.0. Stay tuned.
TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from jason silva on Vimeo.
Follow Jason Silva on Twitter: www.twitter.com/maxandjason
Paul Lamb: Can Religion Rediscover Itself? Taking a Cue from the Singularity University
Why aren't religious organizations imbued with the same spirit of wide open discovery we find in a place like Singularity University? Is it because religions hold that nothing beyond what is written in the sacred texts is worth discovering?
This dude is Burning Man thought incarnate... Spiritualism through hedonism! Hah!
I'm really scared of death - I always have been, and I've dealt with grief as so many people have. But one thing we fail to recognize, something I've tried to learn, is that there is something truly miraculous about mortality itself. There's something extraordinary about the very fact that we die, and somehow the very entropy of the universe makes things all the more precious.
Technology can do so much, good and bad, and it's done so since people invented agriculture. But the kind of immortality we ought seek is something of an endless knowledge and an infinite kindness. Rather than perpetuating life in technologically advantaged nations, we should think about the lifespan of kindness - stopping the suffering of others whose pain has little to do with a laboratory. Technology can do this. Technology can unfold literally astronomical learning; it can unfold discoveries we struggle to envision even with our marvelous imagination.
But really, what we need to discover is part of ourselves - our capacity for wonder. things are astonishing even as they are. Knowledge and ideas and creation and kindness, well, I don't think they die.
Technological communication has its monocultural dangers, but it has its possibilities of diversity, too; cultures and traditions and ideas of which a person has never heard, ideas which might be on the brink of vanishing, can be spread around the world. It all depends not on the machine, but on our own awareness and use of it.
I like to capitalize pronouns when referring to collective life, or to life as an entity, to reduce confusion.
"It's the work of the Devil!"-Unknown
"Did anyone ever bother to open the box, and feed Schroedinger's Cat? Poor kitty."-Me.
Some people that are kind of religion-heavy are not big science fans, because once you proceed down the path towards scientific enlightenment, forever will it control your destiny, because all of a sudden, you discover that weights, measures, distances, and other worldly concepts kind of get right at the heart of things, while pontifications and philosophical meanderings pertaining to the Hereafter don't typically 'carry the mail'. While your average piece of religious literature does possess the properties of mass, weight, and dimension, and can be measured using conventional equipment and the findings independently verified, it's the B.S. INside that's apparently the source of all the mystery. The REAL mystery is why anyone would plunk down good money to buy it...but, that's just my opinion.
We've been conflicted about who we are ever since we had enough reflexive consciousness to see ourselves. Our religions and myths used to ease the conflict. Now science is supposed to? Ha! Science is just us doing our crude, destructive, inventive stuff.
There's all kinds of discussions on Artificial Intelligence that is scary only in that it will be the end of real creativity and real original thought. We need to ask ourselves what we'll have to become to be able to stomach the future.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031104064412.htm We may not even be as unique (writ large) as we once thought. Only in detail may we be unique. I once rejected revelation as a fairy tail, I now regard every speculative thought and work by a "sentient" being revelation, just not carved in stone. History is strewn with the wreckage of paradigms. Reality is an illusion, but for our purposes it is still very real while it exists. And this may be enough for the greater purpose, what ever that is.
The solution to that problem is going to be..enlightening for both sides
It's coming...
In the immortalist ideal, would a person remain their ideal age, having ceased the aging process until they so choose to give up that life? Or is the goal unabashed eternal life?
Like most important things, I think this was dealt with in an episode of Star Trek...
"Oh, to be certain there are improvements upon technology, in the tools we use. But what improvement has been made upon man...?" Khan
Sorry, but the very essence of the Oil disaster in the gulf, of the economic disaster, heck, of the Titanic, all come down to "Man is now God"
In the current economic disaster, you had economists, men trained in the very art they were perverting, telling us that housing prices will never go down and the Dow has hit a new permanent high...all while ignoring the very basics of economics.
It's not unlike a man, after learning how to fly a plane, to now decry the "Gravity is really a thing of the past..."
I have no doubt of the scientific wonders that we will behold, but unless we find some "new paradigm" in human behavior and ethics...it's just going to be more of the same...with better lighting.