I am a member of the organization called the Mormon Transhumanist Association. The group is fortunate enough to have an articulate and highly intelligent founder and spokesperson, Lincoln Cannon.
I just read this excellent essay where Lincoln interprets Joseph Smith’s famous King Follett sermon. Through this literary device Lincoln reconciles the vital doctrine Joseph Smith taught on that occasion with both transhumanism and Lincoln’s adaptation of the simulation argument which he calls the New God Argument. Such a reconciliation is easy because, as he and I agree, Mormon doctrine mandates transhumanism.
I do want to comment on something he says at page 9.
“Imagine a posthuman child. Using the tools of quantum archeology, she traces backwards through time and space from effects to causes. Sampling a sufficiently large portion of her present, she rediscovers you. Attaining a desired probabilistic precision for a portion of her past, she recreates you. The future-you is distinguishable from the present-you, but only as the today-you is distinguishable from the yesterday-you. As if awaking from a night’s sleep, you are resurrected, and you learn to do the same for your parents. “
I commend and agree with his attempt to conceive of how we will play a role in the resurrection of the dead, which I have heard taught, will be a Priesthood ordinance for us to perform and so, obviously, will have some role to play. I think everything he says here is plausible and consistent with what has been revealed and accepted as doctrine. Not just not inconsistent, but consistent, as Lincoln does a great job of tying family history research, performing proxy ordinances for the dead, and the actual mechanics plausibly at play in the actual resurrection process.
However, as in most things God lets us do, I think that here too there is a part which only he can do. I think that a posthuman’s quantum archeology, no matter how impressive, could not discover all the nuances that constitute a human mind. To think it could suggests a deterministic view of how the world works which I believe we can avoid thanks to the inherent indeterminism of quantum mechanics. Also, to think that one could resurrect ancestors many generations removed at the end of a long series of resurrecting all those in between, one by one, and relying in part on their memories of their ancestors is wildly optimistic. The results could only bare a superficial likeness to the actual person.
I have trouble believing that a process like the one Lincoln describes would not be a part of the resurrection. Even as posthumans we will have much to learn and the best way to learn is by doing. As humans, and as posthumans, I don’t believe God will simply do for us anything we are capable of doing for ourselves, even after much trial and effort. It is in achieving results through trial and effort that we learn to become like Him.
However, being believers in God, we need not postulate a resurrection wherein He plays absolutely no part at all.
The New God Argument is an adaptation of the Simulation Argument for Mormons. I made this adaptation for myself long before I encountered Lincoln’s statement of it. I discuss it in another post so here I’ll skip to the conclusion. The reality we experience is actually a “virtual reality” just like we can envision ourselves creating in a not-too-much-more technologically sophisticated future. No doubt such virtual realities require powerful computational processing and impressively large storage capacity. In other words, vast intelligence and perfect memory. Initially we might think of the posthuman creator of our reality (virtual reality to Him) as sitting down at a powerful desktop and typing away. But surely a second’s contemplation of progressive miniaturization and improvements in brain/computer interfacing should prompt us to replace this image with one closer to the actual God whose omniscient mind produces the thoughts memories which represent the code upon which our reality relies for its existence.
Surely after the nascent posthuman’s ability to recreate her dead ancestor through quantum archaeology has been exhausted, He whose thoughts originally organized the information that became her ancestor could add the final touches and produce a perfect likeness.
I believe God’s continued contemplation of the dead’s consciousness, His awareness of precisely what it is like to be that person, is sufficient to maintain identity between the quantum bits that were the deceased and those constituting the newly resurrected person. According to Mormon doctrine, that consciousness is not even inactive between bodily death and resurrection, but remains engaged in a course of learning and growth toward godhood.
I find it extremely satisfying and intensely faith promoting that Mormon doctrine is so easily reconciled with these scenarios as they are not arbitrary science fictions but logical extrapolations from clearly discerned technological trends.
Hello all you lovers of democracy and the ballot box. All you petitioners who lobby the government to legislate goodness and light. Ever hear the saying, “live by the sword, die by the sword”? Well if its legitimate for the government, our “democratically elected representatives” to heed your call to require people to do what you consider to be the right thing, then isn’t it legitimate for those who disagree with you about what the right thing is to petition the government to legislate that as well?
Bottom line – if its just about democracy and not about inalienable individual rights, then you must admit that this new idea called “4th trimester abortion” is perfectly fine so long as they can get a majority to go along with it. And if college students who were asked to sign a petition in favour of 4th trimester abortion are any indication, a majority won’t be hard to obtain, because everyone who was asked to sign the petition, signed it.
What is a 4th trimester abortion? It is the right of parents to kill an unwanted child right up until the child is 3 years of age. I refer you to this article for further information on this diabolical idea.
Well, why not? People try living together before they get marriage to see if its right for them, why not try out having a kid for a few years before you really decide whether its for you or not.
Ok, enough with the sarcasm. There are people who actually think that this infanticide is ok so long as its not called murder but given some euphemistic label instead and gets approved by the majority. Or their representatives. With in our pseudo-democracy is actually a plurality. This is what the state and its ballot box gets you – mob rule by brutes who don’t have an ounce of brains, sense, ethics or compassion.
Before you object that this is not yet legal so my protestations are premature, have you considered the barbarous practice of late trimester abortion, which is perfectly legal? A fully viable, fully formed, perfect child, but one who has not yet quite cleared the birth canal, is brutally murdered and it is perfectly legal. IMHO it is ethically inconsequential to expand the purview of murderous parents to include “post-birth abortions”. As long as the individual’s right to life, liberty and property are held to be subject to majority whim, we risk this kind of unethical monstrosity becoming a legal reality.
In the absence of the state, those who choose to respect these three fundamental negative human rights could voluntarily associate under a constitution that held them sacrosanct. Without a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given geographic region, the government of this association would have to adhere to this constitution or lose its adherents to an association that did so.
A free market in governments. Under governments which respected individual rights, the people would enjoy peace and prosperity. Under those which readily sacrificed the rights of the individual on the alter of democracy, the people would suffer from the same corruption, political warfare, misery and death that we have now. After a while the benefits of liberty will become apparent even to the most dim-witted democrats and the only competition to slight variations of libertarianism will be a few hippy communes and outright death worshipers – like these homicidal 4th trimesterites – whom libertarians will have every right to eradicate at will.
I wrote this in response to an invitation to sign a petition to request government censorship of pornography.
I am 100% opposed to pornography. I am also 100% opposed to state censorship. If people are forced to choose the right we are no longer moral agents, no longer things that act but things to be acted upon and we can make no progress in developing our moral character through freely choosing the good over the evil.
No individual person has the right to make decisions like this for another. When you ask the state to do it for you, you are neither exercising nor delegating a right, you are simply resorting to brute force and asking the state to wield that force on your behalf against others who think differently. By advocating the initiation of force you the aggressor, the perpetrator of a crime against these others.
You perpetuate a war that has been going on for a very long time, between liberty and slavery. Even if the slavery is to what you consider the good, it is still slavery and slavery is always wrong.
I consider the advocates of this petition to be the same as had they shown up at my door with a gun to decide for themselves what liberty I was permitted to exercise with respect to my property. I recognize the right of all persons to defend their lives, liberty and property and to use force to do so.
That is the level to which you who support this petition descend. You are seeking to use force against those who have decided to treat as children, incapable of making decisions for themselves. In your pride you have established yourselves as their moral superiors and seek to strip them of their moral agency.
You have admitted that your beliefs lack the power to persuade and thus you give up persuasion and resort to force. This is intellectual laziness as the case against choosing to view pornography is persuasive and ought to be made, to free individuals, not to political tyrants.
Pornography objectifies people. What do you think your attack on their moral agency does? You are every bit as guilty as the pornographers of the very same thing. Where their is no moral choice, their is no moral development.
This article starts out like a typical Moorish rant about gun control, but it goes much deeper than that. He himself admits, “Connecticut had one of the strongest gun laws in the country. That did nothing to prevent the murders of 20 small children on December 14th.” That one quote destroys the argument that banning guns will prevent these atrocities. In fact one extra gun, in the hands of a trained staff member would probably have saved many innocent lives.
Moore correctly identifies that the underlying problem is arrogance in the application of state power. In international affairs he condemns America’s leaders for forcing other states to act as America requires them to. Let the leaders of Iran and North Korea and Syria butcher, mutilate and starve those unfortunate enough to live between certain arbitrary lines drawn on a map. 262 million people have been killed by their own governments in the last century (not counting wars) but Moore doesn’t see that as justifying some form of international state gun control. According to Moore, internationally the American state should mind its on business. And the business of the American state is the American people.
He says the fact that some are poorer than others “creates more crime”. Clearly then someone should take money from those who have it and give it to those who have less. But wait a minute. Isn’t that what crime is? So it’s not the use of force to redistribute wealth that needs to be prevented, its just that it should be left to the government to do it. We need to nationalize violent crime. Well that doesn’t require anything new really. Just an educational campaign to show violent criminals that they don’t need to risk jail – they just need to be patient while the government commits the deed on their behalf. But there already is such an educational campaign – it’s called an election.
He says when Americans “fantasize about being mugged or home invaded” they picture the perpetrator being poor. He makes it clear that he thinks this fear is exaggerated even though he just finished saying that being poor “creates” crime. This is not muddled logic, he is leading to something – something that he sees as the root of the problem. It is the cause of poverty and both the crime and the fear of crime that poverty creates.
That something is what he calls the “me” society, which is his euphemism for an old fashion principle that allows people to be mean, rotten, nasty and even violent. But that same principle also allows people to be kind, generous, good, and peaceful. Call it liberty, freedom, or personal choice – it is the principle that my life is mine to live, not yours. My choices are my own and their consequences are mine to suffer or to enjoy. If I choose to share I do it on my terms and for my reasons. If I ask for help I make no threats or demands but ask with respect and accept with gratitude, offering to do what I can in return. It is the only principle upon which self-improvement is possible.
It is this liberty that Moore opposes, knowing as he does, that the slaves of a totalitarian state lack the freedom to do violence. They can’t do any good either but there’s no need for individuals to freely choose to do good – that’s what the state is for. As for individual self-improvement, that too is unnecessary. A good person is simply a dutiful citizen of a good state. It is the state, the community, the group which is moral, not the individual. Society must require the sacrifice of the “me” for the “we”.
Liberty is messy. People are so wonderfully diverse that there is no end to the variety of actions they undertake or the outcomes those actions can have. As a result there is always an outcome (asset) that someone else has that another would like and only 3 ways to get it. He can undertake the same action and hope for the same outcome. He can trade something for it. Or he can steal it, or have someone (a mobster or politician) steal it for him. This last option is Michael Moore’s prescription for reducing violence – to nationalize it. The way to clean up the messiness of diverse outcomes produced by liberty is to abolish liberty and thus ensure a uniformity of outcomes. If no one has anything that anyone else could possibly want, crime will go away, fear of crime will dissipate, and the need of guns for self-protection will disappear. A bland, grey utopia of dutiful automatons – but a peaceful one I expect, except perhaps for the suicide rate.
This truly is the best article of Moore’s I’ve ever read as in it he makes his values crystal clear. And before I ever have to live under a regime requiring me to surrender my values to his I hope that there is at least one gun left, and one bullet.
Many Christians look forward to the literal return of Jesus Christ to usher in a thousand year period of peace called the Millennium. This is certainly a part of Latter-day Saint doctrine. Scripture says no one knows the time of this event but God the Father but that believers should watch for the signs of its coming so they can be prepared. The scriptures are replete with signs but remember that most were written by people who were totally unfamiliar with modern technology. Sure they were inspired and received revealed truth but they still struggled to express it given their lack of experience with today’s (let alone tomorrow’s) technology. I must have been like writing in a foreign language with which they were almost totally unfamiliar.
So let’s step away from scriptural interpretation for a minute to see if there is anything that a little logic and common sense can tell us about the possible timing of the second coming. I think there is and that it points to a date somewhere around 2045. Here’s the argument:
1. For thousands of years people have been born, lived and died without the need to be ruled directly by the Lord. It is reasonable to suppose that something must be going to change that will require a more direct intervention by God. If we can guess what the change is and when it is likely to occur it should give us a better idea for the time of the second coming.
2. The pace of technological change is exponential (2×2=4, 4×2=8, 8×2=16, 16×2=32) rather than linear (2+2=4, 4+2=6, 6+2=8, 8+2=10). The more time passes the more change that takes place over the same period. Experts predict that by the 2040s the pace of change will be so great that it will completely outpace our ability to adapt. Before we can make up our minds about what to do next, the options we were considering will have changed. Borrowing a term from physics they refer to this as a technological singularity. The period from now to 2045 will see more change to the way we live than has taken place throughout all of human history until now.
Some of this technology will enable us to enhance our mental abilities so that we can keep up with the pace of change. Many will, some won’t. Those who don’t will be as helpless in the world of 2045 as a deer in Times Square. Those who do will have almost godlike powers. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, the technology of a sufficiently advanced civilization would be indistinguishable from magic. By 2045 most of us will be able to perform magic.
3. To have godlike power does not necessarily imply that one will have godlike virtues. To some degree I do believe that ethics is related to intelligence but not in direct proportion. It is easy to see that we are not progressing ethically at the same pace as we are technologically. By 2045 we may find ourselves in a situation analogous to unsupervised toddlers in possession of loaded weapons. As Uncle Ben said to Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. The power is coming. Are we ready to exercise it responsibly? To avoid using it to hurt ourselves and others? perhaps some are, but are all of us? By 2045 most of us will not have developed sufficiently godlike virtues to avoid exercising our godlike powers irresponsibly.
4. By 2045, with most of humanity possessed of the combination of godlike power but without godlike character, only direct divine intervention will prevent us from doing great harm to ourselves and others. Thus the second coming and the millennial rule of Christ.
I do not believe the millennium will see everyone sitting around learning to play harps. It would take a lobotomy or something like a drug-induced coma for me to be able to tolerate that for much more than 5 minutes. My gratitude and respect for God’s greatest gift to man, his reasoning mind, can not allow me to believe that he will destroy that gift and call it “salvation”. If I am to be saved, that which I refer to as “I” must not first be destroyed. Without a mind with which to reason, I am no more. Without the freedom to act according to reason, I would not wish to be.
I do believe that, crudely put, upon arrival the Lord will basically tell us that collectively we’ve done a good job using our minds to develop technology but that we’ve got a lot to learn about ethics. He will need to teach us as he has always taught us. First, that we need to be humble enough to be willing to learn. Second, we need to be obedient because we only learn (acquire a new skill, talent, ability, characteristic, etc.) by successfully imitating an expert, not by trial and error as many people mistakenly believe.
The third thing we need to learn is really the first substantive thing as the first 2 just make learning possible. This third thing incorporates everything else that he’s ever taught us. Technological progress comes to us naturally, as we require it to have power to act in accordance to our reason. But this third thing does not come to us as easily. We do have the capacity to develop it, it is a part of our nature, but so many of the challenges and distractions of daily living tempt us to neglect its development.
What I am speaking of is the capacity to love. Not just the family members from whom we receive so much obvious return for our emotional investment, but everyone. Christ taught us that we have the capacity to so identify with our fellow beings that we can experience their happiness as our own. The emotional state associated with our awareness of this is love – a biochemical motivation to pursue what is best for someone else in order to share in their resultant happiness.
Without developing our capacity to love our happiness is severely confined to just that which benefits us directly. With a fully developed capacity to love we expand our potential for happiness perhaps infinitely. In scriptural language this is a “fullness of joy”.
To bring this full circle, godlike power will maximize our ability to achieve whatever ends we pursue. A godlike capacity to love will motivate us to pursue the best interests of all our fellow beings and share in their resultant happiness, which thanks to our power, will all but inevitably be achieved.
To substitute a fullness of joy for a miserable world of power without ethics is why I believe we can anticipate His return sometime around 2045.
When Obama took office the US national debt was already a staggering $10.88 trillion. After just 3 years of a fiscally reckless President and an equally reckless Congress, the US national debt has grown to $15.36 trillion. The increase in the debt of $4.47 trillion under Obama is greater than the total debt amassed throughout the entire history of the US from its beginning right up to the end of Bill Clinton’s first year in office.
Got that? In 3 years Obama overspent more than every President from George Washington to Bill Clinton combined.
The only way Obama was able to stave off national bankruptcy was to approve borrowing even more money, thus all but ensuring that bankruptcy will be inevitable and have even more severe consequences. By the way, before he was elected Obama promised to cut the annual deficit by half by the end of his first term.
Marketplace is a show produced by a state-owned TV network that owes its existence to massive subsidies of money stolen (taxed) from people who would otherwise not watch it and to regulations designed to crush and eliminate its competition in the “marketplace”. Therefore it comes as no surprise that this show would stoop to crass manipulation of statistics in order to egg on fellow-travelers over at Health Canada to squash a highly effective product that dares to treat Canadians as intelligent adults capable of making up their own minds as to what remedies to use to prevent and treat cold and flu symptoms.
Specifically, at about the 10 minute mark of this hatchet job, a U of A expert is cited for the proposition that a person would need to take Cold FX for 17 years (cold seasons) before it would prevent a cold. This is NOT what the expert said. She said the study showed Cold FX reduced the risk of a cold by 15%. That means it could help reduce the risk of 15% of those who take it, EVERY cold season. There are other interpretations as well. That marketplace decided to spin this statistic in the most unfavourable possible way shows that they do not have the interests of their consumers at heart but those of their masters – those who would be out of work if we no longer lived in the overtaxed, over regulated economy in which we do. Those, essentially – like themselves.
I will be continuing to take Cold FX, continuing to remain cold-free, and continue to hold Marketplace, and the CBC as a whole, in utter contempt.
Bitcoin is a new digital currency with a twist. The twist is that there is no central authority, no bank, etc. It is based on peer-to-peer networking just like bittorrent. The advantage is that just as governments have been unable to shut down bittorrent, they have no way of identifying, freezing or stealing bitcoin accounts (if you are careful). Here is an article explaining more about bitcoin.
Here is a nice simple article that explains agorism. It doesn’t explain the relationship between bitcoin and agorism but once you understand something about both of them the relationship becomes clear.
Further exploration of the archives of the Bitcoin Weekly lead me to an article about how an online community could choose to incorporate the taxes it’s members freely consent to right into its currency. One of the criticisms of the state’s central bank’s power to increase the money supply – i.e. inflation – is that it really is a form of taxation. Well, recognizing this, and obtaining consent to using it for this purpose, could be a noncoercive means for funding the community’s common endeavours.
For trading in the Bitcoin currency Trade Hill has been recommended by some.
There’s a few things I’m fairly certain about. I believe I have an accurate, though imprecise, appreciation for the degree of uncertainty we have to deal with. (So I’m fairly certain about uncertainty.) The claim to possess absolute knowledge is a fairy tale. The claim, “I am absolutely certain that this (any) statement is true” is either naive, an exaggeration, or a lie. The only source of information about the external world our brain has is what it gathers from our five senses. We are all to familiar with the many maladies that can interfere with the functioning of the senses as we are of disabilities, temporary or chronic, that interfere with the brain’s ability to process sensory information. Hallucinations are real – they are real hallucinations.
It is the nature of a hallucination that we are tricked into believing what we hallucinated to be as real as that which we accurately perceive. Therefore, there is no way, no absolutely foolproof way, of distinguishing what is real from what is imagined. I could be hallucinating the experience of typing these words, or indeed, of having truly experienced every single one of my memories. But giving serious credence to that is no way to live. Indeed logic and experience tell us the opposite is true and that we should always trust the evidence of our senses as the basis for rational judgment. That our senses may sometimes be tricked, or that our judgment may sometimes not be all that rational, just remind us that we are not perfect and that absolute certainty is not a part of the human experience.
As usual, that was simply a long preamble to provide the context for stating that I am sure that there is life after death. I am convinced, for reasons I have written about, that our identities will survive what we experience as physical death and will continue to enjoy an even broader range of experiences hereafter. I base that belief not on blind (hence irrational) faith, but on a rational judgment informed by the evidence of my senses. The evidence of things hoped for, the substance of things unseen which are true. I am not absolutely sure, but I believe it to be true. If it turns out that I am right, I can then say that I knew it. Anticipating that I am right, I can now say that I know it (but I just don’t absolutely know that I know it).
I have always liked Roger Whittaker’s version of The Last Farewell. Some of the lyrics are:
“I have no fear of death, it brings no sorrow.
But how bitter will be this last farewell.”
These words express my feelings very closely. The process of dying may be quite unpleasant but that is different. I am speaking of death itself. I don’t fear it. But interestingly, not for the reason of my very strong belief in (anticipatory knowledge of) an afterlife. Many years ago, albeit when my belief in an afterlife was not so strong, I admit that I did have a fear of death. What if there were no afterlife? I certainly had to acknowledge the possibility then and still have to now. Then, if I were to die, I would no longer be able to enjoy all the things that bring me happiness. I would miss them.
It was roughly 20 years ago that it suddenly occurred to me that I was mistaken about this and implication has eliminated all fear of death. I can truly say that I have never experienced the fear of death since that time. I don’t understand why anyone would, as the logic is surely unassailable. Without an afterlife I would not miss my family, my friends, or the pursuits I enjoy because I would not be and in order to miss these it would be necessary for me to be. But if I were to be, after I had died, that would constitute an afterlife.
So, in death devoid of an afterlife, it is not as though I will be somehow aware of all that I was missing and would never again experience. I would not be aware at all because I would cease to exist.
This might sound morbid but this realization should actually be a welcome relief to any who have a lingering fear of death (remember I distinguished “death” from “dying”). If I were to die, I would do so convinced that I would imminently be experiencing an afterlife but also knowing that if that confidence was misplaced, I would never know it. I would simply cease to be and never be aware of it.
Now it occurs to me, in the interests of thoroughness, that I ought to address the alleged possibility of an unpleasant afterlife – one in which one experiences endless sorrow. The pain to be inflicted on the infidels by a god who rewards terrorists for blowing up buses full of children, or the eternal flames inflicted by a god who would punish those who never had an opportunity to know him, seem to me to be so far outside the realm of possibilities as to warrant no attention whatsoever. I would put it this way – I have no fear that God is my moral inferior, as such a god as these would necessarily be.
I know myself enough to know that I am far from perfect, but I am also far from being deserving of eternal suffering by any rational code of morality. Thus, I have no fear of death, it brings no sorrow.
What can and does bring sorrow is life – and because of this it is life that ought to be feared. In the song, the bitterness of the last farewell is the emotional consequence of actions taken by the living and experienced by the living. But despite occasional tears of sadness, life affords more occasions to shed tears of joy. It is this that makes life worth living. One ought to fear the consequences of a life based on incorrect principles. By consistently applying correct principles in making life’s decisions this fear can be dismissed and the love of life can determine one’s attitude.
I don’t get a chance to update this much as whenever I sit down at the computer, which is most of the day, my present circumstances dictate that I should be working, not typing for pure entertainment. But, as this is my online journal, I wanted to record my brief notes on a portion of one of my favourite books by one of my favourite philosophers, Defending Immortality by John Leslie.
Leslie says we have reason to anticipate an afterlife in at least one of the following forms:
1. As Einstein proved, the universe has a four dimensional existence. The past and future is every bit as real as the present since time is relative and there is no way for distant observers to agree upon a single “now”. Therefore, one who, to us, has lived or will live, is living now from the point of view of some observers (potential or actual).
2. Leslie spends most of his efforts presenting his case for the origin of existence, suggesting it lies in the reality of a creatively effectual ethical requirement. I believe he argues his case successfully. The result is that the best way to conceive of the cosmos is as the thoughts of a “divine mind”. We then are the complex thoughts of God, who considers our lives worth thinking about in intricate detail. Leslie suggests that, having thought through our lives to our deaths, God may very well consider it equally worthwhile thinking about an afterlife for us.
3. Leslie’s third option is based on the premise of the existential unity of the cosmos. If we consider ourselves to be the same being over time, despite important changes to our physical and psychological makeup (the body replaces its cells, the psyche undergoes personality changes), then why can’t we think of surviving our death in that the container of our thought patterns, this cosmic existential unity, continues to exist?
While all his scenarios have merit, and are not mutually exclusive, I pick door #2. Now back to work.
