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+--- Thread: The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future (/thread-1744.html)
The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future - C C - Dec 16, 2015
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-turing-church-preaches-the-religion-of-the-future
EXCERPT: [...] It’s one of the newest in a multitude of quasi-religious movements, all vying for a place in the rapidly changing futurist landscape. Prisco is carving out a digital space for what he hopes will store the building blocks for the construction of humanity’s direction. According to the official website, the idea is that by releasing and curating metaphysical and scientific “programming code” to the public, people have a better chance of successfully augmenting our path as a species in hopes of eventually achieving in the physical world what most religions only promise in the afterlife: the defeat of death.
The Turing Church aims to attract like-minded support from researchers, programmers, and philosophers hoping to direct transhumanist progress within the framework of a broad “theology” of sorts. It’s a position best summed up by the group’s three core pillars:
(1) "We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead from the past with advanced science, space-time engineering and ‘time magic.’"
(2) "God is emerging from the community of advanced forms of life and civilizations in the universe, and able to influence space-time events anywhere, anytime, including here and now."
(3) "God elevates love and compassion to the status of fundamental forces, key drivers for the evolution of the universe...."
RE: The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future - elte - Dec 17, 2015
Compassion is a worthy divine attribute in the unfeeling and uncaring universe.
RE: The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future - Magical Realist - Dec 18, 2015
One look at my anxiety-ground fossilized teeth and they will pass on resurrecting me. "This one was too neurotic to handle life among us gods." lol! Oh wait. I'm being cremated. Nevermind!
RE: The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future - Yazata - Dec 23, 2015
(Dec 16, 2015 08:14 PM)C C Wrote: EXCERPT: [...] It’s one of the newest in a multitude of quasi-religious movements, all vying for a place in the rapidly changing futurist landscape.
Traditional forms of religious belief are breaking down for lots of people, so they thrash around trying to invent new faiths. It's predictable, even if it isn't always inspiring.
Quote:Prisco is carving out a digital space for what he hopes will store the building blocks for the construction of humanity’s direction.
In other words, he's putting his ideas out on the internet. Isn't that all that sentence means?
Quote:According to the official website, the idea is that by releasing and curating metaphysical and scientific “programming code” to the public,
"Programming code"? Is that really the analogy that this guy wants to use? Human beings are automatons and he's going to "program" future generations? (So much for their liberty and their opportunity to choose their own destinies.)
Quote:people have a better chance of successfully augmenting our path as a species
"Augmenting our path as a species"? 'Transhumanism' reminds me of the hopes that the eugenics movement had the better part of a century ago. They hoped to breed mankind like we breed animals, to favor desireable traits like intelligence and athletic prowess and eliminate undesireable ones like congenital diseases. Ironically, in our brave-new-world 'eugenics' has joined the list of politically-incorrect concepts that must never be spoken aloud and in "educated" company today even considering it is equated with 'racism' and with 'evil' itself. A big difference is that we already have the technology to realize eugenics, while 'transhumanism' is based entirely upon dreamy speculations about the wonders that future computer technology will supposedly someday bring.
Quote:in hopes of eventually achieving in the physical world what most religions only promise in the afterlife: the defeat of death.
Life is already immortal right now. It's existed in a continuous chain down through time since the origin of life billions of years ago.
What isn't immortal are the individual reproductive 'fruiting bodies' that develop over and over on that immortal chain, bodies that we think of as individual organisms. So for individual immortality to exist, we will have to eliminate biological reproduction and life itself will lose whatever biological advantages biological reproduction conveys. The fact that reproduction is observed in all existing organisms (as opposed to individual organisms just lasting forever) suggests very strongly that there's a hugely important (if as-yet unknown) evolutionary reason.
And even if the secret of personal immortality is discovered in the future, that won't give individuals currently living now resurrection and eternal life. (Should we even desire that? Wouldn't it be something very much like hell?)
The text in the link on the OP said something about future omnipotent AIs ("Gods") tunneling into the past using "quantum weirdness", presumably to save individuals living now. Why would future AIs have any interest in doing that? And if they did, where are they right now? If humans ever invent time travel, would they really have any motivation to locate and resurrect every individual trilobite that once lived in the ancient Cambrian seas?
Quote:The Turing Church aims to attract like-minded support from researchers, programmers, and philosophers hoping to direct transhumanist progress
They are "hoping to direct... progress"? That sounds awfully arrogant. They sound like people who want to puff up their own egos by imagining themselves as a visionary elite holding the future of the entire universe in their hands.
Quote:within the framework of a broad “theology” of sorts. It’s a position best summed up by the group’s three core pillars:
(1) "We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead from the past with advanced science, space-time engineering and ‘time magic.’"
Yeah right. That sounds realistic.
Quote:(2) "God is emerging from the community of advanced forms of life and civilizations in the universe, and able to influence space-time events anywhere, anytime, including here and now."
(3) "God elevates love and compassion to the status of fundamental forces, key drivers for the evolution of the universe...."
Those sound more like pious hopes than anything that anyone can actually know.
Bottom line: This stuff sounds like total bullshit to me.
RE: The Turing Church Preaches the Religion of the Future - C C - Dec 24, 2015
Apotheosis is an ancient idea, so it surely can't be said that this take on religion is a complete break from all tradition. Evolution might have entered the picture as a means for yielding eventual godhood via Teilhard's Omega Point literature, with Frank Tipler and others later adding a guided technological angle to it. The "self-engineering" prospect also stems from sci-fi's classic cyborgs, downloading neural information into or simulating brains in computers, virtual reality, and the futurism of a noetic singularity or god-like archailect eventually arising from ordinary artilects and internet linkages.
Still, transhuman religion seems a radical departure in the sense of its expectation of humans (or something they invent) accepting responsibility for producing what was considered to be a "given" in olden times (thaumaturgy, supernatural, etc). Clarke's "advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" context. Instead of hope and faith-based theism and immortality, the ascending apes are to take the bull by the horn themselves and ensure that the extraordinary becomes the case, a sort of "Childhood's End" on the distant horizon of tomorrow.
But it's difficult to see how any "metaphysical engineering" of spacetime would ever be possible; that information from past people could be recovered and they be resurrected in either synthetic, robotic or cyberspace bodies. Such seems to rest in the idea of this world itself being a virtual reality whose programming can be hacked, or in some kind of quantum physics interpretation that features maintenance of temporal coherence both ways (past and future), like Cramer's Transactional Interpretation.
Yet, if it reaches the point where picoscopic machines become possible and the peculiar properties of ever smaller bits of space can be studied and manipulated, who knows what a system of genuinely creative AIs and their immense processing powers might uncover and devise in terms of staggeringly complicated schemes. Again, the motivation and action of seeking to engender miracles / godhood is better than the old scenario of sitting around twiddling thumbs in egocentric confidence that a literal theogony and a ultra-level of wondermaking are already the case.