Nov 24, 2024 02:50 AM
The false religion of transhumanism
https://iai.tv/articles/the-false-religi..._auid=2020
INTRO: The transhumanists of Silicon Valley aim to become more than human – to copy life, edit humanity, and delete death. But Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that transhumanism is a false religion masquerading as a technological program. God is long dead, but Silicon Valley is building a digital one. And this new God, contends Gomez-Marin, is a death-cult, promoting a self-immolating future for our species, for the supposed benefit of a post-human race that shall be better equipped, happier, and live forever here on planet earth and soon depart beyond the stars.
EXCERPT: By pursuing the so-called technological singularity, transhumanists want to become more-than-human. Triumphantly pledging our transcendence via the machines, they seem to also want to make humanity obsolete. Or worse: to extinguish our animal species into the machine.
They are indeed convinced they can solve the problem of life, the universe, and everything. But one wonders: Is language an autocomplete process? Is thought simply problem-solving? What is intelligence, after all? Is creativity automatable? Is life mechanizable? Is consciousness digitizable? Is reality a simulation? Really!?
[...] Dressed as a technological program, transhumanism offers a set of goods that are typically the province of religions: a gospel to evangelize, a series of messiahs, a prophecy (apocalypse included), and the prospects of redemption, salvation, and even liberation from the flesh, ultimately achieving immortality...
[...] According to the ideology that dominates the thoughts and investments of tech-billionaires in Silicon Valley, the world is broken, but they can fix it. This includes the human being and nature herself. They are determined to redeem it all, building heaven on earth even if all hell breaks loose.
God is long dead, but they are building a digital one. It is going to be all-knowing, all-mighty, and present everywhere; such is the new cult of digital totalitarianism. And yet, it’s one thing to try to steal the fire from the Gods, but it’s quite another to want to replace the Gods themselves… (MORE - details)
Jordan Peterson’s prophecies: The Canadian thinker’s self-made deity is a symptom of the modern Western malady
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...god-review
INTRO: At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation.
The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism. The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?
Thirteen years in the making, this compendious volume –the first of two, Peterson tells us – consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture. Reflections on the Genesis story of the Fall, Cain, Abel and the meaning of sacrifice lead to a two-chapter meditation on Moses, over 100 pages long, and a final chapter on the story of Jonah who, instructed to convert Nineveh, ends up being swallowed by a whale.
In the section on Moses, Peterson refers to the Israelites who “regressed to the paganism of possession by instinct”, worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: “The narrative here… indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order.”
An “a priori cosmic order”, however, is not the biblical deity, the creator of the world and humankind. Such an order could be the timeless realm of Plato’s “forms”, or – as Peterson acknowledges when he cites the Taoist tradition – the impersonal “way” of Chinese thought. Why identify this “intrinsically structured reality” with the God of Abrahamic religion? In the introduction, or “Foreshadowing”, Peterson tells us:
“The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”
Reduced to a collection of inspiring legends, however, Christianity cannot exorcise the spectre of nihilism. Thinking of the Christian religion as a bulwark to shore up a particular civilisation leaves it less than a universal truth and risks the cultural relativism that Peterson condemns in woke thinkers... (MORE - details)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-false-religi..._auid=2020
INTRO: The transhumanists of Silicon Valley aim to become more than human – to copy life, edit humanity, and delete death. But Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that transhumanism is a false religion masquerading as a technological program. God is long dead, but Silicon Valley is building a digital one. And this new God, contends Gomez-Marin, is a death-cult, promoting a self-immolating future for our species, for the supposed benefit of a post-human race that shall be better equipped, happier, and live forever here on planet earth and soon depart beyond the stars.
EXCERPT: By pursuing the so-called technological singularity, transhumanists want to become more-than-human. Triumphantly pledging our transcendence via the machines, they seem to also want to make humanity obsolete. Or worse: to extinguish our animal species into the machine.
They are indeed convinced they can solve the problem of life, the universe, and everything. But one wonders: Is language an autocomplete process? Is thought simply problem-solving? What is intelligence, after all? Is creativity automatable? Is life mechanizable? Is consciousness digitizable? Is reality a simulation? Really!?
[...] Dressed as a technological program, transhumanism offers a set of goods that are typically the province of religions: a gospel to evangelize, a series of messiahs, a prophecy (apocalypse included), and the prospects of redemption, salvation, and even liberation from the flesh, ultimately achieving immortality...
[...] According to the ideology that dominates the thoughts and investments of tech-billionaires in Silicon Valley, the world is broken, but they can fix it. This includes the human being and nature herself. They are determined to redeem it all, building heaven on earth even if all hell breaks loose.
God is long dead, but they are building a digital one. It is going to be all-knowing, all-mighty, and present everywhere; such is the new cult of digital totalitarianism. And yet, it’s one thing to try to steal the fire from the Gods, but it’s quite another to want to replace the Gods themselves… (MORE - details)
Jordan Peterson’s prophecies: The Canadian thinker’s self-made deity is a symptom of the modern Western malady
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...god-review
INTRO: At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation.
The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism. The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?
Thirteen years in the making, this compendious volume –the first of two, Peterson tells us – consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture. Reflections on the Genesis story of the Fall, Cain, Abel and the meaning of sacrifice lead to a two-chapter meditation on Moses, over 100 pages long, and a final chapter on the story of Jonah who, instructed to convert Nineveh, ends up being swallowed by a whale.
In the section on Moses, Peterson refers to the Israelites who “regressed to the paganism of possession by instinct”, worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: “The narrative here… indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order.”
An “a priori cosmic order”, however, is not the biblical deity, the creator of the world and humankind. Such an order could be the timeless realm of Plato’s “forms”, or – as Peterson acknowledges when he cites the Taoist tradition – the impersonal “way” of Chinese thought. Why identify this “intrinsically structured reality” with the God of Abrahamic religion? In the introduction, or “Foreshadowing”, Peterson tells us:
“The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”
Reduced to a collection of inspiring legends, however, Christianity cannot exorcise the spectre of nihilism. Thinking of the Christian religion as a bulwark to shore up a particular civilisation leaves it less than a universal truth and risks the cultural relativism that Peterson condemns in woke thinkers... (MORE - details)
