A "Transhumanist"?!
December 9, 2015 at 2:48 pm
(This post was last modified: December 9, 2015 at 2:52 pm by Amine.)
Hi. Glad to have found this forum.
I've been a solid atheist for almost 3 years. I was always a doubter but up until more recently I was pretty naive. As early as 4 or 5 perhaps, I remember being in church and hearing people pray and talk about God as if they just knew. I noticed that I didn't have that sense. From then on I was always 50-50 on it at best, and certainly more of an agnostic than a follower of a well-defined sect. I was also pretty horrified about there even being a slight chance that I could be wrong. I reasoned that I might as well take no risk of eternal punishment, however small the risk.
In my 20s I got into psychedelics and Zen Buddhism and those led me down the rabbit hole, unfortunately. I wound up one of those drug-people who thinks things like 'losing your ego you become god' and all of that garbage and navel-gazing. Big waste of time. In the end I wound up getting very depressed for a period of a few months, to the point of basically losing my mind. It was then that I finally felt someone was listening to me when I prayed. That couldn't last long, though. After so long of me continually upping the ante on this belief and staking everything on it, I woke up one morning and realized my life was in ruins and I was bound for the insane asylum if I continued on this path. That's when I realized it really all was just superstition and wishful thinking.
These days my philosophy is pretty well captured by someone like Sam Harris most of the time (minus parts of Waking Up although I think half of it is truly great). Guess you could call me a "New Atheist", although it is of course a silly label. I am fairly tired of talking about atheism itself, though, which is paradoxically why I am here. My hope is that this isn't just a place of identity politics, but more a place of having selected out a certain kind of nonsense so it doesn't have to be dealt with. I easily get hampered down arguing with believers and it's a waste of time. Although I am a huge fan of "street epistemology" which some around here may have heard of.
I like to take contentious positions. Some that interest me are the following. For one, I consider myself a transhumanist. That just means that I think we should use technology to overcome out biological limitations; indeed, that may be one of our defining traits as a species. Glasses are the most basic example of that. I'm no fan of "natural". Enhancement is more and more becoming a possibility and I think we should apply "glasses" to many other areas of human performance, rather than worshiping the humanness of seeing in blur. Or, say, getting ill and aging.
I am also a fan of utilitarianism, specifically the 'negative' sort which holds the relieving of suffering as having the highest moral weight. I belief suffering and death are bad. I believe in progress, I believe we have made progress, and I believe we will probably continue to, and probably at a quickening pace. I hope we can tackle problems like poverty, disease, and violence and take them all down to even lower levels. One area I find particularly important is animal welfare. I am an anti-speciesist: in the words of philosopher David Pearce, that means I think "all else being equal, equally strong interests should count equally" regardless of the arbitrary criterion of what species something is. Granted, "all else" isn't always equal, but there's a lot of room for improvement, I think, without even really having to consider that. One hope I have is that cheap in-vitro meat will eventually spur global veganism.
I don't believe in free will. I don't believe "life is what you make it" or that it is beautiful, a gift, sacrosanct, or anything like that. It can be some of those things, but it often isn't. Atrocities happen. Things could go truly horribly on this planet, it is all up to us (that is, if anything can be done about it at all). Thus I have quite a sense of urgency about the world and about spreading healthy beliefs about it. Regarding 'evil', I think the Problem of Evil is a pretty good knock-down argument against at least a benevolent God (and I kinda think the idea of a malevolent one is just silly). It also, in my opinion, makes it seem pretty unlikely that intelligent space-faring aliens are anywhere near us, if they exist at all. The idea that they are observing this planet without intervening is repugnant. In a similar vein, the idea of seeding other planets with life seems equally barbaric to me, unless the seeder can ensure that the sort of atrocities human history is filled with would never occur.
I think the Many Worlds interpretation of QM is probably correct. I think materialism is probably false, because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Subjective experience seems irreducible to hard spherical particles bouncing around. So I tend to think reality is experiential in nature (i.e. Strawsonian physicalism), but not in any woo-woo sense of "you manifest it" or "the universe is one great mind" or anything like that. It is hard to deny, though, as a person who is experiencing doing this right now, that the universe has first-person qualities. I speculate that those first person qualities may have always been around like a soup of incoherent noise, and sentient brains my have evolved to specialize in 'binding' those incoherent microexperiences. Very speculative indeed, but maybe still preferable to eliminative materialism ("consciousness is an illusion") or, *gasp*, dualism.
Anyway.. hopefully this will be a good place to find some challenging discussions and sharpen my mental toolset and whatnot. That's what I'm mostly looking for. Cya'll around.
I've been a solid atheist for almost 3 years. I was always a doubter but up until more recently I was pretty naive. As early as 4 or 5 perhaps, I remember being in church and hearing people pray and talk about God as if they just knew. I noticed that I didn't have that sense. From then on I was always 50-50 on it at best, and certainly more of an agnostic than a follower of a well-defined sect. I was also pretty horrified about there even being a slight chance that I could be wrong. I reasoned that I might as well take no risk of eternal punishment, however small the risk.
In my 20s I got into psychedelics and Zen Buddhism and those led me down the rabbit hole, unfortunately. I wound up one of those drug-people who thinks things like 'losing your ego you become god' and all of that garbage and navel-gazing. Big waste of time. In the end I wound up getting very depressed for a period of a few months, to the point of basically losing my mind. It was then that I finally felt someone was listening to me when I prayed. That couldn't last long, though. After so long of me continually upping the ante on this belief and staking everything on it, I woke up one morning and realized my life was in ruins and I was bound for the insane asylum if I continued on this path. That's when I realized it really all was just superstition and wishful thinking.
These days my philosophy is pretty well captured by someone like Sam Harris most of the time (minus parts of Waking Up although I think half of it is truly great). Guess you could call me a "New Atheist", although it is of course a silly label. I am fairly tired of talking about atheism itself, though, which is paradoxically why I am here. My hope is that this isn't just a place of identity politics, but more a place of having selected out a certain kind of nonsense so it doesn't have to be dealt with. I easily get hampered down arguing with believers and it's a waste of time. Although I am a huge fan of "street epistemology" which some around here may have heard of.
I like to take contentious positions. Some that interest me are the following. For one, I consider myself a transhumanist. That just means that I think we should use technology to overcome out biological limitations; indeed, that may be one of our defining traits as a species. Glasses are the most basic example of that. I'm no fan of "natural". Enhancement is more and more becoming a possibility and I think we should apply "glasses" to many other areas of human performance, rather than worshiping the humanness of seeing in blur. Or, say, getting ill and aging.
I am also a fan of utilitarianism, specifically the 'negative' sort which holds the relieving of suffering as having the highest moral weight. I belief suffering and death are bad. I believe in progress, I believe we have made progress, and I believe we will probably continue to, and probably at a quickening pace. I hope we can tackle problems like poverty, disease, and violence and take them all down to even lower levels. One area I find particularly important is animal welfare. I am an anti-speciesist: in the words of philosopher David Pearce, that means I think "all else being equal, equally strong interests should count equally" regardless of the arbitrary criterion of what species something is. Granted, "all else" isn't always equal, but there's a lot of room for improvement, I think, without even really having to consider that. One hope I have is that cheap in-vitro meat will eventually spur global veganism.
I don't believe in free will. I don't believe "life is what you make it" or that it is beautiful, a gift, sacrosanct, or anything like that. It can be some of those things, but it often isn't. Atrocities happen. Things could go truly horribly on this planet, it is all up to us (that is, if anything can be done about it at all). Thus I have quite a sense of urgency about the world and about spreading healthy beliefs about it. Regarding 'evil', I think the Problem of Evil is a pretty good knock-down argument against at least a benevolent God (and I kinda think the idea of a malevolent one is just silly). It also, in my opinion, makes it seem pretty unlikely that intelligent space-faring aliens are anywhere near us, if they exist at all. The idea that they are observing this planet without intervening is repugnant. In a similar vein, the idea of seeding other planets with life seems equally barbaric to me, unless the seeder can ensure that the sort of atrocities human history is filled with would never occur.
I think the Many Worlds interpretation of QM is probably correct. I think materialism is probably false, because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Subjective experience seems irreducible to hard spherical particles bouncing around. So I tend to think reality is experiential in nature (i.e. Strawsonian physicalism), but not in any woo-woo sense of "you manifest it" or "the universe is one great mind" or anything like that. It is hard to deny, though, as a person who is experiencing doing this right now, that the universe has first-person qualities. I speculate that those first person qualities may have always been around like a soup of incoherent noise, and sentient brains my have evolved to specialize in 'binding' those incoherent microexperiences. Very speculative indeed, but maybe still preferable to eliminative materialism ("consciousness is an illusion") or, *gasp*, dualism.
Anyway.. hopefully this will be a good place to find some challenging discussions and sharpen my mental toolset and whatnot. That's what I'm mostly looking for. Cya'll around.
