Transumanar

“F### death!” vs. anti-superlative apologists of death

I have stopped posting to the always interesting Amor Mundi blog edited by Dale Carrico (because I have no time for debating people who think insults are arguments), but I still read it often. It is a useful window on their mindset. See my previous post on Anti transhumanist thought cops for a background.

When I and other sensible people stopped posting there, and left them to congratulate each other for their shared narrow-mindedness, I thought they would at least be happy repeating their anti-superlative blah blah to each other. Instead, they started immediately insulting each other. In the comment thread of post predictably titled Superlative Boo Hoo, Dale begins by stating that “Those who disagree with me and who are now also beginning to get annoyed can go screw themselves”.

Then one of Dale’s followers friendly invites another to consider using a more readable and understandable posting style, and receives a “fuck you” in reply, soon followed by “the rest of you can stick your heads in the toilet”. Yes, I have quoted out of context, but please read the exchange to see how the quotes are quite representative of the context. I cannot help thinking that these folks just like being rude, and will take pleasure in insulting each other when there is no external enemy to insult. What an illuminating example of intellectual and emotional maturity.

But this is only about form, let’s see some content.

In the comment thread of a post titled Business of Death, one infidel dares mentioning cryonics, and is immediately flamed by Dale: “By the way, you do realize that you are going to die, don’t you?”.

My answer to that question would be:

I realize that, with a very high probability, I am going to die. I think operational anti-aging, rejuvenation and mind uploading technologies will be developed someday, but probably not during my biological lifetime. I am signed up for cryonics, but I fear something may not work. I am not thinking of technical problems here - on the contrary I think at some point reviving today’s cryonic patients will be a trivial engineering problem - but fear that before that time regulatory PC zealots will manage to declare cryonics illegal and throw the bodies away.

So, I am probably going to die. Tough. So what? I will not be the only one, people have died until now and will continue to die for some more decades. Dear armchair psychologists, I am sorry to contradict your elegant analysis full of nice and empty words, but I don’t fear death that much. Find another one.

At the same time I consider death not as a philosophical problem, but as an engineering problem. Quoting from my post on Common Sense Transhumanism: Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it. Of course I could have chosen an example not related to things that most people find vulgar and disgusting, but I think this formulation has the merit of removing residual associations with certain mistaken notions of aging and death as good things, and showing in plain and simple words that they are disgusting things.

This must have been one of the reasons why they have chosen a really excellent name for the recently established Fuck Death Foundation (see also their website at http://www.fuckdeath.org/). I love the name because it tries to remove any vestigial reverence for the “sacred nature” of our limits, that even modern “intellectuals” fall for. Death is not “bad, but...”. It is just bad. So Fuck death is the proper attitude.

By the way, I use “immortality” as a shorthand for “indefinite lifespan”, realize that the notion of self is bound to undergo deep changes during an indefinite lifespan enabled by technologies like mind uploading, realize that probably we will not be able to survive the heat death of the universe or something of that sort, and don’t care in the least. Please enjoy your abstract PC prejudices and let me enjoy my indefinite lifespan.

Dale’s and cohorts’ replies to the guy who dares mentioning cryonics are full of things like “Well, that didn’t take very long. One more Robot Techno-Immortalist Cultist brings on the crazy”, “Don’t blame me for your mortality, poor sad beleaguered True Believer”, “You’ve gone off the rails, and it is very much a matter of the company you are keeping”, and many other statements full of respect for others’ points of view, like for example “Another comment thread derailed by Superlativity. What a pack of loons”.

Well, Dale does try to make two points. One, that he considers very important, is “It is crucial to disarticulate the basic irrationality of The Denial of Death for embodied sociable narratively coherent beings in a finite universe from things like—informed, non-duressed, non-normavizing consensual healthcare in an era of unprecedented emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapy”. I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean - I think it is a restatement of Dale’s well known condemnation of imagination as a danger for serious people who want to do serious things. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense.

But the best is: “we people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty, and fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind”.

Nice and poetic words. But Greg Egan has said it better: “We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery”. Egan also explains the origins of this deathist meme: “Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators”.

The keyword here is theistic. They claim to have shed religious superstitions and of course they claim to be PC atheists, but they are saying exactly the same things that religions have always said to enslave the masses and stay in power: we must accept and respect our limits with reverence and humility, and do not try to gain forbidden knowledge and power (or else - think of what happened to poor Icarus and Prometheus). My summary: bullshit, or even better chickenshit. Of course, for them transhumanism, defined by Fukuyama as “a strange liberation movement” that wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints”, is the most dangerous idea.

Posted by G.P. on 11/13 at 07:42 AM
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