Cranks and (deleted)
Dale Carrico, the chivalrous champion of lost causes who likes to criticize others but does not like to be criticized by others, has just informed us that all transhumanists are cranks.
A transhumanist, you should know, is not the Wright Brothers or Thomas Edison, but “the dot-eyed crank in the basement” who believes in “genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain scanning and modeling techniques that will transform some of us into imperishable robots and end human mortality” (now, this is really disgusting!). Our “hopes are essentially faithful and not scientific and the hysteria and false certainties Superlativity mistakes and peddles as hope are worse, essentially fundamentalist”. And, of course, he does not need to discuss “with those incapable of grasping that “uploading” is Robot Cult nonsense”.
Well, I have always appreciated Dale for saying what he thinks. Too bad that he does not bother to offer us a scientific explanation of exactly why “uploading is Robot Cult nonsense”. It is nonsense, of course, because Dale says so. The brain, of course, is not a computer but a gland, and the mystical and ethereal mind essence that it produces will never be amenable to corporate-militarist (???) engineering analysis.
By the way, a very interesting article appeared last week on Technology Review (the TR of MIT, not the TR of the Robot God Cult), titled ”A Working Brain Model - A computer simulation could eventually allow neuroscience to be carried out in silico”, has some interesting news: “An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal’s brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade”.
Posted by G.P. on 12/03 at 05:24 PM