Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a holy confusion.
Their dream is to achieve “immortality” by storing their consciousnesses in digital form, existing eternally as ghosts in the machine.
And if someone was an asshole in life, then they’ll be an asshole forever. Or at least until the machine in which they’re a ghost gets unplugged by some janitor.
Whether this sort of extreme transhumanism motivates any significant portion of Genderism’s supporters notwithstanding, a fundamental mind-body disconnect is shared between them.
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Godalmighty. What do they think would be the point without a body? I can’t imagine anything more horrendous.
Yeah, what’s the point? The elevation and privileging of mental and intellectual pleasures, whenever and wherever it is indulged, is almost always done in conjunction with the denegration and disparagement of “mere” bodily pleasures. There’s no evidence that any kind of pleasure is possible without a body; bodily pleasures are a part of the package, so why not enjoy them? You need a body to do that, or anything; why is that a bad thing? Metaphysical sour grapes if we have no choice, but if we do, what makes us think that having the choice is necessarily good? A longer life is no guarantee of a better one. It’s not necessarily any one person’s choice either, as we shall see.
The belief that one’s personality and conciousness has an existence independent of the body, and that it can be removed and transferred to some material substrate other than the body in which it arose, is a technological version of the belief in a soul that lives on after death. Transhumanists might fool themselves into thinking they’ve changed things by describing this entity as a “pattern of information,” or somesuch, but it’s still much more a religious conviction than anything one might call “scientific.” They don’t want to know that consciousness might simply be an emergent property of a particular arrangement of matter, and that that property cannot be abstracted from that arrangement and “installed” in another one, that consciousness, personality, whatever, is something that is a product of biology, and that it must be evolved and grown, rather than designed and built. I know it smacks of vitalism, but what if consciousness is actually dependent upon biology, and that the messiness of bodies, and blood & guts existence, is the only way you can get it?
The whole idea that you can download or upload your consciousness into a machine (or anything else) feels like a category error, like believing the journal into which you write your thoughts and feelings not only thinks your thoughts and feels your feelings, but that it will continue to think thoughts and have feelings just like you, in perpetuity. Sure, it’s a pattern of information, but it’s an inert one, a dead end; it can’t write out its (or should I say your) thoughts and feelings in turn. But if someone else picks it up and reads it, then some of those thoughts and feelings, in a way, are repeated, preserved and perpetuated. But the journal can’t read itself, it can’t pick up and continue the story beyond the point where you set down your pen and closed the book.
I’m a materialist; I don’t think there is any other existence than a material one, nor that there is an “afterlife” or “immortal soul” that continues after we die. The only afterlife in which we can partake is the recycling of our briefly borrowed atoms back into the grand dance of biophysical processes from which they and we sprang in the first place. I’ve come to think of “religion” or “spirituality” as the “narrativization” we devise that sets out the way in which (we believe) we are connected to the rest of the universe. That connection does not require any supernatural agents whatsoever; it doesn’t need any overarching “plan” or “direction,” no overarching principle, personification or embodiment of Good or Evil. Maybe I’m being naive or hypocritical in my “belief” that biology is necessary for consciousness. But there’s just something desperately sad and pathological about the desire to dispose of biological embodiment altogether. Now there might come some time, with the inevitable decline of health (assuming I avoid all other, earlier manners of death) that I might feel more interested in finding some way to escape my own personal “best before” date. But I hope not. I enjoy life, but once I’ve had my turn, it’s time to go, and if that’s what my physical, biological, animality decrees, then so be it. Death will be just another non-negotiable force to which I will have to yield, like gravitation and the need to metabolize. It’s just the way things are. There’s no fault or blame for its occurrence; there’s no shame in the inevitable. It just is. And then, we just aren’t. And that’s fine. I’m under no illusion that the world needs any more of me than it’s going to get: a little goes a long way. And just as I’ve come to think that the last people you should be handing power to are the ones actively seeking it, I’m not inclined to believe that the world would benefit from the immortality of those seeking immortality. Sure, everyone is unique, but nobody is indispensable. Anyone chasing immortality is labouring under the narcissistic delusion that they’re both needed and wanted, that their desire to continue should prevail over, and that they rest of the world should be obliged to accommodate that continuation, as if they are owed it.
