Glen -
It probably means nothing more than that I should go find (and clean) my
reading glasses, but my first read of your subject line gave me
"Fidel-istic" as in Castro. And applying cold-war rhetoric, it is easy
to think of our man Fidel as having operated his entire "career" as a
Fideist as well, with his "faith" in communism at odds with (some of)
the reason surrounding him of various market economies and the utility
of allowing capital to concentrate outside the context of a state or
political party. And then there is that little illusion (barely captured
by the rhetoric of "the people's party"?) of self-determination that our
form of representative democracy seems to maintain (the illusion,
whether or not the fact) somewhat more effectively.
I know that you have a particular hard-on *against* the Singularist
rhetoric. I myself share a huge mistrust of said rhetoric when it is
running on the jet fuel of people wanting to live forever, if only as a
ghost inside of an advanced machine intelligence. Just below
immortality, is the general technophilia that most here also are
infected with. There is nothing more heady than asking the question
"what if?" in one breath and then expounding on the answer for the rest
of the day. I suspect there are few here who didn't mis-spend a portion
of their lives (at least youth) reading speculative fiction.
I attribute Kurzweil's (as the nominal leader of the popular Singularian
movement) motives to seeking personal immortality. I've coincidentally
been visiting places where he was giving a keynote/capstone/public
speech on each of his two Singularity Books and he made NO bones about
appealing to dreams of immortality with the audience. There is an
undercurrent of megalomania as well, as if the "first to ascend" will
somehow have special status as founders or as elders or just "get a head
start" on the later ones. The logic does not hold... just as
interstellar space travel in SF is filled with early missions being
*passed* by later ones with advanced technology. "Leave early, arrive
late" probably applies to ascendence into the singularity matrix (enter
early, suffer early-adoption woes).
I attribute much of the remainder of Singularian dreams to technophilia
and it's developmentally challenged sibling "because we can!".
What remains after those two "obvious" issues are dismissed is still
interesting to me: In the same way that various other innovation
"revolutions" are interesting. Where feedback loops in a system helped
to generate diversity and then subsequent complexity. This could be any
one of the evolutionary "explosions" we have measured in the fossil
record, or it could be the human technological "explosions" that settled
out into things we call (after the fact) the "neolithic age", "bronze
age", "iron age" then much later "steam era", "industrial revolution",
"communication age", "transportation age", "electronics age",
"computer/information age", etc.
I understand that the natural myopic perspective across history has our
"recent" events seeming more important or auspicious than perhaps the
older ones, but even factoring that out, I believe there IS some
significant acceleration in technological progress.
I'm not sure that our prognostications of the present are any more
meaningful than those of say, Jules Verne's or HG Well's era. Or why we
might think they should be. Some will turn out to be spot on, others
totally outlandish. I suspect there are aspects of the Singularian
rhetoric which will turn out to be inspired... but not likely all of it,
just as we are not traveling in steam-driven lighter-than air ships
around the world today, or being fired to the moon and other planets
inside giant bullets.
- Steve
Given our conversations on the meaning of "faith" and various attempts
to discuss the singularity hypothesis, I thought this might be interesting.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_19
Selmer Bringsjord, Alexander Bringsjord and Paul Bello
Abstract We deploy a framework for classifying the bases for belief in a
category
of events marked by being at once weighty, unseen, and temporally removed
(wutr, for short). While the primary source of wutr events in Occidental philos-
ophy is the list of miracle claims of credal Christianity, we apply the
framework to
belief in The Singularity, surely—whether or not religious in nature—a wutr
event.
We conclude from this application, and the failure of fit with both rationalist
and
empiricist argument schemas in support of this belief, not that The Singularity
won’t come to pass, but rather that regardless of what the future holds,
believers in
the ‘‘machine intelligence explosion’’ are simply fideists. While it’s true that
fideists have been taken seriously in the realm of religion (e.g. Kierkegaard
in the
case of some quarters of Christendom), even in that domain the likes of orthodox
believers like Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Paley find fideism to be little
more
than wishful, irrational thinking—and at any rate it’s rather doubtful that
fideists
should be taken seriously in the realm of science and engineering.
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
