Allah? Have you read the Koran?

Exactly.

Enter: Morality.

Singularity doesn't really sounds like a religion to me.
It sounds more like a cult (which is more scary) and Kurzweil is their cult leader.
Also, it looks like his followers (read suckers) donate money to the cult too, working as intended I guess.

Don´t you think that ultimately something like singularity will happen? Let´s forget about Kurzweil for a while. Why wouldn´t computers/robots ultimately become smarter than homosapiens?

Ha, yesterday the forums went down just as I was writing this post. Perhaps the server had something to come to terms with.

Well, I on the other hand don't get how the fact that it's going to end takes anything away from life. I just don't get it at all. My morning coffee is not ruined by the fact that eventually I will have drank all of it. A lovely music track is not ruined by the fact that it's going to end eventually. Enjoying the company of a good person is not ruined by the fact that we will part ways at some point. On the contrary, the fact that it will end makes everything only even more valuable.

I'm not hard on drugs because then I would lose even the little prescious few decades I have left. I'm not randomly shooting up a school because not only am I completely void of any wish do it, the mere idea of doing that actually fills my every braincell with extreme disgust.

You obviously associate nothing but utter despair with the thought of of everything coming to an end once. You do not seem to think that it is possible to feel nothing but utter despair at this thought. But it is. And I think it is so even for you, though you cannot seem to imagine it. Human mind is generally not so incompetent as to be poisoned by its own product.

And I don't think delusion is the answer. It's a crutch, and it might be necessary for some people in some situations. But the real cure is to embrace reality, whatever it is. It might seem bitter at first, but a healthy human mind has the wonderful ability to over time come to terms with almost any situation. The species wouldn't have made it otherwise. Neither you or me have any clue what is true despair, what it is like to see most people around you, most of your family, your children, die randomly, violently, suffer from disease, starvation, terror, struggle every day just to survive. Yet, that is the life our ancestors had for hundreds of thousands of years. It seems silly to me then to be convinced that a mere abstract idea that a human mind itself came up with in the first place could be something it cannot overcome.

It might be painful at first, but if accepting it is the only choice you leave yourself with, then that's what you are going to do. The agony usually doesn't last more than a couple of days. Then you are going to feel terrible but at least barely functional for a few weeks. Then you are going to feel low for a few months.

Then you're going to be fine.

Vantek might be my long-lost Nordic brother: A "perfect nihilist"; or a nihilist who has overcome nihilism...I like....
Cheers

I like vantek's philosophy. It seems somewhat Buddhist

Please define and prove.

Really?

Pick up a book.

Meh. Long as I can have an army of robots to go to work for me and make me $ i say bring on that singularity baby.

Lol. Fail. You define and prove.

I'm all for the Singularity, as well, and believe it will happen... but not before another century or so passes.

He IS serious! That's adorable.

Vantek,

nice post. I definitely would agree that anyone can be happy by learning to live in the moment, live mindfully, appreciate the totality of their sense experiences etc. I would also argue that one could achieve that and yet still be philishophically a nihilist. My comments about being on drugs or raging against the world were deliberately provocative; while they may have somewhat described me when I was younger I'm sure I could be a happy nihilist right now without any belief crutches.

WRT belief, I don't believe in it, heh. I can never 100% prove my own existence so following from that I can't 100% believe anything to be absolute truth. What I find to be most pragmatic though is to use the belief system in the brain as a tool. We can probably all agree that we stand the best chance of performing at our best at something if we have complete confidence in ourselves, right? I'm just applying the same concept.

When it comes to immortalism, the fact that the chance is non-zero is the game-changer. I and I imagine other transhumanists/cryonicists/technotopianists don't concern ourselves too much with trying to pin down just how likely we are to make escape velocity or w/e you want to call it, and we don't need to for our lives to have gained new shades of meaning on a daily basis.

I'm comfortable equating this with religion because I think it resides in similar areas of the brain. But because of my view of belief, I feel like it's something anyone can choose to 'believe in' without having to be fully convinced in a scientific way. And then life becomes a little bit better and more meaningful, imo.

p.s. to take the game theory angle, surely Kurzweil's edict: do everything within your power to maximise your chance of still being around when aging is 'cured', just dominates any other strategy.

A narcissistic wiew, imo. Truth is more important for me. Peculiar enough. Bye bye world, that time will come.

Perhaps, although one could argue that a likely consequence of the singularity will be networked intelligence and thus dissolution of the self...

Ah. That makes more sense.

Personally though, first, to me it's not so much that a chance of immortality is a game-changer, but a chance of death is the game-changer. I guess I might be the pessimist here in this sense, lol? You gotta accept that there is a chance you die (and there seems to be a chance to die even if the singularity thing is true, I don't see how you can hope to make yourself absolutely indestructible), and to accept even a small chance that you die, let alone the big one that you and I are facing, it seems to me you need to become pretty insensitive to the idea of death.

But most important for me is that I actually don't feel a sense of continuity between me now and me after singularity. Hell, I don't really feel much of a sense of continuity between me now and me as a child. If I actually were to make it to singularity, well, you can expect that even if there is *technical* continuity between me now and some entity that might exist at some point in the future, the me now and that entity will be dramatically different things. I just don't feel any emotional connection with that completely unfamiliar thing that might exist then. I don't care wether that thing will exist or not.

So I actually would hate it if singularity happened tomorrow. By my own standards, that would probably mean that I will "die" much sooner than I otherwise would have. But I am guaranteed to "die" by my own standards no matter what. I might hope that it becomes technologically feasible to save me from aging, but at the moment I have absolutely no appetite to become a cyborg or a computer. A cyborg or computer would not be me by my standards. If the technology was available tomorrow, I would prefer to stay a human who is unnaturally young and healthy but otherwise has completely standard biology. I would feel an emotional connection with such a "me". Over time, my attitudes probably would change, and I probably would start to slowly transform into a technological form of existence, but right now, such a scenario has no appeal for me whatsoever, and is on an emotional level no different from dying.

But, turns out we agree on the problem on which I initially responded to. What I wrote in this post is just an explanation of a completely subjective position with no intent to change anyone's mind, that I wrote in my previous post actually contained some things that I consider objective (people are generally capable to come to terms with any philosophical realisation) and I was trying to change your mind. But, it turns out we agreed in the first place.

Thank ****, sometimes I think its just me.

Hey I'm totally with you here. One of my simplest hopes for advanced AI is that if we haven't yet solved aging, it will. And from my limited understanding of what is known of the various aging processes, once aging can be stopped, turning it back and rejuvenating people will be only a small step further. Hence making some decisions in life that could help you live to 80 rather than 70, might make all the difference for you.

Of course people are going to have wildy different preferences when it comes to 'addons' and I hope their right to express those preferences will be upheld. I'd love to enhance myself in all manner of ways, but the conspiritard in me sees very murky waters ahead which will need to be navigated first.

"Do everything in your power to maximize quality of life" is much, much better by my utility metric.

They can also take your brain and blend it with other brains and produce a mega brain. Immortal and all knowing.

yea this. for example, i'd never want to live forever if i was a paraplegic.

You just have a slightly different narcissistic view. Truth would be nice, but it seems to be a moving target.