I won’t argue the bad theology behind the prediction about tomorrow’s supposed Second Coming. But I would like to raise a bit of a subversive question: Isn’t the transhumanist “Singularity”–in which technology will advance at such an accelerated state it can’t be controlled, leading to human immortality–merely a materialist version of the Rapture? Or at least, aren’t the same impetuses at work?
Consider:
- The Rapture is supposed to occur at a specific moment in time. Ditto, the Singularity.
- Belief in the Rapture generally rests on faith, which the author of Hebrews defines as ” the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” So is the Singularity, at least using that definition of faith.
- Believers in the Rapture accept religion. Believers in the Singularity accept the quasi religion of materialistic scientism.
- The Rapture gives many believers hope that death will be ultimately defeated. The same is true for believers in the Singularity.
- The Rapture is supposed to herald in a new age. So is the Singularity.
- The Rapture is supposed to eventually usher in a world of pure peace and harmony. So too, the Singularity. Indeed, a huge purpose behind transhumanism is to banish suffering and want from the experience of life.
- The Rapture is expected to restore Eden in which the lion will lay down with the lamb, e.g. an end to predation and strife throughout the natural world. Likewise, the Singularity, at least for some transhumanists, who believe that hyper technology will eventually allow animals to be “uplifted” into a state of moral agency, or even as I heard ubber transhumanist George Dvorsky say at a conference, putting their enhanced animal minds into computers.
- The Rapture is prophesied to result in Christians receiving “glorified” bodies that will be immortal. Prophets for the Singularity also promise such bodies. Indeed, Princeton biologist Lee Silver predicted in Remaking Eden that we would one day be transformed by technology into pure mental beings with unlimited capacities.
So all you transhumanists who believe in the Singularity and chuckle about Final Saturday, it seems to me that you live in a glass house and shouldn’t throw stones.
May 21st, 2011 | 12:51 am
This similarity has been noted by many others. “Geek rapture” has been used as a tongue-in-cheek equivalent for “the Singularity” for several years.
May 21st, 2011 | 7:46 am
And, astonishingly enough, there are ‘transhumanists’ who don’t anticipate a Singularity, too.
May 21st, 2011 | 7:55 am
Consider, though, that something like the Singularity *may* happen IF Moore’s Law continues to progress to a terminus. You don’t need to be an atheistic scientific materialist to be open to this possibility.
If there is a God, it could be that He’ll be waiting for us at the top of this Tower of Babel.
In the meantime get ready for, among other things, cyborg humans, medical microchips, folks living a heck of a lot longer that might give the illusion of immortality, artificial wombs, and humans being able to safely transition between genders. Oh and lots of cybersex and cyberdrugs.
May 21st, 2011 | 11:49 am
I am not sure exactly what your point is—that nonreligious people can be just as wacky as religious people and therefore we should respect all religious beliefs?
It strikes me that beliefs based on extrapolations about science and technology are quite different from religious beliefs, especially beliefs that the Rapture will take place on a specific date. Basically anyone can evaluate the arguments for and against the Singularity based on what they already know and believe, but if you want to make an argument about the Rapture occurring today, or any time in the future, you have to convince the people you are arguing with to adopt a particular (and minority) brand of Christianity first. So at least one can make a somewhat empirical argument for the Singularity, whereas belief in the Rapture is based entirely on interpreting certain Bible passages in a particular way.
May 21st, 2011 | 12:52 pm
‘I am not sure exactly what your point is—that nonreligious people can be just as wacky as religious people’
Yeah, that’s pretty much about it. Don’t see what the point was in the rest of your post, you nailed it in the first sentence.
May 21st, 2011 | 1:22 pm
Things like downloading intelligence, computers suddenly becoming as human in thought as we are, and the ease of being immortal cyborgs are a lot harder to justify empirically than you think.
They may SEEM more realistic, but it’s a case of real life not being reducible to human science fiction. We were also supposed to have sentient A.I.s by now, but for all the increase in computing power via Moore’s Law, all we get are more complicated brute-force algorithms. The dirty little secret is that there are limits to what can be done, and we may be hitting quite a few of them soon.
May 21st, 2011 | 2:03 pm
I’m agnostic on downloading human intelligence and AIs becoming sentient like human beings. However I seriously wonder about this:
“The dirty little secret is that there are limits to what can be done, and we may be hitting quite a few of them soon.”
I wonder: a) who is holding such secrets?; and b) what you think those limits are?
Moore’s Law has progressed amazingly. And those more complicated brute force algorithms equate with such things as Iphones and Kindles whose computer chips are more powerful than the computers of MIT each of which took up half a building. And those things are putting out of business or otherwise radically changing the record companies, print media, books, TV and movie broadcasts, and perhaps one day very soon, education. There may be limits, but, absent some kind of catastrophe, we are worlds away from reaching them.
You may think Ray Kurzweil is a crackpot; but the guy has an awful lot of bona fides in his area of expertise.
May 21st, 2011 | 2:09 pm
They’re not really alike, but that’s besides the point. How many secularists do you know of believe that human immorality is inevitable? Very few. More to the point, if they believe it, will they say it’s fact, like many people say the rapture or judgement day is?
May 21st, 2011 | 2:09 pm
The computers from MIT I referenced above were, I forgot to include, from the 1960s.
I do note some kind of complementarity between what the Rapture folks predict and the Singularity in the sense that both are futurist. And it might be thinking along the same tracks of futurism that leads to parallel conclusions.
The Rapture folks seem always to be revising their theories taking present and near future dynamics into account. For instance, the microchip implanted into your hands or your forehead that’s really the mark of the beast. Well, we are, whether we like it or not, moving towards a society that is much less paper oriented. And Microchips implanted into living organisms might do a lot of good.
These are just facts; it doesn’t mean the rapture folks are correct.
I’ll tell you what I’m putting my $$ on: A really good, affordable medical microchip that obviates the need for annual dr. checkups and blood work. As soon as you get cancer, HIV, or something is out of wack, you’ll know. Your medical stats will always be available to you. Think of how much $ that will save and how that will improve health.
May 21st, 2011 | 4:38 pm
Jon, the secret exists because people have a faith in technological progressivism: that science will always advance onwards and wont run into theoretical or practical limits. It’s secret because no one is looking at it. They assume because we have had a massive burst in innovation recently, that it’s sustainable.
As for limits, the ebook model is merely a change in distribution and storage. Nothing about the BOOK itself has progressed because of it, with the few attempts at hypertext fiction and multimedia quickly fading into obscurity. You can keep making bigger and better e-readers, but that’s not going to change the literary forms themselves because they are matured.
The limits are in the natures of the thing. A lot of people think that if the thing becomes powerful enough in its purpose that it somehow makes a leap to become something totally different. If you make a videogame that looks realistic enough and is complex enough, the characters will jump out into the net and try to escape. We know I think this isn’t the case.
May 21st, 2011 | 6:03 pm
Ok, I am not a “transhumanist” and I do not believe in singularity. I am just an ordinary atheist. Can I chuckle about believers in rapture now?
May 21st, 2011 | 6:06 pm
Dblade,
A couple points in response:
1. There may well be limits, but something short of a moving image turning into real life character, ala in Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, is still a big deal. For folks living before the age of electricity, movies and such would have been a big deal. Our video games/virtually reality, audio visual media, as far as we know, will take us to an amazing edge.
2. I agree the “product itself” might not necessarily be getting better. How can you get better than Marty Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, or War in Peace, or Abbey Road, or Peter Jennings?
But the change in distribution and storage, and don’t forget, production, is something radical, and radically better (in my opinion) as it destroys or hurts the old guard, or otherwise forces them to change in a good way. As the old saying goes, change or die. It is applicable.
It has taken and will continue to take away oligopolistic power from the old gate keepers in music, media, the literary world, and one day perhaps education (and as a college professor, I find this scary, but I’m doing what I can to stay on top of the changes). It is like the wild west where you can challenge the Sheriffs based on your skill. If you are full of it — as many bloggers are — you will either get ignored or shot down by other bloggers. I don’t agree with much of what Matt Drudge, for instance, stands for; but he’s now as important in an actual sense as the NYT, NBC, CBS, & ABC, even if he’s not as respectable. And this dynamic is going to progress.
Re the burst of technological innovation, here is where I may part company with Kurzweil: He sees IT’s exponential increases combined with nano-technology taking over all areas of life, including non-IT, eventually manipulating matter at the molecular level, the scientific philosophers stone and so on. As I see it, we won’t get flying Mr. Fusion cars, which Back to the Future II predicted would occur by 2015 until we get a next “breakthrough” in energy and transportation. And God knows when that will be. Kurzweil would argue IT will get so advanced that it will give us this. I’m not sure.
However IT itself IS a current breakthrough that — as I’ve seen Kurzweil demonstrate with Moore’s Law — progresses at an exponential rate which by 30 moves gives you “2 billion times more.”
The NON-IT areas of futurism (like Mr. Fusion flying cars) are really hard to predict. I’d love to know when the mousetrap that supersedes the internal combustion engine will be invented so I can invest in it. But the IT aspects ARE predictable. Because IT is a breakthrough that rides an exponential wave to a terminus. For instance, watch this commercial from 1993.
May 21st, 2011 | 7:13 pm
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice in Wonderland
May 21st, 2011 | 8:18 pm
I think there is a difference. The arguments for ‘technological progressivism’ are basically just extending what appears to be possible already.
For example, I think it was Blake who was arguing about the ‘unkept promises’ of science on another thread because all diseases haven’t been cured. But as far as we know there’s no particular reason to assume that any disease that we know about can’t be cured at some point with a technological breakthrough. Likewise the Singularity is highly speculative IMO but it’s just extending on what already seems to be possible….the increase in computing power, for example.
In contrast most religious faith to me seems to be less about believing things that seem plausible but about believing things that seem implausible. Eternal life, rising from the dead, a sudden end of the world for totally non-scientific causes….all these things are not about extending the world as it seems but asserting that the world is not quite as it seems.
Now in terms of a singularity ‘rapture’. Something I notice about it is that it seems to make the same mistake that the Star Trek transporter made. Technically an ‘upload’ of you to a computer network would be a copy of you onto a computer network. After it’s done, ‘you’ are still ‘you’ in your body. We can speculate for hours about the religious/moral status of ‘yous’ that are floating around inside virtual world, but unless the upload process destroyed the body you, well ‘you’ are still there.
A less dramatic ‘singularity’ speculation might be to ponder the implications of achieving material imortality. That would be basically curing or at least stoping all major diseases and being able to control the aging process so ‘natural deaths’ basically cease (other than accidents, murders, suicides etc.)
May 21st, 2011 | 10:21 pm
The singularity is the point beyond which nothing can be predicted. A black hole is a singularity. So if an event so transformative that nothing will ever be the same again occurs and beyond which prediction is impossible, that is a singularity.
The religious view is that god will somehow raise up the faithful, leaving the rest of us to run the planet. Well, so much for the meek inheriting the earth. The transhumanist view is that our machines will bond with our minds and become a “god” of sorts (Deus Ex Machina?), all matter on the planet will be converted into “computonium” or computing material and our consiousness will be absorbed. Only slightly more likely than the Rapture.
Really, if you think about it, the singularity already happened around 1994 when the world wide web came into common use, and anything from now on will just be a matter of degree of brain-computer integration.
So the new god is already here, just still in childhood.
Question for believers: in 200 years (or sooner) when the human race is heavily integrated, from birth or earlier, with computer technology, if the rapture comes, does the silicon soul that is integrated with the soul of humanity get raptured too?
May 22nd, 2011 | 12:35 am
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May 22nd, 2011 | 12:41 am
http://www.orionsarm.com
This is one of the better trans humanist scenarios I’ve read. It’s a shared universe which extrapolates current technology to create a future timeline to about the year 12,000 AD. There are some space opera elements and many of the stories are sophomoric, but there are a lot of very cool well thought out ideas, with plausible mathematics and technology, written by folks with PhD’s. Instead of one singularity, they have six. Known space is run by AI gods with minds the size of Jupiter, linked by wormholes and filled with every conceivable type of sentient life form from enhanced humans, to robots, to uplifted animals (or human-animal combos), to whole civilizations that exist inside virtual space.
As for a “geek rapture”, I put it in the unlikely, but kind of cool column. Someday, humanity may develop a way to radically extend life, but I doubt that will happen while I am alive. Who knows what limits we might run into, but then again, who knows what new ideas and information will radically change how we perceive and understand the universe?
May 22nd, 2011 | 2:16 am
OMG only one of us made the cut!
May 22nd, 2011 | 9:28 am
“Question for believers: in 200 years (or sooner) when the human race is heavily integrated, from birth or earlier, with computer technology, if the rapture comes, does the silicon soul that is integrated with the soul of humanity get raptured too?”
I’m not a traditional believer, certainly not in Hal Lindsey style rapturism. But this relates to my earlier comment about them being revisionists and futurists: They integrate thing like this into their prophesy. Like you know how Revelation says EVERY single person will be able to “see” Christ coming. How is that possible if people are scattered all over the globe. Well with the Internet, everyone being wired, perhaps everyone having their own built in Internet microchip from birth…viola.
May 22nd, 2011 | 11:12 am
I agree that computer technology is going to keep advancing. But, will some one explain to me how to make a computer conscious and then self conscious. Maybe we need to back up even further and ask, what is consciousness? David Chalmers described this as the hard problem. At present no one has a clue how to solve that problem. Therefore, all bets are off.
May 22nd, 2011 | 11:43 am
Boonton:
The problem is that not everything that seems plausible is. If you read SF heavily, pick up some from the 1970s. At the time a lot of it was very plausible, extrapolated from current ideas and trends. Now, most are so dated they seem ridiculous, and it’s the most implausible ones that endure.
Jon:
I’m not arguing against disruptive effects at all. I would like to say its never one sided: ebooks also may hurt the little guy and benefit the big one by giving the aggregators power via a “long tail” approach to profit.
It’s just technology becomes like magic in kurzweil’s eyes. It will always get better, and never plateau, or be limited. There’s a difference between realistically looking at future tech and wondering how it will change us, and a blind faith in us having the equivalent of flying nuclear cars in our ranch house garages.
May 22nd, 2011 | 12:20 pm
Dblade: I agree with your comments to me and Boonton in the sense that futurists can be laughably ignorant in non-IT areas like 1970s predictions and nuclear flying cars.
What I’d like you and others to appreciate is: ignore the non-It stuff where the future breakthroughs are utterly unpredictable and instead focus on the predictability of IT advances as they relate to Moore’s Law. So much futurism gets it wrong; but that 1993 At & T commercial got it right.
Re technology and magic, that’s a discussion for another day. I understand the new Thor movie (which I have yet to see; but, as a comic book geek I certainly will) contains a line derived from one of Arthur C. Clarke’s rules that is if you don’t understand the scientific basis of advanced technology it appears to be magic.
May 22nd, 2011 | 5:38 pm
Surely the notions of singularity and the rapture are both worthy of a good chuckle. What the??##%* — My mouse just attacked me, everything’s getting darker, darker dar…
May 22nd, 2011 | 5:53 pm
“How many secularists do you know of believe that human immorality is inevitable? Very few.”–Jeremy
That’s precisely the problem–secularists’ dismissal of human immorality.
I suspect what you meant to say is “immortality” not “immorality”.
May 23rd, 2011 | 2:01 pm
@Artaban7
“That’s precisely the problem–secularists’ dismissal of human immorality. ”
Zing!
May 23rd, 2011 | 5:38 pm
The main difference is that a rapture requires some kind of intervention from above… a superhuman force to reach down and set a new era in motion. The singularity is more grass-roots, so to speak, originating from the ground up through our own collective initiative and innovation. The rapture will require an act of God to happen and so will probably never happen. The singularity will require an act of God to keep from happening and so will in all likelihood be inevitable. These are big differences.
May 24th, 2011 | 2:22 pm
Wesley, the transhumanist community noticed this a long while back.
In rebuttal, folks working towards The Singularity are going to produce a lot of cool technology.
Rapture-fanatics are going to produce a few websites and take a lot of sucker’s money.
May 29th, 2011 | 12:50 pm
Is a totally programmed A.I. a prerequisite to the Singularity? I for one don’t think so. I believe that in the future we will have the ability to map the brain so thoroughly that the result will be artificial intelligence. This is different from actually programming from the ground up. The digitized version of a human brain would initially, at least, have limitations and advantages that purely programmed artificial intelligence would not possess. These limitations may include biases, prejudices, and fears based in the material plane that would no longer have any practical application. The advantages may include a moral code that is based on a life lived in our society. These limitations may be quickly overcome by access all of the worlds amassed knowledge in the blink of an eye. It’s amazing to think of how quickly it, and others like it, could change the world.
Thank you,
Christopher W. Clark
http://johngalt4u2.blogspot.com/
June 2nd, 2011 | 12:50 am
[...] secular, transhumanism trackback Over at FirstThings, which I am loath to dignify with a link but here it is, there is a post up counting down a short list. Inspired by the recent failed doomsday prediction [...]
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