Have you forgotten Jesus?

Here is the review I posted on Amazon of Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

Have you forgotten Jesus?

Isn't it about time you did?

Seriously, though, Sam Harris has performed an extraordinary service through his taboo-breaking book. As other reviewers (like Natalie Angier in the New York Times) have pointed out, Harris has articulated openly what many people have long thought about religious beliefs and practices, but were afraid to say publicly. It's as if Harris has disabled the internal censor that inhibits the Secular Humanist in us all, and now others feel free to follow his example.

Even religionists themselves acknowledge that religious behavior isn't rational or sane when they witness practices in other people's religions that strike them as absurd or creepy. Harris just takes the analysis several steps further and points out the fundamental incompatibility of all the "Abrahamic" religions -- Judaism,
Christianity and Islam -- with a world where potential weapons of mass
destruction can fall into the hands of their respective fanatics. Religious
"freedom" served a valid purpose when our European ancestors knew a lot less
about reality but wanted to end the Protestant/Catholic wars for practical
political reasons. The science of the time couldn't decide the truth of
competing religious claims either way, and the available technology for warfare
and terrorism wasn't that destructive.

But when we are in a much better position to understand how reality works, and we have learned things which throw doubt on the reliability of religious myths, it's irresponsible to pretend that beliefs like a coming "rapture" are any less ridiculous than the predictions of UFO cultists that aliens from the mother ship are going to abduct them.

If humanity can pass through the current bottlenecks and survive in an
enlightened and economically comfortable state, our outlook will probably be
more like Sam Harris's than like Jerry Falwell's or Osama bin Laden's. Harris
deserves credit for writing what could contribute towards the blueprint for a
livable world in the 21st Century.

Unintended implications

I have felt for a long time now that under the current Wealth System in America, the overwhelming majority of adults simply cannot afford to rear children in a financially sustainable way -- unlike the adults in the rentier classes, for example our current President, whose twin daughters recently graduated from college. I would be willing to bet money that these young Bush women have no student loans to pay off, and that they will never have to do any real work, much as Chelsea Clinton got a phoney-sounding but absurdly well remunerated "job" as a "consultant," no doubt because someone owed her politically powerful mother a favor. In a rational society, of course, Chelsea Clinton would have wound up with some job like teaching school in Little Rock. By contrast, President Bush's daughters seem more like Wal-Mart clerk material to me.

The empirical evidence supporting my position has come out in a new book, reviewed here. I plan to get around to reading this study, The Two-Income Trap, some day, but from this and other articles about the economic erosion of the middle class, I draw quite different conclusions. If most American adults can't afford to have children, I don't look for a solution from politics or economics; I look at the radical solution, namely, that you have no business making babies unless you have a substantial guaranteed income from sources that can't fire you, or at least that don't hold you to a rigorous standard of performance.

Ironically even people who should know better don't get it, for example, Immortalists. I recently had an email exchange with a female cryonicist with several young children who endorsed having children as a way of ensuring the success of cryonics, despite all the evidence to the contrary that a commitment to cryonics isn't generationally transmissible. After all, the overwhelming majority of nondeanimated cryonicists today come from non-cryonicist families, and I've heard of cases where children of cryonicists, who were signed up while under their parents' authority, dropped their arrangements upon reaching the age of reason. In addition this woman comes across as financially stressed in news accounts I've read of her (I think her husband was serving in Bush's war against the evil doers), so she illustrates my point about the financial irresponsibility of trying to rear a family on the ridiculously low incomes that pass for wages in today's Wealth System.

I have a lot more to say about the economic aspects of this tar baby later, but I'd also like to add that I think it's morally wrong to bring new human minds into existence that will be traumatized, as we all are, with the knowledge of their mortality. If we could make babies in a regime of engineered negligible senescence so that they had realistic expectations of not dying from the diseases of aging, at the least, then I might consider having some children of my own, despite all the practical difficulties that currently stand in the way -- the main one being the lack of women in our species who would make suitable companions for me.

Too good to pass up!

From the Cost of the War in Iraq Website:

The Wealth System at work: The brain disease epidemic

From The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1283588,00.html

Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases

Scientists alarmed as number of cases triples in 20 years

Juliette Jowit, environment editor

Sunday August 15, 2004

The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.

The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.

Once again, our dysfunctional Wealth System shows its weaknesses and disadvantages. While members of a relatively small, wealthy elite enjoy the benefits of freedom from want and involuntary work, the very industrial activities that make their position possible can also inadvertently poison them. (Think of wealthy people who develop Alzheimer's apparently caused by environmental toxins.) After all, they have to breathe the same air, drink the same water and use many of the same contaminated products the rest of us have to use. A Wealth System designed according to emerging Supersurvival criteria, based on the quest for engineered negligible senescence, would try to control the long-term costs of our current economic activities and integrate them into current calculations so that the production of what we really need won't threaten our health and safety years down the line.

Practical Transhumanism

I don't quite understand the "body modification" (BM) fad, where people in effect injure themselves through tattooing, piercing, scarification and so forth, unless these individuals are (rather robotically) doing so as a means of showing off their reproductive fitness, much like hunter-gatherers who engage in similar practices to broadcast their tribal identity and to show much pain they can endure to impress potential mates. ("Modern" Jews and Muslims carry on a socially acceptable form of tribalistic mutiliation through their assaults on their baby boys' foreskins.)

BM does seem to resemble certain explicit goals of Transhumanism, however, so it's not surprising that a BM Website would publish a report about the recent TransVision 2004 conference in Toronto, Canada.

The author, Shannon Larratt, makes some comments about what he saw there that strike me as true and on-target given my experiences with cryonicists and Extropians over the years. For one thing, he laments the small turnout; individual congregations in Sunbelt-city "megachurches" have more members than the thousand or so, if even that many, self-professed Transhumanists on the planet. For another, he describes sitting next to

a tall, slender Asian man with a big bag of groceries. Oblivious to those around him, he prepared and ate several salads and fruit dishes, carefully weighing them and then entering them into a spreadsheet on his laptop as he ate, afterwards spending ten minutes loudly flossing his teeth. This seemed to me to be a strange thing to do, and by their strained glances at him, I think some of the speakers were debating whether or not they were being insulted. Later I discovered that he believed that in order to best achieve longevity one should adopt a paleolithic diet, since that’s what our bodies are presumably evolved to survive on.

I recognize that sort of personality immediately. Many cryonicists and Immortalists display unusual dietary obsessions, and I've read into the whole debate about Paleo nutrition myself. Unfortunately I'm not in a position where I can better approximate a Paleo diet, and with agricultural output likely to implode after Peak Oil, I don't know whether I'll ever be able to sustain such a diet in years to come even if I wanted to. (The empirical evidence from British wartime food rationing suggests that our health would benefit from eating fairly rationed food on the decline, at least for awhile.)

Larratt also chides the mostly male audience for its reaction to a well know female Transhumanist in her 50's who has surgically augmented her "mammalian features" and who drew an unseemly amount of attention when it was her time to talk. Apparently many young male Transhumanists have trouble finding age-appropriate companion females, and again, I recognize both myself and many of my acquaintances in the portrayal.

And, again recognizably, Larratt remarks upon the extreme contrasts within the Transhumanist subculture between the ones who are trying to do something practical, like the "creepy" self-professed cyborg Steve Mann or the the Australian performance artist Stelarc, versus the fantasists who apparently can't pry themselves away from their science fiction novels and computer games:

In my opinion, transhumanism doesn’t need ill-informed people who go off on flights of “what if” fancy. You know what? All of us have been doing that since we were five years old. What transhumanism needs is transhumanists. Not people
who talk about. People who do it. I have enormous respect for people like Steve
Mann and Stelarc ... who are actually out there living transhuman lives and having transhumanist experiences, rather than just talking about them without any first-hand knowledge, as well as the scientists doing the foundation research that will make it possible. I am not convinced that the philosophers and artists are any different from science fiction authors — an important element in inspiring people to live as transhumanists, but no more than
that...

Finally, if I could say one thing to transhumanists in general, it is to follow Steve Mann and Stelarc’s example and make it real. Don’t just talk about far future fantasies. Taking the first step may not be as fantastical as masturbating over the year 3000, but it’s the only way that we can force transhuman evolution without being restricted by governments and corporations, who will act in the best interests of nationalism and capitalism, rather than humanity’s future.

I have been thinking for a number of years what it will take to make Transhumanism "practical" for myself, and given my current cirumstances, I realize that I need to solve the wealth problem as a priority, while also maintaining my arrrangements for cryonic suspension. Many of the intriguing technological opportunities either aren't affordable, aren't legally available or just aren't merely practical yet, and the whole Singularity vision could become pointless in a few years any way if declining world oil extraction causes modern civilization to crash. (No electricity means no computing means no "Singularity," assuming one is even possible.)

But even with conventional mechanisms for wealth-building we face suboptimal choices. The Bush Administration wants to cut taxes and shrink the Federal Government back to pre-New Deal levels, which presumably would help the growth of investment accumulation and which many libertarians would love. But Bush's bioethics policies are explicitly pro-death, and as I keep reminding fellow cryonicists who prefer a smaller government, Bush cannot possibly cut your taxes enough to compensate you for dying.

So, at least for myself, the strategy for living as a "real" Transhumanist, whatever that means, remains unformulated and pending. It doesn't mean I'll stop looking for practical things to do that push me in the right direction, however.

"Intimacy " with a deity

There are some expressions that really make me cringe, a form of the "Yuck response" I am willing to defend (unlike Leon's Kass's, by contrast).

I find occasion for the semantic yuck response when I hear a man talk about his "intimacy" with Jesus or a god, not so much because of the deity part (though that does offend me as well, for reasons I'll outline later), but more because of the "intimacy" part.

First of all, real men generally don't go around talking about "intimacy," except perhaps to mock it. It's a women's term, and one they use as a euphemism for sex, apparently because so many women are afraid to talk about the business of plugging together in plain English. (Ads for lubricants to enhance "intimacy" show the dishonesty involved.)

Secondly, even if such a religiously brainwashed and presumably heterosexual man thought he had a "relationship" with a deity (which is not unlike a 10-year-old talking about Harry Potter as if he were his real best friend), what is going on in his brain that short-circuits the homophobic "yuck response" he would probably feel if he started thinking about "intimacy" with a living man?

I suppose the religionist could counter that he is using "intimacy" in an emotional or psychological sense (though christians often employ the confusing anti-concept "spiritual" to describe those aspects of our subjective experiences), but psychological research and common sense suggest that when a word has two or more meanings, we can't always consciously separate the two. So do men who mouth off about their "intimacy" with a god reveal repressed homoerotic feelings?

Speaking personally, I have drifted towards Atheism, Secular Humanism and Transhumanism in part because I don't have many of the sorts of emotional responses to ordinary cultural phenomena displayed by others. For example, I'm not merely signed up for cryonic suspension (a minor "yuck" in our society), but I have chosen the neurosuspension option (a major "yuck"), and I really don't care what others think about my choices.

Regarding my emotional responses to religious constructs, which incorporate largely arbitrary beliefs, as far as I can tell, I have never understood the appeal of Jesus as a personality, much less a reason why I'm supposed to want to worship him (assuming he even existed historically) or his alleged father as deities -- apart from the conjectured prudential one that they will zap me if I don't, for which I see absolutely no evidence. Even as a child I remember feeling uncomfortable around displays of religious behavior, including pictures of it in books. Ironically religionists themselves acknowledge that religiosity is weird and creepy, when they see it displayed by other religionists in ways they find disturbing, even within the same religious tradition. (For an especially psychotic example from Islam, look up the Shia Muslim holiday of Ashura.)

Any way, I'm trying to get at the point that when christians tell me that I need a "relationship" with Jesus, whatever that means, I feel like responding with, "Why would I want that? I don't value relationships with people all that much!" And in addition to the lack of emotional chemistry, I have intellectual problems with the idea that if a deity exists, I would need to find out how to contact it, interact with it and obey its commands. I do not see how that follows from the existence premise.

In short, christianity, especially, makes assumptions about human psychology that I find don't apply completely to me. I'm largely emotionally independent and have warm but fairly arm's-length relationships with my parents and sister. Not surprisingly I'm still single at age 44. Many women have told me that I'm "cold," whatever that means, though that impression may result less from my habitual flat affect than from my declining estimation of female value with age and experience, which women can probably pick up on. If I don't need a female companion to make my life worthwhile, why would I need a deity's "love"?

The banality of super-wealth

A few years ago I read about and noted that some retiring Microsoft executives, who had net worths in the $100 million range, seemed to be pursuing surprisingly banal goals with their newly bought freedom from work, like the one who wanted to practice bowling. Another one, Nathan Myhrvold, at least had trivial plans that I would consider defensible, like spending more time with his twin sons, whom he must have neglected during his Microsoft career. I found the lack of ambition discouraging at the time, considering that the men in Bill Gates's top team must have been smarter than 99% of the population, displayed life-long interests in science and technology, thought a deal about future technological progress and by the late 1990's acquired vast claims on the resources of society through their equity holdings in Microsoft. People who are dealt a hand of cards in life like that are able to do great things with their good fortune, like working towards engineered negligible senescence and the eventual conquest of death itself.

At least Myhrvold seems to have found something useful to do with his gifts. In a more general sense, however, the people who possess super-wealth seem to live in fundamentally banal ways because of the diminishing advantages in the kinds of goods they can buy -- as well as the ones they currently can't buy. Oh, they have access to elite classes of products and services that ordinary people can't afford -- monstrous houses, luxury automobiles, private jets, objets d'art, superior healthcare, private prep schools for their children etc. But for many of their other needs and wants they have to get them from the same sources the rest of us depend on. I heard Warren Buffett, who lives modestly by billionaire standards, state on television a few years ago that he sleeps on a mattress he bought at Sears, much like his middle-class Omaha neighbors. There is no boutique gas & electric company that services the homes of the super-rich, for example, nor are there boutique sources of medical consumables. When Warren Buffett's physician writes him a prescription for Lipitor, Buffett has to swallow pills from the same assembly line every other consumer of Lipitor has to use.

And yet, there are plenty of nontrivial goods that the super-wealthy simply cannot buy, no matter how big a check they can write. They have to breathe the same polluted air everyone else breathes; while they can put on sunblock, when they go outside they are exposed to the common UV levels; they have to eat many of the same contaminated foods the rest of us eat; unless they live in total seclusion like Howard Hughes, they are just as exposed to transportation accidents as the rest of us; etc.

And, most importantly of all, they are just as vulnerable to senescence and death as the rest of us, despite the few additional years they can squeeze out of their genomes through their better healthcare and "superior" social status. The wasteful and totally unnecessary mansions the super-rich build today are likely to become museums and destinations for vulgar tourists after they die, so why aren't they struck by the ultimate futility of the current social model about how they are supposed to use their resources? A mere fraction of the wealth they needlessly display could efficiently conquer aging and death in just a couple of decades of steady application towards scientific research. Doing that with your money would by no means seem banal!

After all, dying rich with a house full of expensive toys is still dying. "Memento mori," until you decide to do something about it with your latent financial powers.

The Inutility Police

In his TechCentralStation article, "The Happiness Police," about the growing empirical evidence that we can't always anticipate which material acquisitions will make us happy, how much and for how long, Arnold Kling asks,

Suppose that you could choose to live either in our society with its current choice of lifestyles or in a society where "happiness police" tell you how many hours you can work, what kind of job you can have, and what kinds of goods and services you can buy. Which society would make you happier?

Uh, we have both kinds of situations in our own society now. Financially independent people live in the choice-of-lifestyles enclave (though with some significant limitations, which I'll outline in a following post), while the wage slaves live in a world where authority figures usually called "employers" tell them about their hours, kinds of jobs and what they are able to buy -- though without regard for our happiness, only theirs.

This last constraint comes in two forms, by the way. Employers not only control what we can buy through the quanities of wages they pay us, but also through their decisions about what they offer us on the market, whether we want it or not -- think of all the abysmally stupid nonsense you see on television and in movie theaters these days, for example, along with all the commercial harassment ("advertising") that tries to get us to pay attention to it.

Why should we care what "markets" say?

I don't understand the argument some cryonicists make about how the collective behaviors we call "markets" are somehow transhumanly smarter than individuals and that their net decisions accurately and rationally allocate the use of resources and predict the likely outcomes of events (as in recent proposals to create "ideas futures markets" and the like). If a cryonicist seriously holds this view, why is he signed up for a procedure that the market has overwhelmingly rejected? If you compare the almost-moribund cryonics movement with spontaneous activities that have metaphorically exploded in recent years, like music file sharing, the contrast is even more startling. Clearly the market judges the iPod as immensely more valuable than a possible means of medical time travel to a future cure for aging and death.

I see examples in markets all the time of colossal wastes of resources that just cannot be rationally defended. (The political examples of waste, like Bush's crusade in Iraq, would require a whole other discussion.) Many of the trivial but meretricious "goods" are abundant -- think of junk food, Britney Spears CD's and novels about bible prophecy -- while the important goods and services like healthcare, education, scientific research and infrastructure are supplied grudgingly and haphazardly, if at all. Despite the propaganda about the sovereignty of the consumer, American corporations often produce what they want to put onto the market, whether we order or want it or not. The money squandered in making and advertising unwatchable films like Van Helsing or Cat Woman could revolutionize the field of engineered negligible senescence, but no, we're supposed to pretend that we have no business in complaining how super-wealthy corporations and individuals misuse their wealth despite the deadly opportunity costs they inflict upon us by not investing into what we really need. (That's why I absolutely refuse to see movies in the theater any more. The people who create this garbage already have enough money without my giving them some of mine, regardless of how "good" a movie supposedly is.)

I, for one, refuse to worship market outcomes when they conflict with my own judgment about rational priorities. In an economy that accepts death and channels resources away from possible scientific means to conquer it, I as a "consumer" not only don't feel sovereign, but positively ill-used. We have only one shot at long-term survival, and the older I get, the more I see that I have to repudiate many of our society's economically expressed values that just don't contribute towards that goal. I can also see that the canned ideologies we've inherited aren't particularly helpful either. Libertarians for the most part expect to die pretty much on schedule, if they think about death at all, so I don't understand why libertarianism appeals so strongly to cryonicists. Dying rich and tax-free is still dying, and it by no means follows that a libertarian utopia would also be pro-immortalist if the wealthy people who thrive in it aren't interested in long-term personal survival. Given how socially conformist and conventional most wealthy people are in the current society, how would they be any different in libertopia? Only a handful of rich people are like John Sperling. Most are religious or dumb or both, and it's not uncommon to find ones who promote positively retrograde ideologies.