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Hear No Genes, See No Genes, Speak No Genes--the Jargon of “Culturalism”
The Rapture for Nerds
There's the prospect, if it is a prospect, that the kids—and not likely us—will face something extremely traumatic: the Singularity! This is the postulated point in the not very distant future when we shall be sharing our living space with entities, either electronic or biological, much smarter than ourselves, entities whose cognitive abilities are in relation to ours as ours are to a chimp’s, or a dog’s, or perhaps (see below) a fruit fly’s. There are three ways we might encounter superminds. We might: 1) Make them. 2) Become them. 3) Hear them. To make them, we need to realize the dream of true artificial intelligence, presumably by reverse-engineering the brain, working out a few improvements, and instantiating the result in some kind of electronic device. To become them, we shall have to take control of evolution and crank it up, compressing a million years or so of brain evolution into a couple of generations. To hear them, we need some results from SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. [Read More]
China’s Island of Stability
The optimism of today’s Chinese is not hard to understand. To be sure, China is still a poor country, with a per capita GDP only a ninth that of the U.S. Look back at your own life, though. The times when you felt most upbeat were not the times when you had the most money. They were the times when you had that rising sensation: “I’m on my way up!” That’s how the Chinese feel. Life has been getting better for them very fast these past few years, and there doesn’t seem any clear reason why this shouldn’t continue. [Read More]
What’s So Scary About Evolution?--For Both Left and Right, a Lot
So much for the clear breezy uplands of history and science. Down in the rain forest of actual human society, Darwin has had a more mixed reception. Strict fundamentalists in all three of the big Abrahamic religions regard his theories with loathing. The degree of loathing is different among the three faiths, being highest among , lowest among Jews, and intermediate among Christians. The loathing is real, though, and among some groups of believers, it is very intense. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, Darwin’s theories contradict the holy books, if those books are read with a close and literal meaning. In the second, the broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism, without which the Abrahamic religions lose their point. To put it crudely, those big old Western faiths see humanity as a Chosen Species, uniquely gifted by God with powers of moral discrimination and (though there are sectarian differences here) with the prospect of an afterlife. To modern biologists, informed by Darwin, we are merely another branch on Nature’s tree, our particular mental and social gifts in plain line of descent from homologues among the higher animals. [Read More]
Only a Revolution Will Do
Ron Paul is a potent force because his ideas have deep appeal. We all know, for example, that there is something horribly wrong with the way the federal government spends our money, and that whatever it is that is wrong gets wronger by the congressional session, under presidents of either party. I think we all understand, too, that the fault here is not, or not only, the stupidity or venality of our elected officials, but the dynamics of modern democracy. A system under which our representative could say "no" to us—indeed, would have no choice but to do so—would be one in which government expansion bumped up against iron (actually, in Paul's scheme, gold) fiscal constraints. A fiscal system revised along Paulian lines offers at least the possibility of that. Nothing else does. [Read More]
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