[extropy-chat] Religion: A discussion

Brent Neal brentn at freeshell.org
Thu Feb 12 01:56:32 UTC 2004

 (2/11/04 17:06) Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury at aeiveos.com> wrote:

>I will pose the question in its most extreme form (since I am going to get
>crucified anyway -- which may feed back into the historical discussion of religion)...
>But how do extropians behave when they know the answer to the question:
>   What is this human individual worth in terms of extropic potential?

This is one of those questions that as my major professor once famously said "has no right answers, but a lot of wrong ones." :)

>Lets assume that the antiaging therapeutics fail.  What will be the value
>of myself or Damien or Anders in another 40 years?  One can reasonably
>assume our memories will be going down the tubes.  Now I, Anders and Damien
>presumably have distinct extropic values.  Propose a reasonable argument
>presenting a case as to how to determine that we are more extropic alive
>than dead.  Though I hesitate to bring this up the question I have to ask
>is whether this could have been a factor in Sasha's thinking?

There are problems with stating the question this way. Your assumption is somewhat vague, as you've not defined exactly what "anti-aging therapuetics fail" means (i.e. does this mean we simply never figure out how to upload ourselves to a computer? or does it mean that we fail to maintain our current levels of geriatric medicine?)  Further, you assume that someone's extropic value is a predictable quantifier in absence of knowledge of outcomes. I'm not entirely certain that I'm comfortable with that valuation -on an individual level- due to the variability in people's creative/extropic output. (Demostration by analogy - Einstein's later work was of much less value than his early work, but John Wheeler was exactly the opposite in that his work became progressively more valuable.  Richard Feynman's work was uniformly valuable.)  

I'm more than willing to talk about it in terms of statistics or ensemble averages, though.  But I can't find a way to do so that doesn't make me sound like a raving eugenicist.


Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein

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