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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Transhumanism in terms of belief in the coming of AGI / immortality / mind uploading / genetic enhancement / etc is just a new secular religion. They're taking it on faith that those technologies will arrive soon without any hard evidence. Surely the Messiah is coming soon, right guys? Right?

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I think this claim would be more credible if there were the any other characteristics of a religion present. Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans.

I'd be interested to see some of those as I haven't yet and I've been in the community for a while.

What I will grant is that, there are those who speak in the same structure as religious people. "In the future there will be no poverty because machines will make everything we need for free" sounds a little too close to "In heaven, you can eat all you want and never get full!"

However similar they sound though, they have radically different theoretical roots.

In fact though there is plenty of hard evidence for progress on all of the accounts you mentioned:

AGI: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734

Immortality: http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-successfully-rev...

mind uploading: Not sure about Whole Brain Emulation progress right off the top of my head.

genetic enhancement: http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reverse-sickle-cell-d...

Are they solved? Not by a long shot. Do we know when they will be? Of course not. There is progress though.

As far as I know, nobody is making hard progress on when Jesus is coming back.

    > Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all
    it would require that there is some credulity to a higher 
    power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen 
    by humans.

The Doctrine: Belief in the Singularity.

The Rituals: Writing talks about Singularity.

Totems: Arguably this is the lacking part.

The Prayers: Their talks about Singularity.

This is a pretty strained analogy. I consider it likely that smarter-than-human (*more capable of achieving goals) AI will at some point become possible and cause very unpredictable but hopefully directable results.

So presumably that makes me a secular-religious nut by your estimation, but I don't observe any of the religious customs you specify above. Perhaps the first, if you use a wide definition.

It would be more interesting if the criticism of transhumanist ideas explained why these ideas are unlikely or impossible, rather than dismiss them with the quasi-ad hominem of comparing them to religious ideas that are either outright wrong, or completely outdated in their real-world impact.

>I think this claim would be more credible if there were the any other characteristics of a religion present. Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans.

It doesn't have those, but it does need lots of money, just like religion.

Not that i'm against the idea

> I'd be interested to see some of those as I haven't yet and I've been in the community for a while.

Never been to Less Wrong, eh?

I've been to Less Wrong though, and this is not the place to look for transhumanist-as-a-religion believers.

Calling LW a cult is a stupid meme based on ingroup/outgroup thinking and a few cases where they may have got carried away too far with considering logical implications of the theories they were developing.

The difference is that most of those things are not known to be impossible. Immortality exists in nature, genetic enhancements have been demonstrated in the lab for simple cases, and building a machine that works like a biological brain also doesn't sound impossible. Mind uploading might still be thwarted by the no-copy-theorem, if our minds depend on quantum states.

The things transhumanists believe are possible are engineering problems. Historically we managed to solve those when we put our minds to it.

Immortality doesn't exist in nature for any complex organism. Geneticists can prevent certain diseases caused by a small number of genes but that doesn't enhance human capabilities beyond the current baseline. AGI researchers might eventually succeed in understanding the human mind well enough to build an equivalent machine but there's no evidence to suggest that such a device will be smarter (or more rational or less insane) than humans. For all we know, current humans could represent the maximum intelligence possible due to undiscovered fundamental physical limits. A human level AGI would still be a huge step forward but it won't bring about a Singularity (geek rapture) as the transhumanists seem to expect.

All of these are far from being engineering problems yet. We're still solidly in the basic science phase.

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