How long will we tell ourselves stories?

Recently on transhumanity.net, there has been an influx of religious themed posts. Based on an editor’s note, a bunch of people sent emails to him, asking for it to stop. I find it interesting, but not surprising that no one was willing to post their opinions in the comments section.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but we should all be willing and able to mention that having an opinion does not make it valid.

I posted quite a few replies to the comments sections of these posts. THis is a copy of the latest reply, for those of you that aren’t lurking on t.net. I didn’t want to make it a post their, but I’m happy to drop it here.

The original comment can be found in this thread

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I love it. We basically agree on the point that transhumanism is a series of stories we tell ourselves. Like Christianity. The use of strong declaratives with little evidence is consistent with other pieces here.

As the editor noted, we can talk about tranhumanism if we are some what logical. Like somewhat pregnant, or mostly dead. It’s a lot easier to maintain that suspension of disbelief that classic Transhumanism and Christianity both require.

I agree that more people should post. But let’s post something legitimate. Post about the work being done. And use the comments sections. Emails to the editor undermine the open discourse that makes the internet so great. If you believe something, you should be able to say it out loud, not sneak it in a private email.

I would write about transhumanism, but it is fiction and speculation. I wrote my piece on grinding and that was all I could offer. There is nothing more to be said that isn’t eschatology crammed through a science filter. I thought about making this reply a post, but we don’t need any more doom and gloom and a rallying call to action just isn’t cutting it these days.

Which is sad. Transhumanism still hasn’t made that step into action. I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. Most philosophies are just that. Talk. All this time and we’re still just waving our hands in the air. We should be learning more, growing and developing. Instead we are trading mythologies, hot swapping stories to stop us from fearing the future. Now we’ve started co opting (or being co opted by?) other story lines in a bid for legitimacy and sticking power. I am consistently impressed the the church’s historical record of success. I just didn’t think that we were going to try to make friends with the biggest kid on the block because we can’t actually kick the ball ourselves.

If someone else thinks this needs to be said, feel free to copy and paste this comment into a post, or post yourself. Or we can all just, yknow, kumbaya ourselves to death here.

5 thoughts on “How long will we tell ourselves stories?”

  1. I don’t think opinions are either valid or invalid, they can be seen as right by any number of people or wrong by everyone around them but i think human opinions deserve human respect. Just because someone thinks something is likely and you think it’s unlikely doesn’t mean their opinion isn’t worth respecting. Even if you know 100% that someone is wrong about something, you still shouldn’t deny them the ability to choose their opinion. maybe some opinions lead to unacceptable behavior, well, then stop the behavior but you can’t stop them from having an opinion that seems less “valid” than your own.

    1. Well, there are facts and there are opinions. Like, the earth revolves around the sun is a fact. The opinion that it does not is why Galileo was locked up. Or we could look at more recent issues like climate change or racial conflict. There are the facts of the matter, and then there are how people choose to feel about them. We can’t stop people from having opinions that harm us as a society, but we can stop listening to them. Maybe even not encourage them anymore. Maybe even completely refuse to particiapte in making that opinion be a thing. Because it hurts us all.

      Vaccines cause autism. That is an opinion that is invalid. It is an argument that does not have a sound basis in fact. Are you willing to ignore the fact of the matter just to make sure everyone feels good? There is such a thing as being wrong.

      All I’m asking for is a rational examination of the way we are progressing towards the future. This means looking at the way we as a species act and believe, and calmly and honestly acknowledging that some of it is pure bs. And then not doing that anymore.

      1. okay, yeah… i get that… but as i said in my first comment i’m not talking about opinions that lead to obviously harmful behavior (tho i knnow it’s hard to know where to draw the line for that). I guess all i’m saying is, you can’t change anyone’s opinion at all, they have to change it themself… and some people that have a obviously wrong opinion their whole life can still be helpful smart members of society and maybe even the transhumanism community. Overall i just don’t like telling people they’re wrong when it’s something that they believe strongly that isn’t harming anyone. I know religious opinions can lead to very bad things but some religious people are accepting of every scientific fact as well as being completely tolerant of the LGBT community and other stuff like that, that people think is too liberal to be part of a religious person’s wheelhouse.

        The vaccines-cause-autism thing, well, I agree that that one needs to be stomped out because it’s harming random other people in the community. I just think, we don’t really know anything for SURE so we shouldn’t assume something is impossible. people thought the sun revolved around the earth, as you said. at some point it was an accepted common-sense fact that the sun revolved around the earth. and then Galileo proved them all wrong and got unfairly treated for the rest of his life. This is EXACTLY why i don’t think the laws of science are absolute. heck, the EM-drive tested by NASA may in fact be breaking the laws of physics according to what i’ve read; either that or it’s pushing on something we haven’t discovered yet. so just like Galileo proved the world wrong or whatever, so could some smart person today, even a religious smart person. But i guess at this point we’re probably both saying the same thing.

      2. Talking about facts, perhaps you should brush up on your history. Galileo didn’t get in trouble for saying the Earth moved around the sun, that was already considered a reasonable idea (Copernicus had already fought that battle). Galileo got in trouble because he was making fun of the Pope in his book! (He had dialogues casting the Pope in the “idiot” role, and this was way before “freedom of speech” was a thing.)

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