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Saturday, October 16, 2010

A Few Friendly Challenges for the Robot Cultists

In reaction to my ascription of cult-likeness to the futurological movements in which he participates Ben Goertzel snarks:
Dale, I would be happy if the transhumanist movement WERE better-organized -- not a cult, but a less internally-fractious, more coherent group, clear on its commonalities and mutually supportive etc. But that's not so much the case. I'm spending a certain amount of time working to make it the case, in my role as Chairman of Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Organization). But right now, it really is a bloody disorganized "movement." I'll let you know when and if that changes ;-) .... Much of the reason for the disorganization is, of course, that many of us transhumanists spend the bulk of our time on other pursuits than advocating transhumanism -- such as building software and doing AI and genetics research, in my case...

Of course, I am happy to agree with Goertzel that his cult is shitty as far as cults go. I must say that I find it odd when people trying to impress me with their scientific bona fides declare themselves to be doing important work in multiple fields at once when anybody who actually knows anything about the level of knowledge and dedication and work-hours and patience and, usually, frankly, luck necessary to master and then contribute anything of substantial value in any of the individual fields in question knows this would almost inevitably prohibit comparable achievement in others -- unless, possibly, one is actually a kind of pop-scientific dilettante, in fact, an enthusiast in a technoscience fandom, or possibly has an idea that doing substantial science has something in common with the square jawed muscle-bound "scientists" who throng pulp novels and action-adventure movies?

And now Goertzel has brought in re-enforcements:
My friend and fellow transhumanist Giulio Prisco gave me the following advice just now: 'Ben, don't waste your time debating Carrico. Besides being an idiot, he is so intellectually dishonest that, if you say 2+2=4, he will claim that you said 4+4=2 and insult you for it…' This seems to be accurate. I regret having wasted my time trying to engage in meaningful dialogue in the comments of this blog post. There's no such thing as a meaningful dialogue with people who are intent on having a different sort of interaction ;p

I suppose it goes without saying that there really is nothing remotely so effective as Robot Cultists confining their conversation to Robot Cultists to reassure themselves that they're not in a Robot Cult. I will say more about friend-of-blog Giulio Prisco near the end of this post, but right now I feel that I urgently need to assure my readers -- especially given the charge of my proneness to distort the earnest utterances of futurologists -- that the winky face adorning the first paragraph and now also the sticking out its tongue while winking emoticon appearing in this exchange are not snarky supplements introduced by me to render Mr. Goertzel's arguments caricatural. I faithfully reproduce them from the originals intact. They are not, alas, parodic.

Be that as it may, Goertzel replied to my insinuation that circling the wagons is a venerable tactic of the cultist in a way I think rather odd. He said: "I live near Washington DC (not really a transhumanist hotbed), and almost none of the people I interact with in my everyday real-world life have a transhumanist orientation (except my immediate family). Also most of the people I interact with in my work life are not transhumanist in orientation…" Now, I'm sure there are Scientologists and Ayn Randian Objectivists and Pentecostal Christianists and mystic-crystal revelation homeopaths to be found hobnobbing among sensible people in Washington, DC, too, at the corner store, at the post office, in the cafeteria line. All remain perfectly ridiculous in my view, nonetheless.

It is interesting to me, however, that Goertzel refers here to a transhumanist "orientation," as others who take umbrage at my charge of Robot Cultism will also often refer to a transhumanist "movement," or "identity," or even "ideology." I agree with Goertzel that one can delineate a reasonably representative transhumanist orientation, and with these other futurologists that one could sketch a reasonably representative transhumanist movement, identity, and ideology (whether or not on terms with which the transhumanists themselves would necessarily sympathize).

Presumably we can agree that self-identified transhumanist membership organizations also indisputably exist?

I wonder, can Goertzel also admit that most of the things uniquely believed by people who share this organized subcultural ideology orientation and movement are marginal to consensus science? I am not asking for him to agree that all these unique beliefs can be shown to be logically impossible (I don't need anything so strong as that for the argumentative purpose at hand), but simply to admit that the technodevelopmental preoccupations and predictions typical among transhumanists have not attracted outside the subculture a comparable consensus among scientists in the fields associated with them as to their plausibility or relevance. Can he admit to that obviously true marginality for the beliefs unique to transhumanists? I wonder, can Goertzel admit that despite this marginality, these unique beliefs are held nonetheless in a less qualified fashion than marginality tends otherwise to occasion in people who pride themselves in their scientificity? I wonder, can he admit that among the marginal views held by transhumanists tend to be assertions that certain individuals celebrated within the subculture, but rarely comparably respected if known at all outside futurological subcultures -- like Eliezer Yudkowsky, K. Eric Drexler, Aubrey de Grey -- represent the cutting edge of scientific and technological disciplines in defiance of consensus in the disciplines themselves (as measured, say, by sympathetic discussions in peer-reviewed journals to which research institutions actually subscribe or in articles regularly cited by figures outside the subculture and in the fields presumably in question or in terms of research grants or discipline specific prizes or non-frivolous patents)?

At what point, after how many such admissions, might it become useful at least in principle to note there are ways in which all the techno-transcendentalizing talk about ending history and sweeping the world with their transhumanist movement with their futurological singularitarians extropians guru-wannabes leading the way sounds a bit, well, you know, culty? Never? Really? Not at all? Honestly? These are some of the friendly challenges to which the title of this post refers. There are more to come.

Now, of course I wouldn't expect Goertzel's Robot Cultism to make him incapable of being a functional adult, as he seems to presume I do in boasting of his ability to have conversations with non-transhumanist neighbors and shopkeepers and such. There are plenty of comparably functional Mormons and Ron Paul voters in the world as well, after all. That doesn't mean it is wrong to say Robot Cultism is ridiculous and it doesn't mean it is wrong to ridicule the ridiculous. I don't expect Robot Cultists to welcome or enjoy my ridicule of them (though some do), nor can I say I hope to persuade Robot Cultists to give up their foolishness in consequence of my ridicule (though, happily, some have reported precisely that unexpected but welcome result in their own lives). I beg their pardon, but I never promised them a rose garden.

Goertzel says of me, "the annoying thing about you isn't that you disagree with transhumanism -- it's that your tactics for expressing this disagreement are so profoundly intellectually dishonest." Now, I make fun of Goertzel and his fellow Robot Cultists and he doesn't like it. That's understandable, but for the life of me I cannot see how there is anything the least bit intellectually dishonest about it. After what is clearly a wide-ranging study of their work over many years' time attested to in endless citations and analyses of their own actual words, I testify to the fact that I really do find their views ridiculous and pernicious. I say so and I say why I say so.

But for once I am not content to let these charges stand as is. You know, I would be very interested to hear more particularly just what Goertzel and Prisco and the other Robot Cultists who declare me dishonest think they can actually show in the way of distortion and dishonesty in my critiques of superlative futurology. Where is the evidence to back that charge you are so fond of leveling you self-appointed Enlightenment Champions, you self-anointed Sooper-Geniuses?

Is there, one wonders, any form of disapproving lampoon that you would not finally regard as "profoundly intellectually dishonest" -- such that you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of disapproving all varieties of satire and parody? Is there, one wonders, any form of critique applied from a vantage whose terms and assumptions actually differ substantially from your own that you would not regard as "distorted" and "unmeaningful" -- such that you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of disapproving in advance nearly any actually radical critiques of your guiding assumptions and ideal outcomes? I presume that this would be an uncomfortable position for you to find yourself in, but I must add that it is indeed just the sort of position people in cults -- or even, to be generous, people in defensive evangelizing sub(cult)ural membership formations organized around highly marginal but strongly-held ideological beliefs involving personal and historical techno-transcendence which are expected to sweep the world lead by would-be gurus few of whom are known outside the sub(cult)ure itself but are not cults according to the letter of your dictionary definition so stop saying that! -- all too often find themselves in when confronted by actually knowledgeable critics.

There is plenty that I take seriously and critique seriously in futurological discourse, as the writings archived at the sidebar copiously attest, while there is also plenty to laugh at as I also do. My hope is that the ridicule will discourage the technoscientifically ignorant and technodevelopmentally innocent from taking superlative futurologists the least bit seriously on their own terms and to discourage legitimating public figures, media outlets, and credentialzing institutions in their own ignorance and innocence from providing them legitimacy they could never achieve on their own terms, especially exposed as they are, by me and others who actually know them quite well, in all their hilarious extremity and delusiveness.

I won't deny I really do think Ben Goertzel and other public figures associated with transhumanism and singularitarianism and techno-immortalism should pay a non-negligible reputational price not just for the kooky things they say in public places but also for the kooky and pernicious company they keep (from libertopians, to eugenicists, to cryonics and nutritional supplement scam-artists), and I think institutions that help legitimize their kookiness (Universities like Stanford and Oxford that have provided space for uncritical assemblies amounting to Robot Cult pep-rallies and photo-ops, corporate-military multinationals whose logos adorn their pseudo-scientific pseudo-intellectual think-tank conference-programs, advertisers in their glossy hypenotising and disasterbatory magazines) should rightly fear as certainly they do not so fear now damage to their reputations as well.

I cheerfully accept that should their Robot Gods or Robot Cult one day -- presumably, Soon! twenty years from now is the canned futurological prediction -- prevail across the wide world it is my own reputation that would be damaged by the relentlessness of my critiques and ridicule of them. People should have the courage of their convictions, and I for one can't claim to lose much sleep at the thought of the acquaintance I lose in disdaining superlative futurologists as I do.

By way of conclusion, I encourage readers actually to read some of my actually-available engagements with Giulio Prisco (links extravagantly provided) whose sage counsel Ben Goertzel takes in preference to my dreadful distortions, for example here and here and here. Prisco is quoted, you will recall, as declaring me "an idiot… so intellectually dishonest that, if you say 2+2=4, he will claim that you said 4+4=2 and insult you for it."

Needless to say it is not altogether disconsolating to be called an idiot by one you find to be an idiot yourself, however I am happy to propose a challenge to Prisco and any who cherish him as one of the leading lights of their defensive evangelizing sub(cult)ural membership formation organized around highly marginal but strongly-held ideological beliefs involving personal and historical techno-transcendence which are expected to sweep the world lead by would-be gurus few of whom are known outside the sub(cult)ure itself but is not a cult according to the letter of your dictionary definition so stop saying that! My last friendly challenge for them is to point to actual instances in which I declare 4 + 4 to equal 2 or -- and here's the kicker -- declare as false anything at all that they take to be a comparably warrantedly assertible belief as to a matter of fact. Of course, I don't expect Robot Cultists to write checks their asses can cash, but it would certainly be fun to see them declare their mind-uploading schemes and utility fog handwaving and friendly post-biological superintelligence scenario-spinning as somehow quite as certainly true as twice two makes four. But, they're not, you know, True Believers or anything. Why that would be like they're Robot Cultists or something!

I know that Richard Jones and Athena Andreadis have both corrected me in the past from time to time, but, interestingly enough, always in ways that resulted in making my statements even less and not more generous and congenial to futurological formulations involving nano-cornucopiast and techno-immortalist claims I wasn't qualified by training to assess skeptically enough. Unlike some people, I do not claim to be a scientist but just a reasonably technoscientifically literate rhetorician and critical theorist, after all. Since futurology is an ideological discourse rather than a scientific one this actually makes me better suited to get to the substance of the futurological in many cases than those who make the mistake of accepting futurological pretensions to scientificity at face value and legitimating their discourse even in refuting it at the level of endless debates of technical and terminological detail that are really obfuscated philosophical and political disputes. Needless to say, however, I have benefited enormously from and welcome factual corrections from respectable scientists, though corrections by pseudo-scientists indulging disreputable rhetoric are rather less helpful if usually incomparably more amusing.

As Oscar Wilde said, "A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies." I look forward to responses to my friendly challenges to some of mine. The result will no doubt attest to the care I took in choosing them.

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