Thursday, August 5, 2021
This is a religious blog
It's about the religion of digital "immortality", to be accomplished by digitally scanning and backing up as much of your mind as possible.
In the future, long after you have died of natural causes or otherwise, this data will be used to create an AI "copy" of your mind, and bring you back to life in a VR environment of your choice. This is your only hope. The alternative is the oblivion of eternal chaos, perhaps momentary flashes of confusion as some form of Boltzmann Brain.
This is slightly distinct from the religion of Scientology.
Hubbard didn't want to make the formidable efforts needed to invent mind backup technology. In fact, such a notion never occurred to him.
He simply promised that immortality had ALREADY been achieved in a way that no one could verify. That way he could divert his followers' attention in more profitable directions (like an extended stay at the Fort Harrison hotel at the Flag Land Base). A very clever solution!
However, the problem of death is unbearable. It's insane that more research isn't being done. Death affects literally everyone, but the public response is to avoid thinking about it.
The promise of future science is not enough. We need the equivalent of a new religion to change things.
That means that something like Scientology actually NEEDS to exist, only scientific instead of anti-scientific. Scientology as it exists is actually Antiscientology.
Tuesday, August 3, 2021
Progress is unnatural!
The hidden themes of SF novel series like Ringworld (Larry Niven) and the Foundation series (Isaac Asimov) is how invincibly STUPID everything is. Society is controlled by a dumb consensus, the evil power of brutes. This is presented as both natural and inevitable. Most folks don't even notice.
A great truth is that things are deliberately bad because the majority wants them to be so. Sometimes, I can't get over how bad they want things to be.
Times when everything goes wrong through the deliberate evil of interface torture. System designers spending vastly more on making things NOT work in ways that are profitable for them.
Remove 99% of those people, and things would at least get simpler, and plausibly less bad. That's also what Hubbard said about "removing" folks who are low on the "Tone Scale"...
My best guess is the REAL solution would be to find a way to increase human intelligence. Of course intelligence can't really be increased. It would have to be a virtual process, perhaps involving digital assistants in our daily lives.
And THAT is why i dislike superhero movies so much. In fact I've come to almost despise them, despite their awesome special effects. It's the curse of the genre trap.
With all the crap going on in the world, we see these heroes practicing effortless magic to solve problems with dumb strength. Meanwhile, the real world does not get one whit less evil, and the real issues become LESS open to discussion.
One of my books is being resold on Amazon!
* https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Thunder-Jack-Arcalon/dp/B005D3J2B2/
Rather you buy it here though:
* https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jackarcalon
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