@Grek:
"Spirituality is bad" is absolutely not what I meant. What I'm getting at is that the dogged belief in technological resurrection and apotheosis is the effective "spiritual" component of transhumanism, which actually makes it quite similar to certain eschatological religions. It may not be traditional body-soul-dualism per se, but it still expresses the same dichotomy between the fallen, corruptiple state of worldly existence, and the purified -- resurrected or uploaded -- existence after the salvation. That is your form of spirituality, and I'll do my best to respect it. But I don't have to like it.
I'd like to note that just a belief in the eventual end of (most forms) of death does not necessarily mean one takes any sort of spiritual or dichotomy based view towards it. The difference comes in that there are really two different kinds of transhumanists. There are those that look on the technology as some sort of magical thing that is going to whisp them away and fix all their problems; essentially a "god" for all intents and purposes. These are the transhumanists that exhibit the dichotomy that you note here between the uploaded or whatever and the non-uploaded, with there being some vast line between the "saved" and the "profane". For them transhumanism is essentially a religion with the numbers filed off.
On the other hand there are the more wordly-focused and scientific transhumanists, those who see no real difference between those who are uploaded and those who are not other then their lifespan and resistance to damage (along with a few other nifty things, like increased thought speed). They see no magical problem fixing science to be done, nor any real dichotomy between the uploaded and non-uploaded states. In fact most of these tend to agree that there isn't even going to be some sort of definite split between those on one side or the other of the "uploaded" boundary. They are much more likely to see a gradient ranging all of the way from "totally unaltered human" to "totally virtual consciousness" with all sorts of spots in between the two (assuming we even go for a virtual method, we could also totally go a biological engineering way as well).
Personally I fall into the second category. There is no reason why technology is going to magically solve all of our problems at once, because technology doesn't work like that. What science and technology are good at doing is solving one problem at a time, and even that depends on the people and engineers of the world to actually
implement said solution. There isn't going to be some great "mind uploading" where we all go to centers and are "raptured up" into some great mind collective in the computers. What we are going to see instead (assuming we got the virtual route) is the gradual augmentation of the current brain. Piece by piece we'll learn how a specific part works, and how to replace it when it starts to break down. The line between "outside computer" and "inside brain" will become increasingly blurred, until we won't even be able to tell when we've crossed the boundary line between the two. Society might resist it at first, but the number of people who turn to brain augmentation or replacements will slowly increase, and it's number and the number of people who were born after it existed increases it will gradually be accepted as a common thing. There's no clear delineation or dichotomy anywhere in the idea, just the slow and steady march of both progress and society together.
A similar modern example might have been the development and spread of the phone. When phones first came out the very idea of being able to call someone up and talk to them was a radical one, and many people claimed that it would never catch on even. Yet phones continued to spread, and their accessibility to all broadened. Eventually we got the "mobile phone", and the first people began to take their phones with them. This lead to further push back from society, as we can see present in how often it's considered rude to check your phone while eating with others or similar things. Yet we're reaching the point where everyone has a phone with them at all times, and even things like younger groups of friends eating together often spend a fair portion of their time checking their phones and remaining in contact with their much broader social circle. I wouldn't say that at any point there was some great change between the "unpure" who couldn't contact each other except when face to face or through waiting days for a letter to be delivered and the "pure" who can contact with others around the globe nearly at the speed of thought, yet we can observe plainly that at some point a "human" moved to being someone who has gained a sort of "telepathy", being able to communicate with others whenever they want, regardless of both sender and recipient's actual physical locations. In much the same way we'll never be able to draw a line between the "nonuploaded" who are much identical to our current definition of "human" and the "uploaded", who can do things like travel around the globe in moments, think faster, or not suffer from aging.
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Topic: Spirituality and Consciousness (Read 9431 times)