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There was a pretty big memetic overlap with rationalists, so all the mumbo-jumbo about uploading your body and freezing your brain was pretty popular, but Scientism is the elephant in the room here, I think.
I agree with @WandererintheWilderness. Speculation about future technologies is in a separate category from religious beliefs.
Soft disagree on that one.
Much of it is very plainly wishful thinking in the face of mortality.
One of my last AAQCs was about how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument". As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.
When someone's speculating about how different future societies might be to our own, before accusing them of wishful thinking, just think about how bizarre our society would seem to someone from five hundred years ago. I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere. Or, as a comic recently shared in these parts wittily put it, "ME GO TOO FAR!"
That's true. And it may as well be true that after death, we all go to heaven. I wouldn't know either way. Granted, one of these may well become observable one day, unlike the other.
That things never yet ceased to amuse me.
It's not an argument, you're correct. It's part observation, part speculation, on my part, something I find interesting in its own right. I don't mean to make any point about what future technologies will or won't be capable of. I also don't intend to pry open the brains of third party futurists to try and find out whether I'm even right or wrong about my theory. It's just my completely personal view that I'm putting out here for the sake of a conversation about the parallels between futurism and religion. If that isn't interesting to you, but futurism itself is, then I understand that but I also think we can have our cake and eat it by just having both discussions, with no need to shut down one for the other.
Yeah, guilty as charged, I'm a Bob. I leave it to the Alices to prove me wrong.
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I'll grant you "bizarre", but calling cryo a religious belief is some serious begging-the-question. Unwarranted optimism about a dodgy medical technology is just that: unwarranted optimism. Snake oil isn't a religion.
@FtttG
Simple cryogenics is one thing, I was talking about the uploading of your consciousness to the cloud and stuff. There's a whole bunch of ideas that are essentially recreating a religious worldview inside a secular one - mind uploads, simulation theory, Yud's posthumous consciousness reconstitution inside a virtual paradise vs. Roko's Basilisk.
Is it religion when people want to enter a state of being unbound by the laws of the universe as we currently know them and/or don't want anything hostile to do it first?
Y... yes?
It's a shame that posts as short as this will never be recognized as AAQCs.
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Was it religion when people wanted to fly despite common knowledge at the time being that people can't fly?
It just seems like you're latching on the worldly parts of religions when their defining feature is having esoteric claims about the universe.
Birds existed, people knew stuff can fly.
But they also 'knew' that people aren't the kind of stuff that can fly.
"They didn't ACTUALLY transcend nature so it wasn't real vindication of hubris" looks like moving the goalposts to me.
Transhumanist thought, as I see it, lacks the inherent reverence that the religious mindset comes packaged with. (Yes there are Friendly AI worshippers and Roko's Basilisk doomers, but those are not the inherent parts of transhumanist thought.) In the end religion is not about entering Heaven or Hell, it's about using the promises of those states as a tool for society-building. I do not think transhumanism is about society-building first. I think transhumanism is about entering Heaven first (or Hell, according to doomers).
Did they? Or is it one of those self-congratulatory narratives written by their opponents, decades after the fact?
I don't think so. There's a few levels to this:
I don't think a lot of religious people would agree about their religion being about society-building first, and I'm pretty sure that if any belief described itself as "entering Heaven / Hell first" they would instantly recognize it as religious.
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