christian transhumanist

a kingdom of priests and makers will fill the cosmos

Kevin Kelly is one of the most forward thinking, spot-on futurists I have ever read. His writing is the basis for quite a bit of my technological foundation. His piece on AI today is worth reading and contemplating.

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@TVachaW @kasratweets Pope Benedict made that explicit, comparing Christianity to the Enlightenment in the worship of creative reason

@kasratweets Well, let’s not forget that for the early Christians especially and even many modern theologians, God is referred to as the “Logos”, one of the meanings of which is “reason.”

there are some uncanny parallels between monotheism and rationalism: - the idea that there is one correct, absolute answer to everything - there is a "higher power" (God / reason) which knows no limits, is all-pervasive - you have an obligation to follow this higher power (God / reason) and an obligation to encourage others to do the same

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@cxgonzalez Set aside the question of belief for a moment. If the question is, What significance do we attach to Jesus’ story? The classic Christian answer is: Humanity is literally going to defeat death. The other answers seem to be: We’re going to transform our minds, but not our bodies.

how do people actually believe in a literal resurrection without lobotomizing themselves? like the universe is causally closed and follows the laws of physics always except for that one time with very poor documentation and all the incentive in the world to fabricate?

We need "family AIs" that don't just index on one individual in isolation, but on the values of everyone in the group, as a kind of open collaboration.

@eigenrobot Sola scriptura certainly drove proliferation of churches. This is only a problem if it is mistakenly treated as the thing which will *stop* that, as it sometimes has been.

still thinking about sola scriptura. its an interesting case study in systems of belief and their evolution. In This Essay I Will consider how a solution to perceived problem contained the seeds of is own destruction. it is an essay in the montaignean sense, lax in precision and probably wrong in many places. nevertheless i hope its virtues are of a kind with his. one could understand sola scriptura as an attempt to wrest authority from an early modern church that was, admittedly, more profane than usual in its practices; and under fire by new "rational" modes of thought. sola scripture accomplished this by rejecting the facial legitimacy of inherited traditions of the western church and beginning from the first principle that scripture is straightforwardly inerrant, and then drawing its own conclusions from scriptural text. this attack was highly effective in an immediate sense. of course the practical criticisms of church behavior--indulgences and veniality and so on--were valid, and many temporal powers were glad to have an alternative, perhaps-friendlier religion to supplant roman influence. in more intellectual terms, luther et al were also reasonably successful at undercutting the foundations of much accumulated practice and "irrational" beliefs in under-attested miracles, fantastical saints, and so on. unfortunately for the reformers the sola scriptura tactic was first self-defeating and eventually fatal. by establishing the basis for religious authority on the evaluation of a sacred text rather than a continuous community, luther opened the door to a thousand others who might have their own opinions on the precise interpretation of those texts with no mechanism for resolution but sanctified authority or schism. as the reformation was predicated on the rejection of one sanctified authority, very quickly a hundred hundred sects multiplied, none of whom had any greater objective or rational claim to a correct reading than the other. in formal sciences proofs may be derived; in natural sciences epistemics act as a final judge. but to generalize from the talmudic tradition, we can observe that sacred texts are not in heaven. ("but--!" i hear my LDS brothers object. yes let us allow the return of the golden plates to the empyrean; but LDS doctrine is itself based on canonical copies of those plates and its interpretation by human authorities.) the second and greater undoing of the reformation was elevating rationality in matters theological. the church had always allowed for rational discourse at great length though within sometimes-chafing constraints, but luther's attack required it to ascend to a sort of practical primacy. this was a reasonable gambit in 1517 but he might have thought through the slippery slope. rationality is acid to belief and while critically rejecting cephalophores and cynocephaly seems safe, from this starting point one quickly comes to question miracles and virgin birth and--- meanwhile came newton and lyell and darwin whose rational empiricism made the literalist inerrancy of the scriptures increasingly hard to justify from a "rational" standpoint. this was a great challenge for sola scriptura protestantism who in its elevation of scripture uber alles emphasized its "perspicuity," much more than for catholicism which although put on its heels had millennia of tradition from origen and augustine to aquinas softening the ground. intensifying this difficulty was the foundational emphasis on rationality to justify the protestant tradition; catholics could fall back on alternative sources of authority, but protestants had none. watching from outside, it seems empirically sola scriptura protestants were left with two brutal choices: falling hard onto a notion of "faith" in bare scriptural literalism that superseded rationality entirely, or simply abandoning belief in the scripture that was its sole justification. on one hand, a mindless faith; on the other, a dying tradition adrift and unrecognizable as christianity. allow me to state in conclusion that this is not an essay about the object level, nor really about religion as usually construed. figger it out

@venturetwins @NathanpmYoung Way to turn a child’s creativity and quest for knowledge into a weird moral anxiety

I am so sad for this kid

some folks want humanity to go extinct, just not by AI

So this is the new stack that everybody is building—Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. An app you control with your phone, that operates your computer remotely. Does this new status quo hold?

“Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” is not a request for escape but a petition for transformation

All of science and technology is the Road to Emmaus. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?”

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Life triumphant!

The profound error-proneness of human effort

I've always been intrigued by Dali's portrayal of Christ on a 4-dimensional cross, an unfolded tesseract, portraying Christ's death and resurrection as something transcendent, perhaps the superstructure of reality itself.

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