Across society, there have been fringe ideas, with people believing something a bit off-beat from what everyone else believes.
This idea would be one of those fringe thoughts, if it weren’t so prevalent within our secularized modern society.
This idea has arisen because of a distinct change in power. For thousands of years, the dominant human power was through influential warlords. The beginning of our Information Age has created a new class of information brokers that run society, who are approximately the opposite disposition of “warlords”.
Therefore, as much as it’s a silly viewpoint, its ubiquity mandates addressing the ideas contained within it.
If I was blessed with the fortune of being memorialized and this is being read in 300 years, I must tell you: yes, this is what a decent minority of people in the developed world actually believe.
Areligious
Somewhere along the path of the Protestant Reformation, society’s philosophies made a heavy break from the concept of religion and God.
In the lens of history, this development is relatively new. By any estimation of cosmology, 300 years isn’t enough time for humanity to adapt to complete atheism. Also, if our existence was from God and for God, it’s simply not possible for everyone to employ secular thinking.
There’s enough scientific evidence that we are wired into needing something religious to devote ourselves toward:
- All ancient societies have worshiped some type of deity (e.g., fertility, rain, death). It anthropomorphizes the unknown, which allows us to interact with it without the existential confusion that would come from imagining nothing whatsoever in the void.
- All healthy addiction recovery and well-balanced living hangs on a form of giving the uncontrollable to a personal entity that (allegedly) has control. Al-Anon, for example, had to replace “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” into “…God as we understood Him” instead of outright removing God altogether.
- We have a simplistic mechanism in our minds that always requires any set of philosophical values to have a custodian of those values, and devotion to that entity shapes the basis for our habits. Postmodern philosophy, especially Nietzsche, demonstrates that it’s difficult (if not downright impossible) to create certainty without gods.
This flow of thought is not fashionable in our technology-laden society, especially among atheists. Many of the the opponents of the above possess a unique paradox:
- It’s simply better and easier to not believe in gods, since more religion via myths and fables clutters up our landscape of understanding.
- While it’s a generally more difficult concept to accept, we are morally superior if we hold to the truth that we are utterly alone in the universe.
Many of them ascribe to the “Idiot Ancestor Theory”, presuming that people thousands of years ago were morons compared to us because they had less information. Ironically, the worship of the ancient gods continues by other names:
- Believing that the law represents morality is to personify Justitia.
- Belief in the medical establishment is a reviving of Asclepius.
- Defining science as a lifestyle beyond a method is bringing back Apollo.
- Personifying computers is a new imagining of Mnemosyne, with valuing the industry as worshiping Minerva.
This represents as a type of “religious anorexia”, where they crave the devotion to a deity, but refuse to admit its presence.
Existence’s Existential Problem
To believe in no gods means this universe, deductively, must have appeared spontaneously. Any effort to articulate some clever reinvention (e.g., an advanced society created this universe) only extends the finite range further (e.g., someone must have created that advanced society), and slams into the same issue later (e.g., how did that advanced society come into existence?).
If this universe is the product of randomness, then any order that appears from that randomness has incomparable value. To believe in God is to believe the blueprints for all nature exists beyond that life’s existence, but believing in nothing means the physical presence of ordered complexity must be guarded with everything we have. The very fact we, as humans, can even conceive of these things is an unlikelihood stacked upon unlikelihoods, and it’s worth devoting everything to maintain it.
And, therein lies the desperation. The order of the universe must be preserved, and it will easily descend into nature’s baseline of chaos if left unattended.
This desperation frames the political affiliation of many people in this space, especially with respect to ecological preservation. If someone believes in God, they will believe God thought ahead, but an atheist will see our life on this earth as one extinct fly species or cow fart away from certain destruction.
Existence’s Practical Solution
If we will receive no help from any god, we must take matters into our own hands. If we don’t, we’re guaranteed to lose what we have had up to this point.
And, within our capacity, the most powerful answer we have comes through our technology. Fire protected us from predators, the wheel and horseback riding gave us the means to haul things, literacy gave us the means to tell stories centuries later, and so on.
If technology is our salvation, we must act in every possible way to advance it. To the technologist, it’s more than a simply political mindset toward preservation: it’s a higher purpose unto itself.
This is the world of a significant majority of people in STEM, ascending up to some of the wealthiest magnates of our current age.
The Consequences
This idea isn’t fully religious, since it focuses only on this life, but it does give a type of prophetic imagery, similar to other secular religiousness (e.g., Marxist thinking). Their envisioned future will be highly advanced relative to ours, and the human condition will project itself into the stars and beyond.
Most of the world imagines interstellar FTL drives, artificial intelligence that rivals human interaction, and transferring human consciousness as entertaining explorations of human limitation. The technologists, futurists, and science fiction enthusiasts often see something more.
To them, the ideas presented by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, among many others, are prophecies of legitimate risks worth considering as we venture into our new world.
In this value system, science fiction to this form of thinking isn’t merely an entertaining exploration of the limits of our understanding. Instead, it’s a stark depiction of what will likely come:
- Stories revolving around cyberpunk are depictions of the near future, and the explorations of what defines human versus AI construct are practical thought experiments worth having.
- Media set in an interstellar society is a portrayal of what we might actually face, along with its expanded problems.
- In particular, the experience of Star Trek has an optimistic view of human nature (i.e., presuming it will change in a fashion similar to the Progressive Movement’s ideals), presuming that human nature will transcend its differences and create a politically unified interstellar society.
- Beyond being mere stories, Battlestar Galactica and Portal are portrayals of how our technology can betray us, and give moralized lessons on how we can cope with that betrayal.
- “Hard” science fiction set many millennia in the future (e.g., Asimov’s fiction) are contending with legitimate issues of our future time.
Life itself on this earth gives meaning, not through our soul’s transition onward into a new plane of existence, but through our contributions to allow future generations of humanity the capacity to survive our sun’s nova, the end of all planets, and the heat death of the universe.
While the stories touch on our expanded technological development, they magnify a stark reality: that to become transhuman is to become less human, and that’s a good thing. In that sense, it works against what all religion exists for, which is to (allegedly) bring out the best of our human qualities.
Those who can fully trust the machine gods will wish to become the machines themselves, and that means destroying their humanity.
Now, granted, there are warnings against what this transhuman existence can do to our identity (e.g., Star Trek’s Borg hive mind), but their view is generally centered on becoming gods ourselves as we leave these dying bodies of meat and bone.
Petty Meaning
The continuum of our legacy is established when the sacred code we use to program today’s artificial hearts becomes part of a larger cybernetic framework. The AI model we generate today may allow a duplication of a human mind within a distant future. It’s something worth devoting your life to and dying for.
Irrespective of how viable these ideas are, these stories give a massive influx of meaning to modern STEM workers. Your feeble attempt to create a robot soccer player may someday become the beginnings of a well-established cyborg. Janky quantum computer code may well be the beginnings of an artificial body or interstellar drive.
And this mindset, sadly, is a religion that is both selfless and small-minded. Both Alfred Nobel and Albert Einstein thought their contributions to powerful weaponry would end all wars. The designers of many inventions often live long enough to see the reuse and abuse of what they envisioned.
Their innocent belief in the goodness of humanity slowly succumbs to the moral problems that have haunted us all since the first narcissists were empowered to send people on their behalf to take more territory. Eventually, we may see the fruition of some of these technologies. We also may not want to see what they will do to humanity, once implemented.
And yet, this is what they believe.