Genius Around

In a previous post I have commented on the “suicide notes” of Mitchell Heisman but now as I have read the first 100 pages I want to reflect on it. Before I go on I want to make it clear and explicit here that I will not comment on the validity of his claims. Why you ask? Well first of all I simply do not have the required knowledge to check all of his claims and secondly I think that ideologies might be as important as “facts”. After all ideologies are what guide us, they are our lens through which we see the world.

My previous post was entitled “Hunters after reality, wherever it may lead”, I think I should start out with an explanation. The quote is actually by George Steiner who Heisman quotes in order to show that people seek truth at all costs. Steiner further writes:

We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control.

I like the analogy of “hunters” that go for their prey whatever it costs because they passionately want it. As much as they like the reward, the chase is what makes them go on. I have the impression that Heisman is honest in his pursuit of knowledge and even if his ideas seem radical sometimes close to some sort of insanity he manages to capture the reader. He argues his way through and at the end I find myself thinking.

I cannot possibly explain Heisman´s ideas here but I can show you what I got from it. He starts with an “experiment on nihilism” where he brings up the idea that our rationality is based on the assumption that life is superior to death. The “conservation of self” is seen as the rational for our thinking. In his paper Heisman challenges this assumption and writes:

Challenging every living value by willing death is how I will test this question and how I will test this question is the experiment in nihilism.

After his first chapter he goes on to talk about God which he sees in the Singularity or the emergence of a “God-AI”. He analyzes the Bible in a new perspective which is interesting to say the least. He turns upside down the whole notion of the Bible and God when he looks at it as an “ought”. God does not exist but it will evolve from technological evolution. In fact this is one of these moments where I personally thought that this is close to insanity but when I thought about it a lot of points actually made sense.

...and now approaching God

Imagine you are a cellular organism some million years ago, you would not have thought at all but you surely would not have imagined that one day you would become a human. Now imagine you are among the first humans walking earth. Would not seem possible to drive through the bushes with a car, right? Your grandparents probably did not think that you would be reading this on the internet today. So does it really seem impossible that one day we will build God?

As an atheist I do not believe in God but what Heisman proposes here is a total re-conceptualization of it. If God is created by us as a super-intelligence what does it mean if I say that I am an atheist. Monotheistic religions so far seem oriented towards past or present but never have I heard about an “emergence of God”. Heisman notes that the biblical prophets could not have known about evolution or the technologies we have now but he makes a point in explaining that they saw “social life” all around them so that they were primitive social scientists. In that sense they used the “Mosaic law” in order to overcome social challenges. He depicts their image of God as a perfect being and gives an interesting analysis about it.

When reading through the paper it sometimes sounds closer to science fiction than science or philosophy but the second look more often than not makes me think. Like for example:

If God’s rule over “creation” represents the rule of postbiological evolution over biological evolution, and God represents the evolutionary successor to biology at the point at which biology becomes obsolete, then “creation” appears distinctly anti-evolutionary for a specific evolutionary reason: the point at which God rules is precisely the point at which biological evolution has been slowed to a stop. “Creation” would then be analogous to the creation of a virtual world (i.e. a computer simulation) that preserves the memory of biology in postbiological form.

He makes some compelling points and even if I am not entirely sure about most of it I have to admit that its thought provoking and different.Is that enough? Well I think it is interesting because it is that different. We are constantly around familiar people, in familiar context and talk about familiar subjects. Heismans ideas are fresh, they scream for criticism and further elaboration, he opens doors. In the words of Nietzsche:

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently

Personally I think it is worth at least looking at it and checking out the first two chapters because at the very least it is a total re-interpretation of the world.

I attached the PDF to my previous post

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