Re: Extropianism & Theology

Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Fri, 26 Feb 1999 16:04:04 +1100

Aaron Davidson said
> Since myself and many others do not seem to feel this instinct, I think it
> must be more of a conditioned factor.

Well try the same logic out in this sentence "Since i myself do not have brown eyes, I think it must be a conditioned factor"

I think that God-believing is a heritable neural module present in the minds of the great majority of human brains.

A module which evolved around 150,000 years ago and which served the valuable purpose of enabling teleological reasoning (reasoning about purposes).

I think myself, with no evidence whatsoever, that about 3,000-5,000 years ago, either a mutant variant entered the population or perhaps merely chance selective breeding in a small tribe (of Ionic Greeks for instance) created an emergenic phenotype which lacks this neural module.

Those of us on this list who believe in the kind of extropy that I have been discussing lack this module.

I think also that the majority of principles which I espouse follow very directly from simply being incapable of explaining events in terms of "spiritual" happenings, being constrained instead to operate solely in the materialist reductionism space.

I think that we learn Occam's Razor. We learn the fragile culture of science. But we are born either able or unable to use immaterial events as explanations.

tim