Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> I, incidentally, am a fanatic Singularitarian. I want something smarter and
> more powerful and more ethical than I am to exist; I don't care how, or what
> happens to the human race or myself afterwards...
eliezer, you are not alone. i suspect that desire for something greater is hardwired into our brains by way of genetics. reasoning: in times past, when tribal warfare was pretty much constant, those groups of humans that imagined an afterlife and some being greater than themselves would have an easier time forming a hierarchy for battle, and would therefore be a more formidable military force than groups of atheistic individualists, thus deriving the advantage of differential reproduction.
you and i may be nonreligious by way of reasoning out the origins of belief, yet i conjecture that the distant ancestors of you, dear extropian reader, were highly religious, and therefore hardwired religious aptitude into our brains. i, for one, had a hell of a time overcoming the religion instinct. the above notion can explain why there are millions of grand churches, billions of believers, countless idiotic religious memes running rampant thru the human memeganism, while we extropians are a widely separated lonely few. spike