Re: Imagination, more important than intelligence?

Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Wed, 09 Dec 1998 16:58:22 -0500

Why worry? Well, wouldn't we be progressing more quickly towards transhumanity if more people understood it and contributed their support?

Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> Brian Atkins writes:
>
> > It seems like the key ingredient to sparking a real >H revolution
> > in the rest of the population is not brainpower, but rather
> > simple imagination. The reason that people are not turned
>
> As a kid I read a lot of SF, often averaging 4-5 hours/day (while
> being a fast reader). Towards the end, I did it deliberately, as I
> intuitively felt it to be some kind of mental calisthenics, a valuable
> end in itself, if no other application could be found. Out of
> curiousity, how many of you have not been readers of SF or fantasy
> either during your childhood/late teenage? [No, I won't sum it up,
> ask somebody else]
>
> > on by our ideas may not be due to intelligence, but rather
> > simply because they cannot imagine what we describe, no matter
> > what detail we go into.
>
> Why worrying? With a sufficiently advanced technology, human
> population can be first dwarfed, then superseded as both an economical
> source and sink. You don't have to grok a concept to be obsoletified by it.
>
> 'gene

-- 
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
                                                       -William Gibson
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