Re: Scooping Up & Blending Knowledge

Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Wed, 30 Sep 1998 09:42:39 -0700 (PDT)

On 9/29/98 Robin Hanson wrote:
< I for one am very curious to understand exactly what they mean by science sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. >

Not sure exact understanding is possible in such matters, but a very intelligent (though lengthy) essay on this subject that may be of interest is Erik Davis's "Technoculture and the Religious Imagination", available at
http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/05.htm

Extropians and "mystical positivism" are even mentioned in this text, eg:
"... within the frenzied edges of Extropian
technoculture -- Artificial Intelligence, digital immortality, and the radical separation of body and mind".

This is not an anti-science rant by any means. For example, part of the conclusion notes:
"We all know the neo-Luddites are wrong -- we cannot
and should not escape technology. But neither can we escape the technologies of the self, the inevitable problem of how we engineer, direct (and release control over) our own emotions, intuitions, and energies, our own qualities of awareness and imagination. If we abjure one apparatus, we find ourselves plugged into another, so why not probe and explore the technologies of the sacred?"

P.S. A revised and expanded version of Davis's article is also available, in several parts, in the Nettime archives
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0788.html continuing at 0787.html and 0786.html.



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