Infinite Lock-In, part 2

What makes cybernetic totalism a religious worldview? And why is that dangerous?

Spiritual Suicide

Winding down my previous reflection, I summarized Jaron Lanier’s quibble over how cybernetic totalists reduce human beings to information:

They “totalize” mind, subjectivity, and experience as merely the emergent properties of nature’s information system. As such, anything transcending information must be non-essential, irrelevant, worthless.

Then, I posited this reduction excludes any idea that we might have a soul.

This may have surprised some readers. “Hang on,” I imagine them saying, “I thought you were an atheist. Didn’t you explain that at length, not too long ago? Now you’re arguing for the idea of the soul?”

I also pointed out I’m agnostic — I don’t claim “there is no god” because I don’t know that and I don’t believe we can know that. But whether there’s a god and whether we have souls are very different questions. Concerns with spirituality and what might happen to us after death are the only similarities. If we do have souls, it doesn’t follow that a god had to endow us with them. Just what we have — what “soul” might be — is a question of definition with many possible answers.

I’m not going down that rabbit hole. It’s an interesting one, but it’s far afield from the subject at hand.

I only ponder what cybernetic totalism might mean for the soul, if such a thing exists, to steer us to a more relevant and revealing question: “Whose perspective is the most religious — the cybernetic totalists or their naysayers, such as Lanier?”

Lanier’s critics accuse him of sentimentalism at best and of impeding progress with reactionary religiosity at worst. They scoff at talk of “the ineffable.” As MIT professor emeritus Rodney Brooks wrote in his response, “I’ll take the null hypothesis. We are machines until proven otherwise, rather than just wished otherwise.”

Just like scientists and politicians, technologists have no right to assume the answers to spiritual questions on behalf of everyone else.