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''from a review published in 2010'' | ''from a review published in 2010'' | ||
Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful '' | Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful ''{{bookreview|The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind}}'' with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for “the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause”. | ||
Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resembling of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, [[The Singularity Is Near]]. For if ever a man were committed overtly – fervently, even – to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: on one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit. | Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resembling of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, [[The Singularity Is Near]]. For if ever a man were committed overtly – fervently, even – to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: on one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit. | ||