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The Singularity is Near: Difference between revisions
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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”. | 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 {{author|Ray Kurzweil}}’s hymn to forthcoming {{c|technology}}, {{bookreview|The Singularity | Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resembling of a religious one, than in {{author|Ray Kurzweil}}’s hymn to forthcoming {{c|technology}}, {{bookreview|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. | ||
Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence {{sex|he}} terms the “singularity”, a point at which {{sex|he}} expects that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, {{sex|he}} seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away. | Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence {{sex|he}} terms the “singularity”, a point at which {{sex|he}} expects that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, {{sex|he}} seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away. | ||