Julian Huxley and a New Animism

Posted on July 22, 2012 by James Cross
Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley

As a child, I had the typical conception that a child has of God. It was always somewhat vague but corresponded more or less to some male human-like entity that resided in Heaven, wherever that was, who protected me and loved me as long as I obeyed him. This God was peculiar to people of my religion which at the time was Southern Baptist, mainly because a Southern Baptist church was about a block away from my home. As I grew older I began to read various Eastern philosophies and began to think of God as the primary creative force in the universe and a central concept that lay at the core of all religions. Older still I entered a period of skepticism not much different from that of Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion (1). In this period, God became at best an unnecessary hypothesis that added nothing to our understanding of the world which we could best comprehend through science. Older still I became more confused. I couldn’t believe in the God of most religions and certainly didn’t want to toss aside science, yet I still felt there was something more to the world than science by itself could explain. Depending upon the discussion I might call this something God or simply ignorance, but the something was there.  Sometime during this period of confusion (that continues even somewhat until today), I discovered Julian Huxley and evolutionary humanism.

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Posted in Consciousness, Futurism, Human Evolution, Transhumanism | 8 Comments

Why the Future Needs Us Part II

Posted on May 26, 2012 by James Cross

By Wing-Chi Poon (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Life finds a way – Prof. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

 The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. – Isaac Asimov, The Last Question

As a youth, I remember stepping on a puffball in a field near where I grew up in Virginia. Puffballs are a sort of roundish mushroom without a cap or gills. Almost all of them are edible, although without a distinctive taste, when they are young and pure white inside. As the spores mature, the inside of puffballs form a mass in the center of the fruiting body. Eventually the covering of the puffball dries and shrivels and an opening develops in the top. At that point, the slightest provocation will trigger the release of the spores from the opening and cast them to the four winds. According to David Arora (1), a large puffball may contain seven trillion spores. On this day in my youth, I played my part in the propagation of the puffball. At the time, I saw something that looked like brown dust coming from the top of a odd looking sac . It was the puffball finding its own way to spread itself.

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Posted in Futurism, Human Evolution, Robotics, Time | 7 Comments

Why the Future Needs Us Part I

Posted on March 28, 2012 by James Cross

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. -Theodore Kaczynski – the Unabomber

In Wired Magazine, April 2000, Bill Joy wrote an article (1) that argued humanity needed to abandon some of our most powerful technologies because they threatened our very existence. Included in these technologies are bio-tech, nanotechnology, and robotics.

To begin with, I take Bill Joy’s warning seriously. Joy, no bomb-throwing Luddite, was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a core developer on some of the key technologies which have driven software development over the last twenty years. Bill Joy made his career creating technology – specifically computer hardware and software. Most people deeply involved with technology tend to be huge fans of it. They tend to be ever optimistic about its prospects and ever eager to adopt it and promote it. We do not expect a technologist to turn against technology and urge restraint in its adoption.

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Posted in Futurism, Robotics, Utopia | 8 Comments