X-Message-Number: 16865 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Re: Rael himself on the Art Bell show... Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 21:11:51 -0700 In Cryonet #16839, "john grigg" wrote: > From: "john grigg" <> > Subject: Rael himself on the Art Bell show... > Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 04:02:36 [snip] > What worried me was that people would make some sort of comparison > between the Raellians and the extropians. There are seeming > similarities for those who are not aware of the gaping differences. > I >would almost call the Raellians a "counterfeit" religious version > of transhumanism. If any of you had listened to him for four hours > >you would have picked up on this. I heard the first hour of the interview with Rael -- barely. I could only pick it up on a distant station. Setting aside the sleezy aspects of Rael's character -- because he seems to have invented a religion based on science-fictional premises to make money, like someone else I could name, except that I don't want the harassment -- what impressed me with Rael's message is that it reminded me of a kind of creative problem-solving technique I've encountered before. Basically you try to imagine how an advanced civilization would solve a problem, then try conceptually to reverse-engineer the solution in terms of what we could do given what we know today. Hence his elaborate scenario of conquering death through the growth of adult human clones and the transfer of your neurological structure from your dying body onto the "blank" brain of the clone. Rael proposes this because of his contention that the "Elohim" in his ufological fantasy do something similar, or else that this is how we could attain the same result that his advanced aliens attain through other means. (I didn't pick up on whether he makes a distinction like that.) So I do find an interesting signal through all the noise. If Rael had proposed this idea as a speculation verging on a serious proposal -- How would technologically advanced aliens conquer death, and could we just about be able to try it? -- then he would definitely belong to at least the fringes of defensible Transhumanist thinking. But I agree that because he mixes this superficially plausible idea with a lot of weirdness about space aliens, he is promulgating a "counterfeit" perversion of Transhumanism. Meanwhile, I was wondering if we could try to "borrow" some feasible solutions to the death problem from thinkable future civilizations. I found a link which describes this sort of creative thinking, for what it's worth: http://www.winwenger.com/beachhd.htm Trans-millennially yours, Mark Plus, Expansionary "Working to make death obsolescent in the 21st Century." _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16865