Mitchell_Porter comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 17 September 2010 01:44AM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 24 September 2010 11:22:58AM 8 points [-]

A man committed suicide in Harvard Yard a week ago, after uploading a 1905-page book to the web first. Curiously (because he was, like myself, named Mitchell), I first heard about this on the morning I went to post my make-a-deal article; it led me to trim away the more emotive parts of my own, rather shorter message.

Anyway, I have been examining the book and it's very intriguing. If I can sum up his worldview, it is that human values have an evolutionary origin, but Jewish and Anglo-Saxon culture, for specific historical reasons, developed values which biocentrically appear to be anti-evolutionary, but which in fact ultimately issue in the technological, postbiological world of the Singularity. (Eliezer is mentioned a few times, mostly as an opposite extreme to Hugo DeGaris, with Heisman, the author of the book, proposing a synthesis.) Heisman's suicide, meanwhile, is anticipated in the book, where he says that willing death is a way to will truth in a meaningless universe. He equates materialism with objectivity with meaninglessness and nihilism; he considers the desire to live as the ultimate barrier to objectivity, because objectivity implies that life is no better than death, and that nothing is better than anything else.

It seems to me that under different circumstances, he might have written a very similar book, but would instead be alive. I imagine that if the book receives any serious attention, a lot of it will focus on what could have been different - to what extent his suicide was predetermined by his philosophy - but the rest of the book (its "sociobiological" history and its Singularity musings) also contains a lot to ponder.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 24 September 2010 12:58:07PM *  10 points [-]

The comments, on the blog that you link to, mention Ted Kaczynski. This reminded me of my own comment

Think about the date: 1995. The Kaczynski Manifesto marks the end of an era. Nobody today would start a terrorist campaign aimed at getting his manifesto published in a newspaper. It is not just that newspapers are dying and that no-one believes what they read in newspapers anymore, especially not opinion pieces and manifestos.

Now-a-days you put your manifesto on a website and discuss it on Reddit. If it is well written and provocative it will be discussed and pulled to pieces. The delusion that did for Kacynski, and his victims, was that if only he could get the message out, it would change the word. Now-a-days you can get your message out, if not to a mass audience, at least to curious intellectuals. You get to the stage Kacynski never reached, of talking it over and finding that others are not persuaded and have their own stubbornly held views, very different from your own.

1995, the very end of the solipsistic era. In the new internet era there is no hiding from the fact that others read your manifesto, find some of it true, some of it false, some of it confused, and then ask you to read their, much better manifesto :-)

Perhaps my final point needs to be spelled out explicitly. You cannot expect other intellectuals to read and seriously engage with your door-step manifesto unless you are willing to hang around and read and seriously engage with their door-step manifesto. But you cannot do that if you are dead. So suicide is forbidden.

Alternatively: there is an implicit deal here - I'll read yours if you'll read mine. Killing yourself breaks the deal, and damns you to obscurity.

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