The Singularity as Religion (yes/no links)

lukeprog

My own opinion is that it's not worth much to argue over the boundaries around a vague term like 'religion,' and of course the question should not be 'Does the Singularity hypothesis share some features with religious hypotheses' but instead 'Is the Singularity hypothesis plausible, and what are its likely consequences?'

What are you referring to?

Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, many of the comments in Crises of Faith, there are other places but those are the two examples I have down for this.

Can you expand?

The tenets of Gnosticism is that the God of the Bible is evil (this is constantly being brought up in the mysterious answers sequence) and here to ensnare us who are the true gods. (Also, that the material world is evil (see uploads)). To free ourselves from this state we must create a god (or ourselves become god), not necessarily that we are to worship this god. Now comes the boot-strapping problem, where does this knowledge come from and how to create this god? The answer is that we have always had it and must merely rediscover it using those that have seen the way as our guides. It is really just a confusion of the temple ceremony (if one is LDS and believes the temple ceremonies were had anciently) with the standard twists.

Hopefully that clears up how I see a connection and don't see your objections on those points as being arguments against it being a religion.

don't normally even go together and putting them all together as an attempt to make something which (vaguely) resembles a religion.

They are all here on this site.

Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

Um, really? The primary point there point there doesn't seem to be about whether only the in-crowd should know about things but whether knowing about cognitive biases is safe for anyone. But maybe that's just me.

many of the comments in Crises of Faith

But that doesn't fit with your claim that the truth is being reserved for some elect in-group. No one (from my quick reading of the thread) is talking about just telling things to people who are already members of some super-secret transhumanist rationalist amalgam, j... (read more)

-1Sniffnoy15y

Unless you want to argue that Less Wrong is a religion, that isn't helpful. These are still separate things. As it happens most people here endorse both of them - this isn't a coincidence, the transhumanism is a result of the rationalism - but in general they are still separate. In other places too you seem to have conflated transhumanism in general or rationalism in general with Less Wrong in particular; do you think most transhumanists have ever heard of Eliezer's sequences? Nor do they necessarily expect a technological singularity or that cryonics will work. Hm - now that I look at your original comment, you actually wrote [...] But from there on out you've just referred to "transhumanism" rather than this website. Please stop doing this; use the proper terms for what you're referring to so people actually know what you're talking about.