are striving to be god. Others more critical admonish us for arrogantly ‘playing god’. They warn of dire consequences. these critics are absurd. We humans do not want to be god or to play god. We aspire to much more. God was a crude concept - vengeful wrathful destructive. We humans want to evolve beyond god. (Up-Wingers, New York: The John Day Company, 1973, p.143.)

Moreover, books of this sort add to millenarian madness, and will need to be countered with appropriate ‘memecides’. For example, when religionists tell me that the book of Revelation predicts things to come in Europe and Western Asia, I point out that characters in Revelation fight with swords, own slaves, and ride horses for regular transportation; I have not visited the Mediterranean, but I have heard that life there is not quite that primitive. Fighting religious memes will be a major task in the next few decades if we are to head off man-made catastrophes, and applied memetics is a desperately needed discipline.

LETTERS

Dear Max,

Tsk, tsk. When cryonics is in such a socially and legally precarious situation, we extropians need to spread our memes in a socially responsible manner. As Allen J. Lopp suggests in his review of the Jan. 4 1990 L.A. Law episode, we need to justify our desires for immortality, wealth, and power in terms of feelings and relationships.

A’s ‘Arch-Anarchy’ is an especially egregious example of the Faustian propaganda we need to avoid. (After sketching out a plan to become God, what will A write for an encore?) I find it ironic that A, a self-professed arch-anarchist, wants to become the Arch-Statist. It is no coincidence that dictators are accused of ‘playing God’ and of trying to do the contradictory and the impossible. A’s projected Brave New Jerusalem does not appeal to me, and I may try to sabotage things by becoming Lucifer. It is better to rule oneself than to serve A in heaven.

By the way, another ‘must’ addition to the extropian library is Analog Essays on Science (New York: John Wiley Sons, 1990). Getting essays by Drexler, Henson, and Donaldson together in one volume is worth the price alone.

Extropically yours,

Mark Potts, aka M.P.-Infinity.

FORUM

ARCH-ANARCHY: MORE AND AGAINST.

by Max More.

‘Arch-Anarchy’, as befits its avowal of contradictions, finds me cheering and yet booing. Contrary to A however, I shall show that the apparent contradiction is unreal by analyzing my reactions into consistent parts.

First, since most of what I have to say will be critical, I wish to be clear that I fully share A’s spirit, the spirit that questions all limits and seeks new freedoms. I believe we will continue to gain control of natural forces and will continue to expand our capacities indefinitely. No limit can be declared final and ultimate; our always limited (and so always growing) knowledge forever offers the possibility of new freedoms and expanding horizons.

(1) What I disliked about the article was the possible authoritarianism and irrationalism of some of the ideas. The opening is indeed rousing, but note that it is a ‘call to arms’. Extropians prefer ideas to weapons, reserving weapons for a last resort in self-defence. Surely we would do better to refrain from violent metaphors in our exhortations to advancement.

The implicit authoritarianism pokes its head out in A’s characterization of the universe into two opposing forces: his (hers or its) will and obstacles to his will. The universe cannot be so rigidly categorized however: The wills of others can be an enabling condition of my own will; this is the basis of social cooperation. The extropian individualist does not hold that you are for or against him. He does not hold you to be part of the solution or part of the problem. Rather he sees that without others to provide a context for what he wants or does, his positive freedom would be meagre indeed. For-or-against me thinking tends to lead to you-and-not-me thinking, i.e., either authoritarianism or barbaric conflict.

Similarly, non-sentient limits outside me provide a context which provides structure and form. Gravity is not necessarily my opponent. If I want to enjoy the sensation of free falling through the air, if I want to feel the satisfaction of muscular exertion, gravity is my friend even though holding me back. Clearly A does not want to deny this, only to recommend us to gain the power to ensure that the presence of gravity is under our control. This view I share, but putting it in terms of fundamental conflicts is not accurate and lends itself to entropic degeneration and conflict.

(2) A claims to refute the principle of non-contradiction His method consists of an application of Descartes’

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notorious scholastic “Reality Principle”: X is more real than Y if Y couldn’t exist without X. Since no modern philosopher that I know of accepts this principle, A’s “refutation” can hardly succeed in meeting those philosophers on their own ground. I will leave to the reader the task of determining the many problems with Descartes’ principle.

A’s argument also fails, as must any argument against the principle of non-contradiction, because if he is to succeed in making an argument his words must have a determinate meaning. Without the principle of non-contradiction his words have no determinate sense and so cannot constitute an argument at all. In other words, if his argument is right it is meaningless and so self-refuting. Further, as is well known in logic, allowing contradictions means that anything goes. Fine, so long as you are willing to throw out meaning, knowledge, and progress.

I would agree that some principles of classical logic may be revisable - the distributive law of Boolean logic is rejected in quantum logic for instance. But this does not motivate the possibility, let alone the actuality, of rejecting the fundamental principle of non-contradiction. Whenever we come across a contradiction it’s a clear sign that our concepts are confused, that our data is in error, or that we have not yet penetrated to a consistent underlying explanation.

[A brief note: Line 3 of A’s footnote 12 should be “~A” rather than “~B”; this has been corrected in the second printing of EXTROPY #5.]

(3) A’s rejection of the principle of non-contradiction was motivated by a wish to throw aside all limitations on his freedom. However, I think he is seriously mistaken to believe that embracing contradictions is the way to achieve his goal. If you want to believe there is or can be a being that is infinite -a being with infinite degrees of all qualities - it is necessary to suppose the being to hold within itself many (an infinite number?) of things or qualities which are mutually inconsistent. A mentions two of the traditional powers of God which conflict: omnipotence and omniscience. Rather than taking this to suggest an incoherence in the concept of an infinite being, A chooses to reject consistency. I have argued above that this is a bad choice. As extropians we want to continue increasing our knowledge and understanding, and to continue increasing our experience, value, importance, and happiness, as made possible by our improving conceptual schemes.

Strange as it may sound, my criticism of A’s view of the extropian goal is that in his talk of an infinite being, whether called God or the Ein Sof, he is being insufficiently ambitious. The fundamental extropian value is that of expansion, of wanting MORE. An infinite, unlimited being would have no more to seek, no more to move toward. If we were to become the Ein Sof (supposing, as I do not, that the idea is comprehensible), we would stop our progress and stagnate. We would have to wallow in our infinitude. No condition is the final condition for the extropian. The joy is in the pursuit; it is in the process of expansion, growth,

intensification, progress, and not in the attainment of a final condition, even that of infinity.

But if the condition is infinite why should we be concerned about the end of progress? Answering this question runs into problems because of the obscurity of the idea of an infinite being. An infinite process is clear enough; examples such as the infinite series of integers are easily available. But what would an infinite state or condition be like? Does an infinite being include an infinite progressive process? If so, then surely the being is not infinite, since progress implies a current imperfection. Perfect beings cannot also be imperfect. (Again, embracing contradictions is only a way of evading this problem). But, if perfect and infinite being does not include an infinite progressive process, then that being lacks the good of progress and is limited in not being capable of improvement - something even we lowly humans can do! I suggest, therefore, that we reject the idea of an infinite being - God/the Ein sof - both in its religious form and in the form offered by A - as a dead end that can only be adhered to by deliberately evading giving meaning to our terms and thus by destroying our ability to reason and to progress.

Instead of striving for perfection and infinite being then, I suggest that the extropian dynamic is the continual process of growth, expansion and value-increase. It is the process that matters, not the state. (See Robert Nozick’s discussion of the meaning of life in his Philosophical Explanations. I intend to develop this view in detail in a longer work currently underway.)

There is a way of giving workable content to the idea that I think A wants to defend, though it does not allow the retention of infinite states. I have argued that the extropian goal is really the continuance of the infinite process of expansion/improvement. Imagine a graph, with time being the vertical axis. The line representing the degree or amount of the extropic goods of wisdom, power, intelligence, and so on, rises from the horizontal line slowly at first and then accelerates away from the horizontal. The steeper the

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extropic acceleration the closer to vertical the line becomes. If the line could become absolutely vertical, improvement would happen at an infinite rate. An asymptote is a theoretical place toward which such curves tend. I believe that A’s God/Ein Sof is a way - a misleading way - of trying to represent that asymptote. Our rate of progress can never become infinite relative to time but it becomes arbitrarily close to it. Our goal is, in a way, that asymptote. However, it is a mistake to then conclude that there is a state - godhood - which is the goal. An asymptote is not a state to be reached. It is a point at an infinite distance from us in the future. It is the goal that keeps us eternally in motion, forever growing and improving. It is this that provides the extropic dynamic, not some state of godhood.

The positing of an infinite God that we will become (and who exists now) carries with it dangers which the extropian wants to avoid. A himself raises ‘the possibility that we might now worship the God that we will become.’ This is a frighteningly entropic picture. Praying to a higher being is an act of submission, and worship is a substitute for action. Believing that God already exists removes our motivation for improving ourselves. The history of religion provides examples of many other entropic consequences of worship and prayer that I will not detail here. Rejecting a state of godhood as our goal, and instead letting our goal be the asymptote - the eternally continually expanding process - is the truly extropic choice; it is the choice that motivates us to grow rather than stagnate.

Since my comments are already lengthy, I will forego commenting on A’s conception of ‘laws’ of nature (except to say I agree that since there is no cosmic legislator, they are not really ‘laws’).

Bell to A

It seems to me that A, the author of ‘Arch-Anarchism’, faces a paradox. On the one hand, A emphasizes the most extreme form of individualism imaginable: ‘As an arch-anarchist, I divide the universe into two opposing forces: my will and obstacles to my will.’ (p.11).

On the other hand, A softens this individualism by presenting a somewhat fuzzy view of the self. A say, for example, that ‘I am no more than a particular pattern of information, a set of data and processing rules. To the extent that I share this pattern with others, we share personal identities.’ A explicitly advocates joining with others in the most holy of matrimosies: ‘All anarchists aim at the same end, and those of us who reach it will merge into one being: God.’

The conflict between these two views comes out quite clearly in the following quote: ‘As an arch-anarchist, I refuse to recognize the validity of any obstacle to my will. Is this selfish? Yes, but because I take a broad view of personal identity I am willing to consider other’s interests along with my own.’ (p.17).

Here’s the paradox: A’s most distinguishing feature

is extreme individualism. A thus shares identities most with other arch-anarchists (assuming there is more than one). Why? Because all arch-anarchists are extreme individualists. I conclude that the only beings with which A could merge identities are exactly the sort of beings unwilling to do so.

What will it be A? The solitude of extreme individualism or the company of imperfect friends? You can’t have both. Nobody will come to your party if you try to have your cake and eat it too.

A to Bell.

That saying never made much sense to me. Of what use to me is my cake if I cannot eat it? Indeed, I cannot safely claim to have my cake until I fully possess it by wrapping myself around it and integrating it into my being.

There is no paradox here. Being an extreme individualist doesn’t make me unsocial. I recognize that others can help me, just as they realize that I can help them. Our common enterprises give us common interests. We join, as Max Stirner would say, in a ‘union of egoists’.

True, I am most likely to share identities with other arch-anarchists. Does extreme individualism force us apart? No. It draws us together. As we each advance toward self-perfection our separate paths converge, meeting at Godhood.

The real problem lies with those who seek union through selflessness. They cannot share identities for they have no identities to share. Theirs is truly a self-defeating paradox.

We arch-anarchists, on the other hand, can have our cake and eat it too. It is, if I may say so, our just desserts.

A to Potts.

You have obviously mistaken the God that I hope to become with the Christian figure of the same name. The God of which I speak is not ‘an old caucasian male with a long beard and a deep voice (that’s Santa Claus).’ (p.16) My God is more akin to the Tao, or what Robert Nozick calls Ein Sof: the totality of all universes, actual and possible. Given His bad reputation, I can understand why you fear the God of which I speak, however. The Ein Sof does not go around kicking heretic butt.

Because your fears are misplaced, your accusations are unfounded. Nowhere in ‘Arch-Anarchy’ do I speak of ruling others. Rather, I advocate full respect for others’ negative rights to life, liberty and property as long as we remain in anything that resembles our current world. Does the ‘as long as’ clause set you off? What is the alternative? Should we worship libertarian ethics as necessary truths, as immutable laws we must never question? No. Negative rights have spontaneously evolved out of the undirected actions of self-interested agents. Because they help to coordinate our actions, they work to the benefit of each of us.

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But this shows that negative rights apply only to beings like us in circumstances like ours; they are contingent. By the time we achieve Godhood, they may no longer apply to us. But don’t worry - we won’t give them up unless it once more serves our interests.

A to More.

Part (1) of your critique actually contains three elements. In the first you impugn my use of “violent metaphors”. But nowhere do I advocate aggressive action against others. To the contrary, I repeatedly emphasize the benefits of peaceful cooperation. I say, for example, that “Should others ever join me in my quest for arch-anarchy, I will not fight with them over the spoils of heaven; there ought to be plenty of bliss to go around. Rather I will embrace them as my kin, for all arch-anarchists share the love of life and the thirst for freedom.” (p.13) My metaphorical “call to arms” is directed against the metaphorical “reign” of nature and logic. You take this rhetorical flourish too seriously.

You also, in part (1), imply that I ignore the existence of other beings. My demonstrated concern for peaceful cooperation with others shows that I take others into consideration. True, I divide the universe into only my will and its obstacles, but this leaves plenty of room for other beings. I place their wills in one of these two categories. To the degree that they hinder my will, they form obstacles to my will. In practice I treat most others as neutral in regard to these two categories, but because I am as yet ignorant of their effects on my interests. In principle, however, the line may be drawn.

Your last objection in part (1) simply misses the mark. I want to control the laws of nature - not blindly destroy them. After a false start, you end up recognizing this. I gather, then, that you are objecting solely to my tone of voice. Lighten up! The transfer of information should be fun. So what if I shout and sing and giggle? Let us limit our debate to what I say rather than how I say it.

Although you boldly assert that “No limit can be declared final and ultimate,” your courage collapses when you defend the principle of non-contradiction in part (2) of your critique. I admit that contradiction presents terrible difficulties, and that as long as we remain short of Godhood we are better off sticking to conventional logic (a point I should perhaps have emphasized in “Arch-Anarchy”). But the day may come when the principle of non-contradiction gets in the way of my will. If so, I will embrace contradiction. Do you find that difficult to imagine? So do I. Our lack of imagination does not, however, prove us wise. As God, I would no doubt see things differently. You already admit the repeal of other elements of conventional logic. What makes you think the principle of non-contradiction sacrosanct?

Do not let your deification of the principle of non-contradiction keep you from deifying yourself. You are far more worthy of Godhood than is the principle of non-contradiction.

In part (3) you criticize my portrayal of Godhood and

argue that we should seek an alternative goal: eternal improvement. I am sympathetic to your views, but not at the expense of my own; I find the two entirely compatible. You draw a false distinction between our views because you mistakenly portray God in static terms. Clearly, if God embodies contradiction, God is not static. God’s internal dialectic ensures both its rest and motion.

You may think this contradiction is a cop-out, but your alternative depends on contradiction as well. You ask that we eternally seek the goal of perfection without wanting to achieve that goal. To achieve perfection would, on your view, doom us to stagnation.

I think there is a synthesis here, however. I would have us seek a perfection that embodies process; you would have us embody a process that seeks perfection. Both are final ends. Both rely on contradiction. I have chosen to emphasize one aspect of Godhood; you have chosen to emphasize another.

You conclude part (3) by correctly pointing out the dangers of worshipping God. That is a good reason for preferring (what I take to be) your version of God, particularly when proselytizing - it is less susceptible to abuse. Your apt warnings do not discredit “Arch-Anarchism”, however. Others may debase themselves by praying to “higher” beings, but I do not. I raised the possibility of worshipping the God-I-might-become only to discredit the notion. I am not afraid of the dangers of worship because the very drive that leads me to seek Godhood simultaneously renders me immune to voluntary servitude. As an arch-anarchist, I follow only one will: my own.

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Summer 1990