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“Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose
is meaningless.” –
Bertrand Russell, atheist philosopher
Ray Kurzweil is by most standards an odd duck. Along
with swallowing 250 diet supplements during an average day, the
inventor and computer scientist downs eight to 10 glasses of
alkaline water and suffers a similar sloshing of green tea. He also
tracks about 40 to 50 “health indicators,” whatever those are.
I, on the other hand, figure that if I can draw enough
breath to fog a mirror I’m ready to tackle another day. But despite
his excesses, Associated Press reports that Kurzweil is not a health
nut. He just wants to hang around long enough to be immortal.
In his book “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live
Forever,” Kurzweil and co-author Terry Grossman suggest that science
is a mere 20 years from promising physical immortality for all. At
age 56, he doesn’t want to die of something mundane – aside from his
punitive diet, AP reports he doesn’t tailgate or take chances on the
freeway – before the eternity ship sails in on a sea of alkaline
water and green tea.
Spanning that sea is what Kurzweil and Grossman call the
“three bridges to immortality.” The first is the tortuous diet and
health routine Kurzweil subjects himself to. The pills and gallons
of fluid sound awfully rough on the kidneys, but let’s assume it
works.
That takes us to the second bridge, a “biotechnological
revolution” that would put humanity in charge of its own genes,
allowing us to promote the good genes and eradicate the bad. The
authors don’t call it eugenics but that’s pretty much what it is,
presumably without the nasty reputation the practice picked up in
the last century.
The third bridge will come from advances in
nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Kurzweil foresees
molecule-sized robots scurrying about our bodies destroying disease
and undoing the consequences of time and age. Enhanced by nano-computers,
science will “obliterate known limits on human intelligence.”
I’m not sure robotized creatures with test tube genes
meet the dictionary definition of “human,” but for argument’s sake
let’s assume they would. Let’s take a further leap and accept all
this is even possible, and within 20 years. The biggest remaining
question would be why anyone would want to live forever in earthly
form, or the approximation of it Kurzweil has in mind.
The AP story says Kurzweil knows “science can’t answer
questions about why eternal lives are worth living. That’s left for
philosophers and theologians.” In other words, he wants to live
forever for no particular reason.
As near as I can tell Ray Kurzweil is not a crackpot, at
least not in the conventional sense (if there is such a thing as a
conventional crackpot). He is the winner of a $500,000 Lemelson-MIT
prize, one of the top honors for inventors. He won the 1999
National Medal of Technology Award and was inducted into the
Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventions that include a machine
that reads any type font, for use by the blind. Yet he seeks a
purposeless immortality, clothed in mortal flesh.
Sherwin Nuland, a professor at Yale University’s School
of Medicine, might have his finger on Kurzweil’s motivation even if
Kurzweil himself does not. According to Nuland, the famed inventor
is “a product of a narcissistic age when brilliant people are
becoming obsessed with their longevity. They’ve forgotten they’re
acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction, and it
distorts their rational approach to the human condition.”
I found nothing on Ray Kurzweil’s religious understanding,
but I suspect he would find much in common with Bertrand Russell.
Lacking purpose, the only thing left is fear.
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