Very true. I just wanted to add a quote of Feynman about this: (scientist as rationalist)

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s some times taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says, “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. But I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower that he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter: there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure…also the processes.

The fact that the colors in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting – it means that insects can see the color.

It adds a question – does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms that are…why is it aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.

It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

R.P. Feynman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSZNsIFID28

Loouise!

Where do I sign up to get this kind of insight into life?

I read this, and I am proud to be on the same planet with you, and those that brought you your own insight.

I look forward to reading more, and understanding more, in the time ahead.

Pat

Just read everything. Read books, read papers, read stuff people write on the Internet. Sooner or later you’ll encounter most of these ideas, and then you can start making connections between them. For example, today I heard a talk by Dr. Zimbardo (of the Stanford prison experiment) on how humans misattribute the cause of evil due to correspondence bias. And from there you can go on into how we see evil in others but not ourselves, how humans will usually behave similarly in similar situations regardless of culture, what we perceive evil as, how all this would extrapolate under CEV, etc.

Getting back to transhumanism, in my experience cryonicists (not all of whom identify themselves with transhumanism, BTW) do tend to have certain personality types over-represented: You’ll meet more child-free, independent-minded women, men with high-functioning autism, gays, entrepreneurs, libertarians and sexual “adventurers” (for want of a better term) in cryonics gatherings than you meet in ordinary sociiety. Cryonics seems to attract people who want to make and live by their own rules in life nstead of following socially conventional patterns that don’t suit them. Outsiders who come away with the impression that cryonics attracts a strange collection of individuals haven’t made a wrong inference.

Most people have just given up, and those that haven’t usually pick an incredibly unlikely path to solve the world’s problems, get bogged down and become cynical. Pretty much every “motivational” book I’ve read on how to make a difference in the world focuses on interacting with small-scale situations you are already familiar with (”think globally, act locally”).