Transcendent Man Documentary on Ray Kurzweil.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Very interesting Documentary on Ray Kurzweil. You can download it for free on ISO HUNT, and I highly recommend it.

He is a very interesting guy. His ideology for the future of technology has all the makings of a religion. He promises eternal life, bringing back loves ones from the dead, super human powers like angels and all the rest of it. I think one needs to be cautious with this sort of stuff, very appealing to the ego that fears death. And the funny thing is that he might actually be right in some of his predictions, who really knows. What I found very fascinating is how closely the promises of transhumanism resemble that of modern Christianity.

Kurzweil's human qualities are brought to the surface by showing how much unresolved sorrow he has related to his father's early death, and how he longs to see him again, and bring him back from the dead. He also claims to refuse to accept the inevitably of death, while taking 150 vitamin supplements daily.

However, some of the research he has done on extending life might in fact be correct, but I think he is too extreme and optimistic in his approach. I will be incredibly surprised if what he believes will happen does actually happen in the short time frame he is predicting. The guy has an incredible intellect, combined with a rare inventive genius, and a deep sorrow for the thought of death. Such a combination of qualities should definitely produce a memorable character that leaves a unique imprint on history. However, there is quite a few unresolved issues in his character, which always has the makings of an ironic tragedy.

[Cory Duchesne]

@Transhumanism - I would keep my biology maintained indefinitely if I could, and if there was enough evidence that it was safe, I would improve my memory. If an improvement to any aspect of my organism was offered, if the therapy was safe, and if it benefited my wisdom, talents and genius, I would take the offer.

However, transhumanists like Kurzweil seem to be very focused on the physical - as if, they genuinely do not see the illusion, suggesting the logical capacity required for my ideas on life are absent in these people. Just the focus on his biological father shows he misses the point by a light year. For all his eloquence and scientific prowess, the man is quite far off from spiritual maturity.

Kurzweil is more a man of talent, than of genius, imo.

Here's an interesting article on him:

http://skepticblog.org/2011/04/19/the-immortalist/

Beware the prophet who proclaims the end of the world, the apocalypse, doomsday, judgment day, the second coming, the resurrection, or the Biggest Thing to Happen to Humanity ever will happen in the prophet’s own lifetime. It is our natural inclination to assume that we are special and that our generation will witness the new dawn, but the Copernican Principle tells us that we are not special. Thus, the chances that even a science-based prophecy such as that proffered by the futurist, inventor, and scientistic visionary extraordinaire Ray Kurzweil—that by 2029 we will have the science and technology to live forever—is unlikely to be fulfilled.
Transcendent Man is Barry Ptolemy’s beautifully crafted and artfully edited documentary film about Kurzweil and his quest to save humanity. If you enjoy contemplating the Big Questions in Life from a scientific perspective, you will love this film. Accompanied by the eerily haunting music of Philip Glass who, appropriately enough, also scored Errol Morris’ film The Fog of War—about another bigger-than-life character who thought he could mold the world through data-driven decisions, Robert McNamara—Transcendent Man pulls viewers in through Kurzweil’s visage of a future in which we merge with our machines and vastly extend our longevity and intelligence to the point where even death will be defeated. This point is what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” (inspired by the physics term denoting the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole), and he arrives at the 2029 date by extrapolating curves based on what he calls the “law of accelerating returns.” This is “Moore’s Law” (the doubling of computing power every year) on steroids, applied to every conceivable area of science, technology and economics.
Ptolemy’s portrayal of Kurzweil is unmistakably positive, but to his credit he includes several critics from both religion and science. From the former, a radio host named Chuck Missler, a born-again Christian who heads the Koinonia Institute (“dedicated to training and equipping the serious Christian to sojourn in today’s world”), proclaims: “We have a scenario laid out that the world is heading for an Armageddon and you and I are going to be the generation that’s alive that is going to see all this unfold.” He seems to be saying that Kurzweil is right about the second coming, but wrong about what it is that is coming. (Of course, Missler’s prognostication is the N+1 failed prophecy that began with Jesus himself, who told his followers (Mark 9:1): “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.”) Another religiously-based admonition comes from the Stanford University neuroscientist William Huribut, who self-identifies as a “practicing Christian” who believes in immortality, but not in the way Kurzweil envisions it. “Death is conquered spiritually,” he pronounced.
On the science side of the ledger, Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sagely notes: “What Ray does consistently is to take a whole bunch of steps that everybody agrees on and take principles for extrapolating that everybody agrees on and show they lead to things that nobody agrees on.” Likewise, the estimable futurist Kevin Kelly, whose 2010 book What Technology Wants paints a much more realistic portrait of what our futures may (or may not) hold, asks rhetorically “What happens in 40 years from now and Ray dies and doesn’t have his father back? What does all this mean? Was he wrong? Well, he was right about some things. But in my observation the precursors of those technologies that would have to exist simply are not here. Ray’s longing for this, his expectation, is heartwarming, but it isn’t going to happen.” Kelly agrees that Kurzweil’s exponential growth curves are accurate but that the conclusions and especially the inspiration drawn from them are not. “He seems to have no doubts about it and in this sense I think he is a prophetic type figure who is completely sure and nothing can waiver his absolute certainty about this. So I would say he is a modern day prophet…that’s wrong.”
Transcendent Man is clearly meant to be an uplifting film celebrating all the ways science and technology have and are going to enrich our lives. I don’t know if it is the music or the cinematography or the subject himself, but I found Transcendent Man to be a sad film about a genius who has been in agony since the premature death of his father at age 58. Fredric Kurzweil was a professional musician who Ray’s mother says on camera was never around while his charge was growing up. Like father like son—Kurzweil’s own workaholic tendencies in his creation of over a dozen companies starting when he was 17 meant he never really knew his father. As the film portrays the tormented inventor, Kurzweil’s mission in life seems more focused on resurrecting his patriarch than rescuing humanity.
An especially lachrymose moment is when Kurzweil is rifling through his father’s journals and documents in a storage room dedicated to preserving his memory until the day that all this “data” (including Ray’s own fading memories) can be reconfigured into an A.I. simulacrum so that father and son can be reunited. Through heavy sighs and wistful looks Kurzweil comes off not as a proselytizer on a mission but as a man tormented. It is, in fact, the film’s leitmotif. In one scene Kurzweil is shown wiping away a tear at his father’s gravesite, in another he pauses over photographs and looks longingly at mementos, and in another cut at the beach Kurzweil recalls the day his father “uncharacteristically” phoned him just days before his death, as if he’d had a premonition. Although Kurzweil says he is optimistic and cheery about life, he can’t seem to stop talking about death: “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” One wonders how much of life he is missing by over thinking death, or how burdensome it must surely be to imbibe over 200 supplement tables a day and have your blood tested and cleansed every couple of months, all in an effort to reprogram the body’s biochemistry.
There is something almost religious about Kurzweil’s scientism, an observation he himself makes in the film, noting the similarities between his goals and that of the world’s religions: “the idea of a profound transformation in the future, eternal life, bringing back the dead—but the fact that we’re applying technology to achieve the goals that have been talked about in all human philosophies is not accidental because it does reflect the goal of humanity.” Although the film never discloses Kurzweil’s religious beliefs (he was raised by Jewish parents as a Unitarian Universalist), in a (presumably) unintentionally humorous moment that ends the film Kurzweil reflects on the God question and answers it himself: “Does God exist? I would say, ‘Not yet.’” Cheeky.

[Ryan Rudolph]

that article sums him up perfectly.

His wife also made an interesting statement about him when she said that "most people find it rather bothersome to take a few pills, but my husband has no problem taking hundreds of pills every day."

To my mind, someone who is able to take hundreds of pills daily and religiously is suspect, especially considering that many of these substances science has not yet absolutely proven will not conflict with anything else or cause other long-term side effects. It would take a lot of unresolved sorrow to subject yourself to that sort of risk daily without question.

However, I do think he is a trailblazer when it comes to life extension and even introducing the ideas of perfecting the species with technology, and history will probably look at him very favorably for his ability to present the ideas the way he does. You need characters like Ray who are able to slowly warm up humanity to the notions of messing with our biology.

Basically, He is such an extreme character with one-sided views that his arguments and predictions definitely get a quick debate going. When characters like this come along, they have the ability to cause quite a bit of ambivalence in people in all sorts of backgrounds. A very positive thing for philosophy and spirituality in general.

And to be quite honest, if a new religious movement based on transhumanism emerges that is in competition with all the other major religions, the consequences would be much more beneficial for the species long-term, as you would get billion of dollars of new capital flowing into research and development in fields like genetics, nano-tech and robotics.