Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn is a transhumanist.
We are still apes and are fighting all around the world. We are in the prisons of dogmatism, fundamentalism and religion. Let me say that clearly. We must learn to be rational ... The pace at which science has progressed has been too fast for human behaviour to adapt to it. As I said we are still apes. A part of our brain is still a paleo-brain and many of reactions come from our fight or flight instinct. As long as this part of the brain can take over control the rational part of the brain (we will face these problems). Some people will jump up at what I am going to say now but I think at some point of time we will have to change our brains.
Hi. I've been following Eliezer's stuff since CaTAI. Been a lurker on extropy-chat, SL4, OB and LW. I remember once participating in an #sl4 chat, and being unable to post due to my accelerating heartrate.
Lurking can be debilitating. Well, symptom rather than the disease I guess.
Considering 'bayesians' are one of his bête noires, this would be very cool, nevermind that as a teenager I learnt far more from reading Eliezer's posts at extropy and Shalizi's webbed notebooks than school.*
Another topic of discussion could be this appendage to his nanotech notebook http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/nanotech.html : "Update, 13 March 2004: At some point in the last ten years I've come to no longer believe that"
Also, Hofstadter and Chalmers seconded.
*massive understatement
I was 8 or 9 and angrily demanded to know whether it was true or not. My mother found the experience uncomfortable, because I was suggesting I'd be devastated if I found out I'd been lied to all these years but wanted to know the truth. She tried to suggest it wasn't lying, just a story, but to me it was black and white.
My Grandma once tried to suggest that I would only get presents if I believed in God, at a time when my sister was going through a theistic phase, because that was the reason for the celebration, the implication being that my sister should get presents and I shouldn't. I think at the time I found this blatant and ridiculous.