Technofascism and Materialism Will March Arm-in-Arm

Advances in high technology create a new possibility of oppression: the specter of technofascism. 

A recent article you can read here is entitled "How Epstein Channelled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite." It is based largely on emails very recently released as part of the release of documents of Jeffrey Epstein. The subtitle of the article says, "The Epstein files expose how racial hierarchy, genetic 'optimisation' and even climate-driven population culling circulated inside Big Tech circles." 

Here are some excerpts from the article, which includes references to ideas about "population thinning" or "population culling," apparently ideas that certain groups regarded as "inferior" or "less useful" should be allowed to die, for the sake of improving humanity's genetic stock. The article also references an Edge.org web site and series of books I discuss in my post here.  

"Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI....As previously reported in Byline Supplement, Bostrom would go on to openly advocate in utero selective breeding to enhance population IQ; total global surveillance by artificial intelligence to prevent human extinction; and the idea that sacrificing a billion lives today might be worth it to improve the chances that ten to the fifty-fourth power (septendecillion) people exist in the future.

In 2009, the same year he joined Edge and became a regular contributor to the network, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (now known as Humanity+). Two years later, Jeffrey Epstein donated a total of $120,000 to Bostrom’s organisation....Epstein’s underwriting of Edge gave him extraordinary access and trust with men who were already building the systems – cloud platforms, AI architectures, digital-asset networks – that now underpin political and economic power.

Threaded through that infrastructure was a worldview that Epstein helped architect: the elevation of a self-defined cognitive aristocracy; rising scepticism toward democratic accountability; an obsession with racial and gender hierarchy, and genetic 'optimisation'; machine intelligence as the inevitable future of humanity, if it survives extinction; the legitimacy of population culling to root out inferior groups; all rooted in a hyper-reductionist, technocratic (and arguably unscientific) view of existence as a computer simulation in an amoral multiverse of simulations.

It was a worldview Epstein not merely recognised but was actively cultivating, as it conformed to his own horrific moral choices."

You could use the term "technofascism" to describe such ideas, and you could get quite a lot of justification for the use of that term from the long paper "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism" by Mark Coeckelbergh, which you can read here. Coeckelbergh describes quite a few parallels between the activities of some players in Big Tech and the activities of fascism. Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The leaders of Big Tech and their advisors spread ideologies that say that the development of AI will accelerate dramatically: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence are around the corner and will radically transform society and humanity. Influenced by thinkers such as Bostrom and MacAskill, Big Tech further promotes narratives about the long-term, cosmic future of intelligence. MacAskill (2022) has argued for longtermism: the long-term future takes priority, ethically speaking. This future is imagined as one in which humanity spreads to other planets: trillions of people living with advanced AI. But transhumanists such as Bostrom (2014), Kurzweil (2005), Yudkowsky, and Sanders go further and imagine a vast number of superintelligence beings as mergers of humans and AI. These narratives invite and support the self-regulated development of AI in the hands of Big Tech and puts tech kings such as Musk and Altman (and the thinkers who advise them) in the role of heroes and leaders in a longer term narrative of cosmic proportions: they will lead humanity on the way to the new Brave New Future, in which AI transforms everything. And this has consequences for ordinary mortals such as you and I. We might not matter so much anymore in the light of the New Brave World in the making. Today, we better follow the tech leaders. And in the future, we might well become obsolete. As Torres (2021) has warned, Silicon Valley is influenced by, and spreads, ideologies that are apocalyptic and predict doom: ends times are near and current humans might no longer be needed on the way to a transhumanist and longtermist future, where we will make way to superintelligent entities. Like the ideologies of historical forms of fascism, these tech ideologies spread a death cult and a leadership cult."

You may be baffled by these references to simulation theory and longtermism. I explain how they are related in my post "Longtermism Is Fueled by a Goofy Belief in Computer-Generated Lives," which you can read here. Simulation theory started out as Nick Bostrom's very silly speculation that we may all be merely parts of a simulated reality created by extraterrestrials. It is an enormously stupid idea based on false materialist assumptions.  What is called "longtermism" is a futurist philosophy centered upon speculations that in the future humans will be able to create gigantic numbers of artificial human lives by using computers to artificially generate something like human lives. 

Such ideas are pretty much the worst kind of nonsense, and it is all totally dependent on the false assumptions of materialism. If you believe that a human mind arises solely from a brain, you may believe that there is some way for a computer to recreate a "brain makes mind" mechanism, opening the door to computers creating something like human lives. But if you have done enough study of the endless very strong reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" ideology, reasons discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here, you will reject such a possibility. 

The reasons for rejecting materialism (and the simulation theory and longermism that are based on materialism) are many, including these:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

In the opinion article here, the Émile Torres mentioned above has some pointed criticisms of the thought of Nick Bostrom. Torres says, " Many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community."  Torres also says, "It should be clear at this point why longtermism, with its transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of 'posthumans,' is eugenics on steroids." 

If technofascism arises to stomp a boot of oppression on our heads, such technofascism will march arm-in-arm with materialism. There was a previous form of fascism that marched arm-and-arm with the materialist ideology of Darwinism: the twisted horror that was Nazism. 

Back in the Nazi days

The famed British medical journal The Lancet created a commission to examine the role of medical professionals in the Holocaust. The commission issued a long report entitled "The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today,teaching for tomorrow." You can read the report here. The report details that medical professionals were some of the key players in the Nazi slaughter of millions. Below is an excerpt from the report:

"The obsession with race and heredity helps to explain why Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess could describe National Socialism as applied biology, and why medicine came to occupy such a significant place in Nazi Germany, which has been described as a biopolitical dictatorship.  Medicine’s role was to purify and strengthen the German national body (Volkskörper) and to prepare it for its historical mission to build an empire that would last a thousand years (a concept borrowed from Christian theology). The creation of a Nazi version of medical ethics was part of this endeavour. A core element of medicine’s role was so-called race hygiene (Rassenhygiene). Developed in the early decades of the 20th century and based on darwinian terms of selection and struggle and Herbert Spencer’s concept of survival of the fittest, race hygiene describes a set of assumptions, ideological beliefs, and practices that were intended to create a strong national body by fostering the procreation of desirable elements and eradicating those considered racially undesirable or genetically unfit. Implementation of race hygiene, which overlapped considerably with the field of eugenics, became the central pillar of public health during the Nazi period."

On the beginning of page 5 of the same commission report, we read about how natural  selection ideas were at the core of eugenics ideology. The Lancet commission report is 73 pages of double-column fine print, detailing in the most explicit detail how the medical and biology authorities of Nazi Germany were enormously complicit in the immense crimes of the Nazis, providing enthusiastic crucial support at every stage. The reported results are of the greatest importance to anyone who has ever doubted mainstream biology claims about unguided evolutionary origins and "brains make minds" tenets, while asking, "Could it really be that the majority of medical and biology authorities in my country might be wrong about an important teaching?" The answer to that question (as demonstrated by the Lancet commission report) is: not only can the leading medical and biology authorities of a nation be wrong in some of their main teachings,  but they can also be enthusiastic co-participants in the most horrible crimes slaughtering millions. 

Totalitarianism uses "ends justify the means" apologetics to try to justify its crimes. Under Nazism people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of a thousand-year empire. Under Soviet communism, people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of the worldwide triumph of communism or the establishment of a worker's paradise. Technofascism theorists are now claiming that "population culling" may be justified in order to help achieve the glorious result of a future in which trillions or quadrillions of artificial lives are generated by computer server farms (maybe solar-powered computer server farms floating in space or existing on the moon). 

It's all the craziest kind of nonsense, and once you adequately study brains and minds you may realize why it is simply impossible. Minds like humans have can only arise from top-down causation such as transcendent causation. Nothing in the slow, very noisy, address-free and index-free high-molecular-turnover meat of a brain and nothing in any electronics of a computer can ever give you a thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, instantly recognizing, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self like yourself, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. 

Bostrom-inspired ideas have always hinged on the silliest word trick unworthy of any serious thinker. It's a word trick in which you start out by claiming that computers can simulate lives (referring to reality such as video games in which human actions are simulated). You then leap to the utterly unwarranted claim that human lives can be produced by computers, using the same term "simulation" to refer to such a production, switching the definition of "simulation" without announcing your switch. It's the same type of equivocation sophistry and word trickery nonsense that would be going on if you first referred to the fact that Taylor Swift is a star, and then said that this proves that Taylor Swift can heat our planet if the sun disappears, because stars are huge luminous bodies emitting enormous heat. (In English the word "star" has a double meaning, referring to popular entertainers and also objects like the sun.)

Once we move towards intelligent ideas about how we got here -- by the action of a causal reality enormously greater than ourselves -- we can move beyond the morally toxic "survival of the fittest" ideas of Darwinism, and embrace a moral viewpoint in which each human mind and each human body is to be treasured and respected, a viewpoint in which humans are never regarded as some animals to be culled.