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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
greg egan has this story (Oracle) in which ~c.s. lewis loses a debate against ~alan turing and then is visited by a future version of himself who tells him "you're wrong about everything, god is dead, science is the only truth" what a rude and tacky thing to do to a dead person
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
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1. greg egan in the '90s absolutely fucking hates religion, spirituality, all humanities subjects and the people who study them, with an intensity i find jarring. i guess this might've made more sense during the height of the atheism wars but it strikes me as ridiculous now
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1:12 PM · Jul 7, 2022Twitter Web App
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
(not to mention "in this timeline your wife is alive because science") it takes a stunning amount of arrogance to assert so forcefully that religion has no redeeming value the way greg does. you have to believe that almost every human being who ever lived was a fucking moron
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
it's also becoming clearer that a big part of why greg thinks science deserves the level of worship he offers it is that he sees it as where all the real miracles come from; the path to acquiring real godhood
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
for someone born in 1961, 16 years after the atom bomb, 8 years before the moon landing, i can see where he's coming from. but for me, born in 1990, the biggest technological story of my lifetime seems like the rise of smartphones + websites that drive their users insane
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
that's a much less positive development than the discovery of penicillin or whatever else people want to point to. there have also been no big developments in fundamental physics, no fusion, no big medical tech advances that i know of... science has been a poor god in my lifetime
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
physics as a religion also suffers from having a deeply unsatisfying cosmology with tons of gaping holes. what caused the big bang? nobody knows. what caused cosmic inflation? "the inflaton field" ie nobody knows. what are dark matter and dark energy? nooooobody knoooows
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
there's just nothing in fundamental physics about how a person living in macroscopic reality dozens of orders of magnitude away from atoms let alone quarks ought to live their lives. it's very unsatisfying if you aren't constantly getting new technology out of it!
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
greg egan's stories just do not contain an explanation of why taking physics as your religion does not inevitably collapse into nihilism *other than* the possibility of sustained rapid technological progress being a sufficiently exciting distraction
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Marcello Herreshoff
@mherreshoff
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
I feel like "don't speak ill of the dead" is a norm that was meant for private citizens, not public ideologues who still have followings after being buried. Philosophies shouldn't get to use corpses as meat shields like that!
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
idk, fwiw i haven't read much egan, but it feels like he's embodying some very necessary stage? like, religion can be fucking horrifying, like close to abject evil, and it feels like he's speaking from having stared straight into that horror. which feels appropriate
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
it also seems kinda incomplete, like religion was in fact occupying a necessary role, and i think if we're using a 'stages' frame that u eventually climb to integrating that, and u seem right that he doesn't understand that
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