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Comment by philipkglass

1 day ago

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.

I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...

Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.

It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.

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philipkglass

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gwern  18 hours ago

This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism.

Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.

This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.

You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...

  • philipkglass  16 hours ago

    Good counterpoints. They prompted me to search through the old Extropians mailing list archive. Fedorov was discussed there in the early 2000s, but those discussions were much too late to be foundational of Western transhumanism. One of the messages pointed me to this now-long-dead link, helpfully preserved via Wayback Machine:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20010211141901/http://members.nb...

    I probably hadn't read that page in 20+ years, but it was familiar as soon as I saw it.

    • gwern  16 hours ago

      Yeah, early 2000s lines up with what I can tell. There were a few translations like https://web.archive.org/web/20021207080806/http://www.berdya... which surfaced somewhere around 2001 or 2002, and they appear to have been about the first anyone had ever heard of 'Cosmism'. Which still wasn't much at all - I was on SL4 myself starting around 2003, and I don't remember ever hearing of it (except possibly as a footnote to a footnote on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) until Stross's post. So you can imagine my surprise to learn from Stross that despite me never having heard the name, and having never seen any of this discussed on SL4 or Extropians or OB or in _Great Mambo Chicken_ or in Ettinger's _The Prospect of Immortality_ and Yudkowsky and Metzger and Max More and all the rest of us having never heard anything about this, this was nevertheless foundational to Western transhumanism... Remarkable the things you learn if you hang around long enough!

      Sarcasm aside, that was a bit of a pity, because even if it had no relationship to anything in 'TESCREAL', Cosmism is an interesting historical artifact. When I was in LA back in 2019, I was able to visit the Museum of Jurassic History where there was an exhibit of Tsiolkovsky stuff like drawings on how humanity might live in space, and it was much more interesting when you knew a little bit about the Cosmism background there.

  • thom  8 hours ago

    I agree this is somewhat manufactured. Both Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel identified as Cosmists in the mid to late 00s, but I don't remember it ever coming up on SL4/singularitarian/transhumanist mailing lists as a major source of ideas at their peak.