notes-raptureOfTheNerds

The idea of the technological singularity has famously been called the "rapture of the nerds".

I have observed various unsettling parallels between the religious/spiritual ideas and symbols of people from times before the singularity was supposed, and ideas of the singularity. The most obvious explanations I can think of are these. First, perhaps the supernatural exists, and past thinkers had conveyed to them something of the essence of future events, albeit in a veiled/metaphorical form. Second (and since I do not currently believe in the supernatural, this is the explanation I prefer), perhaps archetypes (whether fundamental to the construction of the human mind, or merely conveyed obscurely by culture) have more influence on our thought than we can easily see, and that the thining of both these older religious thinkers and also the modern technological singularity futurists are being structured by these archetypes, causing their conclusions to cohere more closely than would be the case if the thought of each were totally unconstrained.

Here I will note down examples of older non-technological thinkers who say things that can be interpreted as a metaphor for something scifi-ish: