Cultivating Bias Toward More Right
Lincoln Cannon is an American philosopher and technologist who co-founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006, serving as its president from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading advocate of technological evolution and postsecular religion, combining software engineering expertise with degrees in philosophy and business. ¶ Cannon is also a founder and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God Argument, a logical argument for faith in God that has become popular among religious transhumanists. His academic work includes “Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism” published in Religion and Human Enhancement: Death, Values, and Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists” published in The Transhumanism Handbook (Springer Verlag, 2019). ¶ Mormon transhumanism, as articulated by Cannon, holds that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is central to the Mormon theological tradition, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Cannon’s work bridges religious faith with scientific advancement, advocating for the ethical use of technology to extend human abilities in ways consistent with a religious worldview.
There are at least two ways to be less wrong. You can decrease risk of being wrong, which also decreases opportunity for being right. Or you can increase opportunity for being right, which also increases risk of being wrong. Neither is necessarily proportionate.
The surest way to be less wrong is to be less—to live less, even to exist less. That which doesn’t exist is never wrong. If we imagine that to be wrong, such is so only to the extent that our imagination imbues existence. Nihilism is less wrong.
At Night's End
To remain true to life, one cannot consistently prioritize being less wrong above being more right. The former is a practical dead end—figuratively, literally, even informatically. The latter entails perpetual risk. And perpetual risk entails perpetual cost. Life demands it.
Work toward being less wrong can be and often is helpful. However, if desire to be less wrong supersedes desire to be more right, if work toward being less wrong supersedes work toward being more right, on the whole, we are servants of death.
The aspiration to be less wrong is not better than the aspiration to overcome bias. Some biases, such as love, can be worth cultivating rather than overcoming. Likewise, the risk of being more wrong can be worth the opportunity of being more right.
Will she love you back? Until you take a risk, you won’t know. That’s how life works. That’s how wisdom works. So that’s what true philosophers do. We take risks, only sometimes calculated, because we love her.
Syndicated from Lincoln Cannon.