Oblomovka

2008-09-22»

Because I didn’t shave my beard off as promised, I now have to lose a few pounds elsewhere, so as from today I’m messing with my eating habits. Not a diet, because everyone knows diets are bad, you just end up yo-yoing your weight and biting everyone’s heads off (mm, delicious heads, full of low-carb brains). No, I need to do a little gear-shift to a lifestyle that perhaps doesn’t involve random mealtimes whose name is determined by how long I can be bothered to use the microwave for (hot pizza == dinner. warm pizza == supper. cold pizza == breakfast!).

Getting up the motivation change my bad (but delightfully familiar) habits is hard for me. Like most geeks, I mostly feel that my body is just something that keeps my cerebellum from dragging in the dirt. Still, some things get me going. As you may have deduced from this blog, I have a fascination with those who wander off the mainstream in ways that I both admire and gawp at, so I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Ray Kurtzweil’s Fantastic Voyage (mental note: what a great parody show title that would make).

The three word summary for Fantastic Voyage is “The Singularity Diet”.

Everyone who, like me, was promised that John Macarthy and Daniel Hillis were seconds away from booting up Skynet in 1983 and creating a glorious hive mind as soon as their were as many Commodore 64s as neurons in the human brain, has become slowly resigned to the fact that infinite lifespans and the serious planning of a Far Edge Party was, and is, always going to be another 20 years away for the forseeable future. Kurtweil , who also wrote The Singularity is Near, is self-evidently more optimistic, but even he is running out of spare decades.

Therefore, he and his medical advisor Terry have made the sensible decision to simply stop aging until life-extension reaches the crucial “average life expectancy increases one year, every year” point.

If you were going to make me stop and pay attention to a diet, hinting that it might freeze my decrepitation long enough to allow me to download my brain into a Moravec Bush is probably going to win me over. As in all transhuman endeavours, the science of Fantastic Journey is so magnetically attractive (and heavily cited) you almost buy in, and then, bang!, suddenly they’re off wandering off talking about drinking six barrels of alkine water a day and sitting in a room for a day a week have nutrients injected intravenously into their perfectly pickled bods.

Jon Ronson would love and scorn this nuttiness, but really my sympathies are more with Julian Dibell’s attitude, which is more there but for the grace of God — oh shit, even with the grace of God and an attachment to contemporary mores in my favor, I’m almost with you. Stop messing with my mind!

Yes, [it] flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code.

No matter how you feel about the Singularity, reading about someone who takes hundreds of separate pills every day so that he can live for a thousand plus years does at least make you think about eating a salad sometimes.

Well, it’s day one of not eating crap, and I should say that I’m already more sceptical that at any point reading the book. Point one: shirataki soy/yam noodles maybe the cutting edge of low-carb nutrition, but I’m currently thinking their “authentic aroma” may just be too high a price to pay for a bazillion years of bliss. Someone upload me a doughnut!

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I was rather hoping somebody would ask me about race in the Presidential elections, because I wanted the opportunity to do a great deal of processing on that. Instead, Julian asks:

As ever the most disturbing thing about the elections for a Brit is the obsession with religion and religious weird science and all its implications. Asking all the Republican candidates their position on creationism, science and right to life seemed downright bizarre. I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine Gordon Brown and David Cameron being subjected to that (though perhaps in an Irish election).

Well, first you do have to pick out a number of variables here. The religious stuff does tend to leap out, but it’s easy to overstate it. One of the reasons why the candidates proffer opinions on these topics is that 20% of the population wants to make sure they’re not secret Dominionists, and another 20% wants to ensure they’re not going to start aborting 40 million Christian babies as soon as they get into office.

To use the clarifying effect of time rather than space, in the political sense, it’s somewhat equivalent to Labour party figures talking about unilateral disarmament or nationalisation in the Eighties. Much of the language was trying at that time to convey to the wider group “Look, we’re not freaking CRAZY”, while still reassuring their base “Don’t worry, we are indeed your kind of CRAZY”. After eight years, I don’t know what the talismanic incantations are for the bases in a Brown/Cameron election: but I’m guessing they will be there. Probably something to do with immigration.

Anyway, most US independents I speak to discard this religious noise with the same resigned aplomb as someone who doesn’t seriously believe politicians when they talk about “making Britain great again” or railing against the Nanny state.

I should say I’m not really drawing strong comparisons here between the nature of American religion and minor political issues in the UK — I’m just trying to contextualize the relative importance of the religion debate. Having c-r-a-z-y ideas about religion and holding down a deskjob (or even the Presidency) is not considered automatically inconsistent here: largely because being batshit about something religious has a fine historical pedigree in the United States. (Currently, that wonderful tolerance is somewhat constrained by the fact that nobody trusts the atheists — or, for that matter, the Mormons. Time, I think, will process all of this: after allfreaking out about Catholics is within living memory in the UK, too.)

For most, churchs remain in America what they were to the British right up until the 1950s: a place where you go for a nice quiet sit-down, meet your neighbours, maybe pick up some tins of food if you’ve fallen on hard times, and sometimes tentatively chat about deep things without feeling a berk. In the UK, I sense those roles are now played by, respectively, parks on a sunny day, the occasional power cut or flood, the dole office, and the offtopic corners of World of Warcraft forums.

And still, I hope, the tolerance grows. “No religion” as a stated preference sits between 14-16% in both the UK and in the United States, and continues to swell. I hope to live to see our first Goth President with an Emo Orthodox atheist vice-president being sworn in on a copy of Drawing Down the Moon – and perhaps on that glorious day, the wisdom of a Jedi Knight will finally grace the British Cabinet.

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