 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gennady Stolyeroff II. I am the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party, and author of Death is Wrong, the illustrated children's book on indefinite life extension. And with me today, I am honored to have Bobby Rich, a researcher into transhumanism, as well as the forthcoming secretary-treasurer of the United States and Nevada Transhumanist Party. So, welcome, Bobby. Thank you. Yes. So, tell us a bit more about your research into transhumanism. What are you working on right now? It actually is in congruence with how I discovered transhumanism. I just started doing research on the scientific method and how much science impacts society. And it only took me a few months after that to discover transhumanism. And so I started doing research on December 25th, 2016. So it's really preliminary right now. And I kind of think of myself in the philosophical stage, for many reasons, because science tends to take a while first off. And second, it's hard to think of an experiment for my hypothesis, and my hypothesis being that the scientific method is the most reliable method that we know of to determine truth. And so a few problems with that hypothesis is, how do you think of an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, or attempt to falsify it? Because that would be circular reasoning, or at least it seems like that. Or maybe that further vindicates how voracious it is, how vertical it is. It's a problem of logic that I haven't quite figured out yet, may never figure out. But I try not to worry about that too much, because the impact of science seems pretty obvious in the last 400 years. And so it took me probably like two months to discover transhumanism, because I was trying to research the frontier of science and technology. And transhumanism is at that forefront. It seems like transhumanism is like a collection of all the frontiers. That's kind of how I think of the definition. At least it's what's encompassed within the definition. It's not specific discipline, it's very interdisciplinary. It could even be the broadest aspect. And it's certainly quite interesting that transhumanism is an intersection of philosophy and science and technology, and also their impacts on society and culture. And one of the things you mentioned in regard to the scientific method is the transformative impact that it has had on human lives over the past 400 years. Indeed, perhaps it is not so important to place a definitive justification on the scientific method so much as just to observe its consequence in improving everyday lives of individuals, lengthening life expectancies, creating more material prosperity and more knowledge of the world. Yeah, so that's kind of how I've been trying to describe its impact. I'm not really thinking of an experiment to attempt to falsify it, but just showing how much it's a positive impact. And there's only, I think, 8.4 million scientists in America, and 90% of the scientists that have existed throughout history are alive right now. And on top of it, you see a massive amount of oppression of science and a massive amount of illiteracy. And so for it to make such a massive impact with those hindrances, I think just shows how much merit it has. And that's a huge thing that excites me about it, and that's what led me to transhumanism. And it's definitely, the arguments of transhumanism are very convincing about indefinite longevity and ASI, and what that's going to lead to in the near future. Yes, indeed. It seems to me that transhumanism is an extension of the scientific method and the scientific process. And if you take the discoveries that have been arrived at in the past, the technologies that have been achieved, and you extrapolate them into the future, you get a kind of transhumanist world. Of course, different people will have different impressions of what that world would look like, but the idea that we're not just stopping here, we're not just stopping at the status quo, this is not the outermost edge of possibility. Would you agree that that's essentially implied by the scientific method and the pursuit of new knowledge? So you're asking how the scientific method pushes knowledge? Yeah, I think it's a problem of induction. There's an infinite of hypotheses. Yeah, it definitely seems to be pushed in front of you. But I actually take a little bit of a different approach to the scientific method. You kind of hear the same definition of it, how it's not absolute truth, and that you still have to be very skeptical of it, and there's many different other ways of determining truth, and so my hypothesis was that it's not only a reliable method, and so if you really apply that to not just determining truth, but as almost a construct of our universe, I've made a few different interesting hypotheses on top of that. For example, I think if it's the only way to have no determining truth, I apply it to consciousness, and I kind of think of, I thought of my own definition of consciousness with scientific method, which is an increase of questions and hypotheses that can be conducted by some entity, and the ability to conduct experiments and find results and propose more hypotheses is this entity's ability to become more conscious, and so that's kind of part of my paper, is outlining that definition of consciousness. It's interesting because I've had some writings on similar themes, particularly on self-awareness and personal identity, and the concept that I formulated of Inus, which is the vantage point from which one perceives the world, the idea that I experience life, I perceive the world as me and you do the same as you, and it's not really possible for me to get inside your head, inside your vantage point, I can try to, for instance, empathize with what life must be like for you and you can do the same for me, but ultimately our direct personal experience of the world, that's what we should try to preserve in terms of seeking life extension, in terms of seeking better health. That sounds like qualia. Yeah, essentially it's the qualia of being you, being who you are, and my paper from 2010, which anyone can find online, is entitled, How Can I Emphasize, Live Forever, What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self, and it's also a philosophical discussion about, well, if you interrupt conscious awareness in a certain sense, like if you go to sleep you still wake up the same person, if you go under general anesthesia you still wake up the same person, but then if somebody took you apart Adam by Adam and reconstructed you, I don't think you would be the same person. There would be some conscious entity at the other end of that, but it wouldn't have that same inus, that same qualia as you mentioned. Other domains I took the second method is with morals, and I'm trying to take it to intelligence and free will and other areas, but that's a little bit more loose right now. But for example with morals it seems like the scientific method and on controversial scientific results are in congruence with morals. Yes. For example, vaccinating your kids. Of course. People don't believe in the scientific results, and you see now like 78 cases of measles in like Minnesota. I forgot which state specifically. Yes, and there have been outbreaks say of whooping cough in California and several other states, and you're entirely correct if there are facts, scientific facts that indicate that certain courses of behavior are more or less conducive to human flourishing, then it seems that ignoring those facts deliberately would be a breach of ethics. Yeah, parents refuse to consider the science and refuse to vaccinate their children. They may be endangering their children. They also are endangering other kids. Yeah, and there's so many different examples. Climate crisis. Virtually every Republican in Congress doesn't believe in climate crisis and the evidence behind it, I think like one of them says that they agree, but they don't think it's man-made. I think it's like just a natural process, which what are they doing? They are putting our species potential extinction and some massive amount of destruction, and that kind of like shows, you know, the example of science being in congruence with morals, and it takes you like to really interesting routes of it being an arbiter, and our politicians allow to deny scientific uncontroversial scientific results, and it seems like they aren't allowed to, and if they do then they're putting us at a large risk. So you mentioned the hindrances to scientific literacy and the role of science in shaping the decisions that are made in public life. What do you think are some approaches that one might at least consider to help overcome that ignorance or resistance to scientific knowledge? Yeah, it's pretty tough. I'm not sure if I have the answer. Some people are just like so against science, and it's pretty interesting seeing them use their iPhone and their laptop. They're making arguments against science while they're on their laptop or driving their car and using GPS, and it just shows you the hypocrisy and where the mind can take somebody and helping them overcome it. I'm not entirely sure. You'd think that people would have overcome it by now in the 21st century with all the palpable evidence in front of us, but it doesn't seem to have happened. Now it's interesting. I think a lot of that, let's say, deliberate ignorance or refusal to recognize certain scientific ideas say the theory of evolution or you mentioned climate change or the efficacy of vaccines. It stems in part from the lack of immediate direct consequences to not recognizing those ideas. So let's say somebody is a young earth creationist who believes that the world started in the year 4004 BC and they can wake up tomorrow and have a fairly comfortable material life. They can use their iPhones and computers and drive their car to work and all of their technology will function as well as our technology will function. On the other hand, if someone has a pseudo-scientific theory about being able to levitate in the air without any sort of technological aid and they decide to act on it or walking out the window of a fifth-story building, something really bad is going to happen to them. This is why we don't see a lot of people hold that view. So it seems to me that the indirect nature of the consequences of certain beliefs, certain false beliefs, is what precludes people from recognizing the error. So in a sense, what do you think might be some ideas to make those consequences more real in the minds of people? Yeah, it definitely shows how fallible the mind is. You have people not believing in gravity or flatter society. And it's really tough. Neil deGrasse Tyson explained it really well. He responded to I think Lawrence Cross about Lawrence Cross just thinks that education and science is enough. I think eventually that would occur. Actually, I'm contemplating a K-12 sort of educational system to teach science instead of maybe a senior project you'd have, like the senior students publishing their paper inside some philosophy journal. And so, but Neil deGrasse Tyson explained it really well. He said that I think the last statistic was 7% of the International Science Academy they believe in a personal God and they pray to him and the 93% don't. And so he says, how can you expect the public to do better than the greatest scientists that exist right now? Or even like Isaac Newton and many just like most top tier scientists believed in a religious entity and didn't rely on scientific evidence and so how can you expect the public to do better than the greatest scientists that ever existed? And I think historically, of course, religious belief was extremely prevalent even among the most educated cutting edge thinkers of the day in part because the theoretical framework for explaining phenomena without the invocation of some divine intervention was absent, say, prior to the theory of evolution. And indeed, there were various attempts at a theory of evolution even prior to Charles Darwin say the Lamarckian theory which asserted that individual specimens can acquire traits during their lifetime and pass them on or maybe during the future with genetic engineering that might be possible but clearly it's not possible in nature right now. But prior to the 18th century age of enlightenment there wasn't this idea that you could have an emergent order from simpler elements and simpler dynamics. An order that's not a consequence of somebody's intention but rather that forms on its own through essentially a set of rules being acted upon and generating something more complex. That's essentially what evolution is. It's also what an economy is. It's an essential principle by which societies can produce, say, a lot more goods and very sophisticated cultural interactions that no individual intended. But prior to the 18th century, that was not contemplated. So a lot of even cutting-edge thinkers would say, well, at some point there needed to be an origin and there needed to be someone to set the laws in motion or to set life in motion and that would be somebody extremely powerful, maybe somebody omnipotent like a god. Actually, with religion, I think that science, I think most scientists would think that it's completely polar opposite and you can definitely make the argument and I tried making the argument that there is some overlap and so what I've noticed with linguistics is that our ability we're only capable of asking questions that are making statements and a statement can kind of be loosely defined as a hypothesis and so that's what religious people do. They have their hypotheses and that the Earth is, or even the universe is like 7 to 10,000 years old or that humans came from sand and a river or a great mumbo vomited universe and they all have their hypotheses and their conjectures and I think it is completely appropriate to believe in these things maybe even more than what the scientific evidence shows and it's what I call superlative cognitive dissonance. It's okay to have this belief even if it contradicts reality but as long as their behavior doesn't contradict reality all those people who don't believe in gravity as long as they're not teaching people to jump off buildings it's okay to have that belief because science doesn't really know it's to be purely truth. You got the problem with induction or that logical argument I made about how you can't think of an experiment to falsify an experiment whether an experiment is purely... it determines absolute truth because it seems like a particular reasoning. Scientists will know that science doesn't provide absolute truth so you could see why it's appropriate to believe in these hypotheses that don't have any evidence for them but as long as your behavior doesn't represent it. There are some interesting thoughts along these lines Voltaire did write essentially if someone can convince you to believe in absurdities then they can convince you to commit atrocities but as you pointed out that's not always the case it's not the case for every individual because there are a variety of other factors other influences that would hold that individual in check so most young earth creationists are perfectly respectable people in their day to day conduct and I think it's important also to recognize in some respects they can be our allies because they do embrace technology to a certain extent they might not mind the next version of the iPhone they might not mind the next generation of open heart surgery or artificial limbs so the question is I think in our society where you're going to have a diversity of perspectives how to get people with these diverse perspectives to align with us on practical goals like continuing the advancement of technology continuing the advancement of longer lifespans there are many religious texts but whether it's accurate or not has that at some point there used to be much longer lived humans and I don't believe that there was actually a Methuselah who lived to be 960-9 years but if a young earth creationist who is a biblical literalist believes that then maybe that could be an argument to get them on our side to say okay well, Methuselah could do it, why not us? and actually I conceived of transhumanism before I really discovered the demographic because it just seems so obvious that with the minute amount of scientists that have made such an impact in such a small amount of time obviously if imagine 7.5 billion people all on board complying with science and conducting it even that civilization would advance at an insane rate and you see it was easy to ponder about indefinite longevity and superintelligence and so that's why I was really excited to discover transhumanism and how it developed it is Yes indeed and we hope to develop it further as well now I would say first of all thank you for your time today and second welcome to the secretary-trend position of the transhumanist party we very much look forward to further discussions and to your involvement in the transhumanism Yeah, thanks a lot Thank you