Ray Kurzweil erschrieb sich weltweit eine solide Anhängerschaft. Seine Verkündigung verlockt auch seit Jahrtausenden: Unsterblichkeit und ewiges Leben ist das Angebot. Man könnte dies nun schlicht in die Schublade „neue Sekte“ ablegen, gäbe es nicht einen entscheidenden Unterschied: Kurzweils Thesen gehen seriös von aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen aus, überhöhen diese dann aber pseudoreligiös.
Die New York Review of Books traf deshalb eine exzellente Entscheidung, John Gray über Kurzweils Weltanschauung schreiben zu lassen. Gray ist säkularer Spezialist für Utopien und Apokalypsen aller Art. Eines seiner empfehlenswerten Bücher besprach ich in einer Notiz. Hier ein kleiner Ausschnitt seiner Analyse des kurzweilschen Weltbilds:
Like Bernal, Kurzweil sees his thinking as inspired by science; but his ideas display clear affinities with some that have been central in religion. The notion that the essence of humanity is a spark of consciousness in a mortal body is a feature of some versions of Christianity and Platonism and figured in Gnostic traditions, which viewed humans as souls that were condemned to live in a dark material world. The idea of the Singularity echoes apocalyptic myths in which history is about to be interrupted by a world-transforming event.
The vision of a merger of expanded human consciousness with a self-aware universe appears in many occult and theosophical writings and in some versions of process theology, which view deity as something that emerges from within the world. The twentieth-century French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that matter was evolving and becoming ever more conscious, a process that would culminate in an “Omega Point” at which the universe would be a single self-aware being. There is nothing in Kurzweil’s work suggesting that he is familiar with any of these thinkers and traditions. Yet to a large extent what he is presenting is a mix of ideas whose historical provenance is not scientific inquiry but mystical speculation—a very different mode of thinking.
