From this post that includes some excerpts from Chapter 21 of his book The Patterning Instinct.
"What we see in Kurzweil’s discourse is an ultra-modern version of the
deification of reason initiated by Plato, which became the foundation
for our modern worldview. In Plato’s cosmology, our reason linked us to the divine. The early
Christians transformed this into the conception of an immortal soul
existing, after the body’s death, with God in heaven. Descartes
reformulated this dualistic framework into the modern, scientifically
acceptable mind/body split, identifying the human capacity for thought
as the essence of our existence. Kurzweil’s vision of pure intelligence
carries this dualistic tradition into the future, fueled by the power of
technology."
"Two and a half millennia ago, Plato attempted to transcend the death of
his body by making it irrelevant, imagining himself to have a soul that
would survive for eternity. Now, Kurzweil is straining towards the
actualization of Plato’s original ambition. [...] For Kurzweil, his body is 'hardware' and his mind is 'software': a
direct continuation of the dualistic Cartesian conception of the human
being. With a simple updating of terminology, Plato’s 'soul,' which
became Descartes’s 'mind,' is transformed into Kurzweil’s 'software.'
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