Shorter Michael Anissimov:
"If this one idea that doesn't make any sense (embodied human intelligence can be "digitized" without loss) is treated as 'true' then all sorts of other ideas that also don't have any connection to reality (techno-heaven, sooper-brains, sweet sweet soma, whole earth as wilderness park for robot tourists, magic for realz, telepathy, borg-collectives, and immortality) suddenly seem worthy of serious public consideration as well, even though they aren't, except possibly as science fiction, and even as science fiction these topics are a bit tired (well, that last part is mostly me, but you get the gist)."
That is to say: Classic Robot Cultism.
And I'm not at all "sorry" to say this.
Before you complain that I haven't done justice to the role of "functionalism" in this unkind abbreviation I must say that neither has Anissimov in the original -- not by a long shot -- and that this lack is incomparably more injurious to his "case" (it is really too generous to so describe his extended indulgence in the usual superlative wish-fulfillment), since his whole "conclusion" presumably relies on the "truth" of this "functionalism." Now, it seems to me that "functionalism" names a philosophical discourse more than a thesis, really, one with many contested variations and contested positions and contested implications among which Anissimov provides no substantial sense of his own preferred version or reasons for his preferences let alone reasons to think why he thinks these preferences straightforwardly "true" when every version on offer is in fact utterly controversial.
I recommend that poor H+ FTW either take up the actual science that inevitably bedevils the slick hype-nosis of the Robot Cultists and learn earlier rather than later the value of critical thinking and/or university education and/or therapy -- or else you can just go back to church with the rest of the Robot Cultists and continue to congratulate yourselves on how "right" you -- and only you -- are to insist that actually embodied intelligence could or will somehow migrate into cyberspace or that human life could or will somehow manage to be prosthetically immortalized or that history could or will end through nano-cornucopia, paradisical virtuality, or the singularitarian arrival of the Robot God, and, you know, start waiting.
I must say, that if the silly handwaving of the transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, singularitarians, cybernetic totalists, and libertechians didn't compel the attention of the unwary to the cost of us all through its eager activation of irrational passions -- mostly panic and greed -- always already occasioned by disruptive technoscientific change, through its appealingly facile oversimplifications of technodevelopmental complexities, through its misleading pseudo-priestly neologistic and guru-friendly mumbo jumbo masquerading as "cutting edge science," through its dramatic media-ready framing of issues of general concern, through its ready appropriation by incumbent interests ever eager for new rationalizations for elite-technocratic control and corporate-militarist responses to global problems (usually caused or exacerbated by themselves in the first place), that is to say, if the Robot Cultists were not positioned to do so much real and abiding damage at a time when sensible deliberation about technoscientific change has never been more urgent in fact, then it would surely be better by far just to ignore their foolishness altogether, along with the few hundred mostly North Atlantic white guys who preach it.
Unfortunately, these formulations both filter out into the mainstream in dangerously deranging ways while, more fortunately though no less tediously and embarrassingly, represent in their very extremity clarifying crystallizations of reductionist, elitist, eugenicist tendencies that prevail more generally already in mainstream neoliberal development discourse.