Download or read book A Cosmist Manifesto written by Ben Goertzel and published by . This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel's "Cosmist Manifesto" gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.
Download or read book The Transhumanist Reader written by Max More and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the origins and current state of transhumanist thinking The rapid pace of emerging technologies is playing an increasingly important role in overcoming fundamental human limitations. Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist Reader is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature.
Download or read book On Not Dying written by Abou Farman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death. On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding. On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?
Download or read book Virtually Sacred written by Robert M. Geraci and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of users have taken up residence in virtual worlds, and in those worlds they find opportunities to revisit and rewrite their religious lives. Robert M. Geraci argues that virtual worlds and video games have become a locus for the satisfaction of religious needs, providing many users with devoted communities, opportunities for ethical reflection, a meaningful experience of history and human activity, and a sense of transcendence. Using interviews, surveys, and his own first-hand experience within the virtual worlds, Geraci shows how World of Warcraft and Second Life provide participants with the opportunity to rethink what it means to be religious in the contemporary world. Not all participants use virtual worlds for religious purposes, but many online residents use them to rearrange or replace religious practice as designers and users collaborate in the production of a new spiritual marketplace. Using World of Warcraft and Second Life as case studies, this book shows that many residents now use virtual worlds to re-imagine their traditions and work to restore them to "authentic" sanctity, or else replace religious institutions with virtual communities that provide meaning and purpose to human life. For some online residents, virtual worlds are even keys to a post-human future where technology can help us transcend mortal life. Geraci argues that World of Warcraft and Second Life are "virtually sacred" because they do religious work. They often do such work without regard for-and frequently in conflict with-traditional religious institutions and practices; ultimately they participate in our sacred landscape as outsiders, competitors, and collaborators.
Download or read book Toward Post Ageing written by Katarina Friberg Felsted and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the emergent and expanding role of technologies that hold both promise and possible peril for transforming the ageing process in this century. It discusses the points and counterpoints of technological advances that would influence a reconstruction of what it means to age when embedded in a post-human vision for a post-biological future. The book presents a provocative interdisciplinary meta-analysis that contrasts paradigms with inflection points, making the case that society has entered a new inflection point, provisionally labeled as Post Ageing. It goes on to discuss the moderate and radical versions of this inflection point and the philosophical issues that need to be addressed with the advent of post ageing activities: postponing and possibly ending ageing, primarily through technological advances. This book will be a valuable resource for professionals who wish to review the continuum of varied constructs and intersects of technologies ranging from those purporting to enhance the activities of daily living in older adults, to those that would enable the older worker to stay competitive in the labor market, to those that propose to extend longevity and ultimately, claim to transcend ageing itself—moving toward a transhumanistic domain and more specifically, a post-ageing inflection point.
Download or read book Tales of the Turing Church Hacking religion enlightening science awakening technology written by Giulio Prisco and published by Giulio Prisco. This book was released on 2020-02-07 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores intersections of science and religion, spirituality and technology, engineering and science fiction, mind and matter, and outlines a new cosmic, transhumanist religion. Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology.
Download or read book Manifesto for the Noosphere written by Jose Arguelles and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The noosphere, identified in the early twentieth century as intrinsic to the next stage of human and terrestrial evolution, is defined as the Earth’s “mental sphere” or stratum of human thought. Manifesto for the Noosphere, the final work by renowned author José Argüelles, predicts that the noosphere will be fully accessed on December 21, 2012—but warns that we will only successfully make this evolutionary jump through an act of collective consciousness among humans on Earth. The ascension to the noosphere or Supermind (using the terminology of Sri Aurobindo), Argüelles says, will be an unprecedented “mind shift” that mirrors the emergence of life itself on the planet. Manifesto for the Noosphere is intended to inform and prepare humanity for the nature and magnitude of this shift. Argüelles brings in the Mayan long-count calendar, radical theories on the nature of time, advanced states of consciousness, and the possible intervention of galactic intelligence. He carefully details the role of the noosphere in relation to other planetary strata (hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere) as well as the history and nature of the biosphere-noosphere transition and the intermediary phases of the technosphere and cybersphere. About the Imprint: EVOLVER EDITIONS promotes a new counterculture that recognizes humanity's visionary potential and takes tangible, pragmatic steps to realize it. EVOLVER EDITIONS explores the dynamics of personal, collective, and global change from a wide range of perspectives. EVOLVER EDITIONS is an imprint of North Atlantic Books and is produced in collaboration with Evolver, LLC.
Download or read book Artifact Collective an attempt to consciousness written by Nick Stokes and published by Nick Stokes. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE is an attempt to create consciousness in a book. You begin. You are trapped in the dark under a great weight. You cannot move. His, her, their, our, your, and my consciousnesses take shape through speculation into your condition. Are you buried alive? Why? Are you alive? Are you accelerating through space in a you-shaped windowless vessel? What is your shape? Are you a flicker of light on the horizon of a black hole? Where is she? Has he lost all he loved? Speculation via thought becomes reality. Including historical, scientific, and found materials and images, ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE is a fictional and non-fictional exploration of quantum theory, cosmology, possible futures, intellectual property, interwoven presents, the commons, the individual and collective mind, and the self. ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE is a corpus. It is an artifact. ARTIFACT COLLECTIVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Download or read book Visions of Technological Transcendence written by James A. Herrick and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines key narratives animating the techno-progressive rhetoric of the human enhancement movement, arguing that enhancement and transhumanist discourse performs a variety of distinctly mythic functions. Principal among these is to cast a vision of a technological future involving enhanced posthumans, immortality, human merger with machines and space colonization.
Download or read book Quest for Meaning written by Marcel Danesi and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The go-to introductory guide to semiotic theory and practice, this second edition features a new chapter on semiotics in the digital age and sheds light on how we grasp for meaning in the modern world.
Download or read book Transhumanism written by Jennifer Huberman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a detailed exploration of the study of transhumanism, this book introduces students to the discipline of cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Totalitopia written by John Crowley and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Crowley's all-new essay “Totalitopia” is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. “This Is Our Town,” written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley’s hard-to-find masterpieces, “Gone” is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley's “Easy Chair” columns in Harper's, “Everything That Rises” explores the fractal interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities—with a nod to both Columbus and Flannery O'Connor. “And Go Like This” creeps in from Datlow's Year's Best, the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies. Plus: There's a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.
Download or read book Here be Dragons written by Olle Häggström and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a widely held conception that progress in science and technology is our salvation, and the more of it, the better. This, however, is an oversimplified and even dangerous attitude. While the future will certainly offer huge changes due to such progress, it is far from certain that all of these changes will be for the better. The unprecedented rate of technological development that the 20th century witnessed has made our lives today vastly different from those in 1900. No slowdown is in sight, and the 21st century will most likely see even more revolutionary changes than the 20th, due to advances in science, technology and medicine. Particular areas where extraordinary and perhaps disruptive advances can be expected include biotechnology, nanotechnology, and machine intelligence. We may also look forward various ways to enhance human cognitive and other abilities using, e.g., pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering or machine-brain interfaces - perhaps to the extent of changing human nature beyond what we currently think of as human, and into a posthuman era. The potential benefits of all these technologies are enormous, but so are the risks, including the possibility of human extinction. This book is a passionate plea for doing our best to map the territories ahead of us, and for acting with foresight, so as to maximize our chances of reaping the benefits of the new technologies while avoiding the dangers.
Download or read book Transhumanism Engineering the Human Condition written by Roberto Manzocco and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed to offer a comprehensive high-level introduction to transhumanism, an international political and cultural movement that aims to produce a “paradigm shift” in our ethical and political understanding of human evolution. Transhumanist thinkers want the human species to take the course of evolution into its own hands, using advanced technologies currently under development – such as robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cognitive neurosciences, and nanotechnology – to overcome our present physical and mental limitations, improve our intelligence beyond the current maximum achievable level, acquire skills that are currently the preserve of other species, abolish involuntary aging and death, and ultimately achieve a post-human level of existence. The book covers transhumanism from a historical, philosophical, and scientific viewpoint, tracing its cultural roots, discussing the main philosophical, epistemological, and ethical issues, and reviewing the state of the art in scientific research on the topics of most interest to transhumanists. The writing style is clear and accessible for the general reader, but the book will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students.
Download or read book Cosmological Theories of Value written by Mark Lupisella and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building from foundations of modern science and cosmic evolution, as well as psychological and philosophical perspectives of value and meaning, this book explores some of humanity’s biggest questions: · Is the Universe “about something”? · What might be roles for life and intelligence in cosmic evolution? · How might we think about value, meaning, purpose, and ethics in a cosmic evolutionary context? The author explores how the sciences of relativity and quantum theory, combined with cosmic evolution and philosophical traditions such as process philosophy, contribute to the development of a broad “relationalist framework”. That framework helps inform perspectives such as “scientific minimalism” and “cosmological theories of value”. Cosmological Reverence, Cosmocultural Evolution, and the Connection-Action Principle are explored as examples of cosmological theories of value, all of which help inform how we might think about ethics, value, and meaning in a cosmic context – including application to the search for extraterrestrial life and the future of intelligence in the universe. This book will benefit a diverse range of practitioners in philosophy, science, and policy, including interdisciplinary fields such as Science and Society and cultural evolution studies. From the Foreword: “This volume ranges from the sciences of cosmic evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics, to value theory and process philosophy, all with the goal of exploring how they relate to humanity in the sense of worldviews and meaning. With his three cosmological theories of value, Lupisella goes beyond the bounds of most books on naturalism, and into fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our relation to it. To read Lupisella is to have a mind-boggling experience, to want to race to references, to want to know more.” Steven J. Dick Former Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/ Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Former NASA Chief Historian
Download or read book The Scientism Delusion written by Gregory Lessing Garrett and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This enthralling page-turner breaks all the molds, and fearlessly exposes the deepest darkest intrigue in history...The Luciferian Agenda for a New World Order. In it, we learn of the Luciferian roots of Modern Science, as the reader is transported back in time to the insidious origins of modern-day Scientism, the current religion of most scientists today. Through an excursion into the roots of Scientism, Mr. Garrett deftly retraces the historical antecedents of Scientism, echoing back to The Secret Mystery Schools of Kabbalistic, Egyptian Hermeticism, onwards into the true nature of Freemason and Alchemical Occultist, Sir Isaac Newton, and then further into the nefarious Vatican Jesuit Priesthood, whose hidden hand can be linked to the creation of The Illuminati, as well as the current Luciferian New Age Religion. Finally, the serpentine path leads up into modern Freemasonic Luciferian, NASA, and then to The Jesuit Controlled Alien Deception about to take hold of the world." --Christian Chesterfield Ph.D.
Download or read book Dark Skies written by Daniel Deudney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
