Download or read book Genesis Redux written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.
Download or read book Genesis Redux written by Edward Rietman and published by . This book was released on 1993-10-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Genesis Redux written by Ed Rietman and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1994 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genesis Redux makes cutting-edge research into biotechnology, neural networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, ecosystems, and cellular biology accessible. Contains artificial life simulation for BASIC, C, and Pascal programmers. Interactive programs on disk allow programmers to create complex, dynamic organisms on their PCs.
Download or read book Embodiment and Mechanisation written by Daniel Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a body, this book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. At the same time, it draws upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought in order to highlight the limitations and inadequacies of such beliefs and suggest alternative perspectives. In so doing, it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies. Illustrated with examples from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, as well as the industrial age and the recent eras of informatics, gene science and nanotechnology, Embodiment and Mechanisation highlights the ways in which technological changes have led to shifts in the definition of machine and body, investigating their shared underlying belief that all matter can be reduced to a common substance. From clockwork and cadavers to engines and energy, this volume reveals our long-standing fascination with and enduring commitment to the idea that bodies are machines and that machines are in some sense bodies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in the sociology of science and technology, embodiment, cultural studies and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Re The Ash Lad written by and published by noemata.net. This book was released on with total page 11285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Neotheology written by Immanuel Goldstein and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2004-09 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The opening sentence of the Old Testament-"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"-has actually established a mind-boggling enigma for all who would be attracted to the monotheistic proposition of creation. To create a universe with a beginning, God, who is perforce infinite and eternal, would have divided his own existence into two distinct epochs as a result. He would have had to pre-stand forever behind the act before having accomplished the feat! How is this possible? The puzzle would appear beyond the logical, finite mind to explain. Neotheology was designed to address this enigma from a secular perspective and propose a hypothetical solution to the question. Moreover, if an answer to the query is possible to decipher, then it should lead to a confrontation with the grand, underlying conundrum: given the nature of the physical cosmos, which appears to obliterate all of its created forms, why was an act of physical creation undertaken at all?
Download or read book Programmable Planet written by Ted Anton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new science is reengineering the fabric of life. Synthetic biology offers bold new ways of manufacturing medicines, clothing, foods, fragrances, and fuels, often using microbe fermentation, much like brewing beer. The technology can help confront climate change, break down industrial pollutants, and fight novel viruses. Today, researchers are manipulating life forms and automating evolution to create vegetarian “meat,” renewable construction materials, and cancer treatments. In the process, they are changing our concept of what life science can achieve. Is this a new industrial and information revolution—or dangerous tinkering that could unleash unintended consequences? Programmable Planet is a grand tour through the world of synthetic biology, telling the stories of the colorful visionaries whose ideas are shaping discoveries. Ted Anton explores the field from its beginning in fighting malaria in Africa to the COVID vaccines and beyond. Covering medical and agricultural triumphs and blunders, he examines successes in energy production, plant gene editing, and chemical manufacturing, as well as the most controversial attempts at human gene enhancement. This book reports from the front lines of research, showing policy makers’ struggle to stay abreast of the technologies they aim to regulate. Even-handed, lively, and informative, Programmable Planet gives a glimpse of the promise and problems of a new biology-based industry.
Download or read book Victorian Automata written by Suzy Anger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking to today's fascinations and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, this multidisciplinary collection is the first to examine the widespread Victorian interest in human and mechanical automata. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Download or read book Goethe Yearbook 23 written by Adrian Daub and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on Goethe and visual culture.
Download or read book A Beginner s Guide to America written by Roya Hakakian and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Hakakian's "love letter to the nation that took her in [is also] a timely reminder of what millions of human beings endure when they uproot their lives to become Americans by choice" (The Boston Globe). Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice," Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others. She captures the texture of life in a new place in all its complexity, laying bare both its beauty and its darkness as she discusses race, sex, love, death, consumerism, and what it is like to be from a country that is in America's crosshairs. Her tenderly perceptive and surprisingly humorous account invites us to see ourselves as we appear to others, making it possible for us to rediscover our many American gifts through the perspective of the outsider. In shattering myths and embracing painful contradictions that are unique to this place, A Beginner's Guide to America is Hakakian's candid love letter to America.
Download or read book A Life s Journey Turning Pages written by Rick Bell and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of poetry has been 35 years in the making, spanning time from the author's adolesence to mature middle age, through love, marriage, divorce, personal loss, and death. It is comprised of a variety of subjects and themes that cover most of the emotional aspects of life that are experienced by all human beings. There are unique poems of humorous and mystical context, as well as some moving descriptions and metaphors on nature. The author believes there are strong common reference points which readers will enjoy and relate to. It reads easy and does not require any formality of poetry structure to be able to appreciate. There are many short poems, and a few longer ones, with both free verse and rhyming schemes. You are invited to come along on this journey of turning pages that reveal the experience of life well lived
Download or read book Animating the Antique written by Sarah Betzer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations—among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris—Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification. Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminantes in fin de siècle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture’s allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique. Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.
Download or read book Automatic Religion written by Paul Christopher Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers—free will and religion—are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and deliberation, religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What, then, is agency, and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century, when crucial ideas related to automatism and, in a different realm, the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans, “nearhumans,” and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical, moral, and legal traditions of the West, certain classes of people were excluded as less-than-human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, Johnson tests those boundaries, revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process, he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?
Download or read book Modernity Reimagined An Analytic Guide written by Chandra Mukerji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award in 2012, Chandra Mukerji offers with this remarkable new book an explanation of the birth and subsequent proliferation of the many strands in the braid of modernity. The journey she takes us on is dedicated to teasing those strands apart, using forms of cultural analysis from the social sciences to approach history with fresh eyes. Faced with the problem of trying to understand what is hardest to see: the familiar, she gains analytic distance and clarity by juxtaposing cultural analysis with history, asking how modernity began and how people conjured into existence the world we now recognize as modern. Part I describes the genesis of key modern social forms: the modern self, communities of strangers, the modern state, and the industrial world economy. Part II focuses on modern social types: races, genders, and childhood. Part III focuses on some of the cultural artifacts and activities of the contemporary world that people have invented and used to cope with the burdens of self-making and to react against the broken promises of modern discourse and the silent injuries of material modernism. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color photographs in its 10 chapters, MODERNITY REIMAGINED is not just an explanation, an analysis of how modern life came to be, it is also a model for how to do cultural thinking about today’s world.
Download or read book The Moving Statues of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam written by Angela Vanhaelen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform. Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.
Download or read book Animating Empire written by Jessica Keating and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire, Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meaning they held. The intricate gilt, silver, enameled, and bejeweled clockwork automata, almost exclusively crafted in the city of Augsburg, represented a variety of subjects in motion, from religious figures to animals. Their movements were driven by gears, wheels, and springs painstakingly assembled by clockmakers. Typically wound up and activated by someone in a position of power, these objects and the theological and political arguments they made were highly valued by German-speaking nobility. They were often given as gifts and as tribute payment, and they played remarkable roles in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly with regard to courtly notions about the important early modern issues of universal Christian monarchy, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire, and global trade. Demonstrating how automata produced in the Holy Roman Empire spoke to a convergence of historical, religious, and political circumstances, Animating Empire is a fascinating analysis of the animation of inanimate matter in the early modern period. It will appeal especially to art historians and historians of early modern Europe. E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Download or read book Theophanic Type Scenes in the Pentateuch written by Nevada Levi DeLapp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the presence of theophanic scenes in the final form of the Pentateuch, which argues that rather than there being a single, over-arching theophanic “type-scene” there are multiple such scenes which reflect the individual theological tendencies of the biblical books within which they appear. The Genesis type-scene revolves around YHWH's promises in crisis situations (i.e., YHWH only appears when there is a crisis or threat to the Abrahamic promise). The Exodus type-scene typically includes the appearance of YHWH's dangerous fiery presence (Kabod Adonai), a communal setting, and divine action constituting or preserving Israel as a people in preparation for the Abrahamic inheritance. In Leviticus the theophanies augment the Exodus type-scene with a liturgical setting where a specific priestly action brings forth a theophanic response. DeLapp then shows how Numbers recontextualizes each of the preceding type-scenes as it retells the exodus narrative post-Sinai. When read synchronically the three type-scenes build on each other and follow the developing narrative logic of Israel's larger story. Deuteronomy then re-reads the Exodus type-scene (and indirectly the Genesis type-scene) to ensure that later readers read the theophanies appropriately (i.e., YHWH only appeared as “formless” and shrouded in “fire”).
