Download or read book Posthuman Bliss written by Susan B. Levin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tightly argued and expansive examination of the pitfalls of transhumanism that reacquaints us with what it means to live well. Advocates of transhumanism, or "radical" enhancement, urge us to pursue the biotechnological heightening of select capacities - above all, cognitive ability - so far beyond any human limit that the beings with those capacities would exist on a higher ontological plane. For proponents of such views, humanity's self-transcendence through advancements in science and technology may even be morally required. Consequently, the human stakes of how we respond to transhumanism are immeasurably high. In Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism, Susan B. Levin challenges transhumanists' overarching commitments regarding the mind and brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality, showing their notion of humanity's self-transcendence into "posthumanity" to be little more than fantasy. Uniting philosophical with scientific arguments, Levin mounts a significant challenge to transhumanists' claim that science and technology support their vision of posthumanity. In a clear and engaging style, she dismantles transhumanists' breezy assurances that posthumans will emerge if we but allocate sufficient resources to that end. Far from offering theoretical and practical "proof of concept" for the vision that they urge upon us, Levin argues, transhumanists engage inadequately with cognitive psychology, biology, and neuroscience, often relying on questionable or outdated views within those fields. Having shown in depth why transhumanism should be rejected, Levin argues forcefully for a holistic perspective on living well that is rooted in Aristotle's virtue ethics but that is adapted to liberal democracy. This holism is thoroughly human, in the best of senses: It directs us to consider worthy ends for us as human beings and to do the irreplaceable work of understanding ourselves rather than relying on technology and science to be our salvation.
Download or read book Posthuman Bliss written by Susan B. Levin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transhumanists would have humanity's creation of posthumanity be our governing aim. Susan B. Levin challenges their overarching commitments regarding the mind, brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality. Her critique unmasks their notion of humanity's self-transcendence via science and technology as pure, albeit seductive, fantasy.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television written by Michael Hauskeller and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does popular culture's relationship with cyborgs, robots, vampires and zombies tell us about being human? Insightful scholarly perspectives shine a light on how film and television evince and portray the philosophical roots, the social ramifications and the future visions of a posthumanist world.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman written by Bruce Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers diverse critical treatments from fifteen scholars of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume.
Download or read book Transhumanism Entering an Era of Bodyhacking and Radical Human Modification written by Emma Tumilty and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the distinctions that underlie the unbound potential and existential risks of life expansion and radical modifications posed by a transhuman world. Humanness is in flux as human bodies are being hacked and altered in their quest for super wellness, super intelligence and super longevity. Now is the time to discuss how best to think about dealing with bodies that have been hacked to exceed natural physical limits or more technically, species typical functioning. Enter the advent of transhumanism to take uncertainty by the horns. According to transhumanists, death is unnecessary and medical conventions undermine the possibility to radically evolve. To biohackers, there is no need to wait to explore the risks that conventional medicine dares not. This book is of interest to anyone interested in tapping into this growing movement of modifying the human body as it is right now.
Download or read book Nanoethics written by Donal P. O'Mathuna and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nanotechnology manipulates matter at the atomic level. It leads to innovative processes and products that are revolutionizing many areas of modern life. Huge amounts of public funds are being invested in the science, yet the public has little understanding of the technology or its ethical implications. Indeed, the ethical, social, and political dimensions of nanotechnology are only beginning to receive the attention they require - outside of science fiction contexts. Surveillance devices may become so small that they are practically invisible to the naked eye, raising concerns about privacy. Nanomedicine may lead to the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic devices, yet anxieties have been raised about the impact of "nanobots" circulating in our bodies. Military applications, or misuses, of nanotechnology raise other concerns. This book explores in an accessible and informative way how nanotechnology is likely to impact the lives of ordinary people in the coming years and why ethical reflection on nanotechnology is needed now.
Download or read book The Substance of Consciousness written by Brandon Rickabaugh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A singularly powerful and rigorous argument in favor of modern substance dualism In The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, two distinguished philosophers deliver a unique and powerful defense of contemporary substance dualism, which makes the claim that the human person is an embodied fundamental, immaterial, and unifying substance. Multidisciplinary in scope, the book explores areas of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the sociology of mind-body beliefs. The authors present the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and rigorous non-edited work on substance dualism in the field, as well as a detailed history of how property and substance dualism have been presented and evaluated over the last 150 years. Alongside developing new and updated positive arguments for substance dualism, they also discuss key metaphysical notions and distinctions that inform the examination of substance dualism and its alternatives. Readers will also find: A thorough examination of the recent shift away from standard physicalism and the renaissance of substance dualism Comprehensive explorations of the likely future of substance dualism in the twenty-first century, including an exhaustive list of proposed research projects for substance dualists Practical discussion of new and rigorous critiques of significant physicality alternatives, including emergentism and panpsychism. Extensive treatments of philosophy of mind debates about the roles played by staunch/faint-hearted naturalism and theism in establishing or presuming methodology, epistemic priorities, and prior metaphysical commitments Perfect for professional philosophers, The Substance of Consciousness will also earn a place in the libraries of consciousness researchers, philosophical theologians, and religious studies scholars.
Download or read book Dialogues on Human Enhancement written by Nicholas Agar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We face an emerging range of technologies that can be applied to our human natures with the goal of enhancing us. There are nootropic smart drugs and gene editing that influence the development of the brain. The near future promises cybernetic technologies that can be grafted onto our brains and bodies. The challenge for readers of Dialogues on Human Enhancement is to decide how to respond to these and other coming enhancement technologies. As you read these dialogues you will meet passionate advocates for a variety of responses to enhancement tech, ranging from blanket rejection to ecstatic endorsement. You’ll encounter Olen, for whom there is no such thing as too much enhancement. You’ll meet Winston, a bioconservative who fiercely but also imaginatively opposes any human enhancement. And there is the moderate Eugenie, who strives to distinguish between enhancement technologies that should and should not be accepted. As these characters philosophically engage with each other they will benefit from the supervisory presence of Sophie, the philosopher. Dialogues on Human Enhancement does not arrive at a single conclusion. Olen’s transhumanism, Eugenie’s moderation, and Winston’s bioconservatism are presented as viable and necessary views as we enter a future made uncertain by human enhancement tech. And the book also welcomes the voices of students, even – and especially – if they challenge the opinions of our age’s experts. As students join the conversations in this book, they will formulate their own views about how humanity could or should be in our Age of Human Enhancement.
Download or read book Eclipse of Man written by Charles T. Rubin and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomorrow has never looked better. Breakthroughs in fields like genetic engineering and nanotechnology promise to give us unprecedented power to redesign our bodies and our world. Futurists and activists tell us that we are drawing ever closer to a day when we will be as smart as computers, will be able to link our minds telepathically, and will live for centuries—or maybe forever. The perfection of a “post-human” future awaits us. Or so the story goes. In reality, the rush toward a post-human destiny amounts to an ideology of human extinction, an ideology that sees little of value in humanity except the raw material for producing whatever might come next. In Eclipse of Man, Charles T. Rubin traces the intellectual origins of the movement to perfect and replace the human race. He shows how today’s advocates of radical enhancement are—like their forebears—deeply dissatisfied with given human nature and fixated on grand visions of a future shaped by technological progress. Moreover, Rubin argues that this myopic vision of the future is not confined to charlatans and cheerleaders promoting this or that technology: it also runs through much of modern science and contemporary progressivism. By exploring and criticizing the dreams of post humanity, Rubin defends a more modest vision of the future, one that takes seriously both the limitations and the inherent dignity of our given nature.
Download or read book Posthuman Life written by David Roden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We imagine posthumans as humans made superhumanly intelligent or resilient by future advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Many argue that these enhanced people might live better lives; others fear that tinkering with our nature will undermine our sense of our own humanity. Whoever is right, it is assumed that our technological successor will be an upgraded or degraded version of us: Human 2.0. Posthuman Life argues that the enhancement debate projects a human face onto an empty screen. We do not know what will happen and, not being posthuman, cannot anticipate how posthumans will assess the world. If a posthuman future will not necessarily be informed by our kind of subjectivity or morality the limits of our current knowledge must inform any ethical or political assessment of that future. Posthuman Life develops a critical metaphysics of posthuman succession and argues that only a truly speculative posthumanism can support an ethics that meets the challenge of the transformative potential of technology.
Download or read book Animals and Science Fiction written by Nora Castle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Eclectic Bestiary written by Birgit Spengler and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays, poetry, and visual art collected here consider the more-than-human cultures of our multispecies world. At a time when humanity's impact has put our planet's ecosystems into great jeopardy, the book explores literary, sonic, and visual imaginaries that feature encounters between and across a variety of living creatures: beetles and bisons, people and pigeons, trees and spiderwebs, vegetables and violets, orchards and octopi, vampires and tricksters. Offering a wide range of critical and creative contributions to Human Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies and the Nonhuman Turn, the volume seeks to foster new ways of imagining a more »response-able« coexistence on our shared Earth.
Download or read book It Rained All Night written by and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2010 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Atheist Delusions written by David Bentley Hart and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious scholar Hart argues that contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history and provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past.
Download or read book What Comes After Postmodernism in Educational Theory written by Michael A. Peters and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal, this book brings together the work of over 200 international scholars, who seek to address the question: ‘What happened to postmodernism in educational theory after its alleged demise?’. Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Scholars in various disciples have suggested that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism and the fragmentary self has given way to something else—as yet undefined. The lifecycle of postmodernism started with Derrida’s 1966 seminal paper ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’; its peak years were 1973–1989; followed by uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond (McHale, 2015). What happened after 2001? This collection provides responses by over 200 scholars to this question who also focus on what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Download or read book Superhumanity written by Nick Axel and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.
Download or read book Globalization and the Posthuman written by William S. Haney and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and the Posthuman argues that by globalizing posthumanism through biotechnology, particularly through the invasive interface of humans and machines, we may well interfere with and even undermine the innate quality of human psycho-physiology and the experience of the internal observer, the non-socially constructed self or pure consciousness. Furthermore, many features of globalization in-and-of itselfâ "such as the fall of public man, the exterritorialization of capital, the loss of an impersonal public world to localized communities based on emotively shared interestsâ "combined with the posthuman expansion of biotechnology will diminish our natural capacity to experience the self as knower and lead to an increase in global crime, sickness, accident rates and overall lack of harmony. The experience of the self comprises the unsayable secret of modern and postmodern literature and art, a secret that may soon become inaccessible if the world continues down the road of globalized infomania. The analysis of the consequences of globalization and the posthuman in this book is unique in that it will be the first to examine the interrelation between globalization, posthumanism and pure consciousness. Posthumanists define consciousness in a way that promotes the globalization of biotechnology without regard for its potential risks. This book explores the implications of the globalization of the posthuman model of consciousness. On the one hand, cognitive scientists tend to equate consciousness with subjectivity, which they associate with the thinking mind as an extension of the body, nature and culture; Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, distinguishes mind from consciousness, with mind defined as the content of consciousness. Bionic technology will have the effect of raising human metabolism and preventing the mind from settling down to the state of least excitation of consciousness. This book suggests that while conscious content is an indispensable aspect of both the human and posthuman condition, the thoughts, memories, feelings and perceptions of this content do not encompass a vital aspect of human nature attested to not only by the first-person experience of many millions of people around the world, but also by the records of both classical and modern contemplative traditions.
