Greenflame » Transhumanism

Disappointed…

stepheng — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:16:16 +0000

After listening to Steve’s presentation on River as a Christ-figure in the movie Serenity, I felt inspired to walk up to Heroes for Sale and grab the last two parts of the latest Serenity mini-series “Better Days” from Dark Horse comics.

Suffice to say I was disappointed. The story seemed to drag, some of the characterisation and language seemed “off”, and it didn’t really grab me like the first mini-series “Those Left Behind” did. Plus, there’s the sense of “dead men walking” if you’ve seen the film. Still, it is Serenity (and walking up the hill to the shop did clear my head of conference ‘fug’ and stretch my legs after a day sitting listing to stuff).

I also picked up the next issue in Image Comics “Transhuman” series - which deals with venture capital funding in this issue. It’s okay, but again the previous issue was much better.

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity

stepheng — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:24:15 +0000

For an interesting range of articles, video clips and other things relating to the speculative concept of the technological singularity see IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity.

Metanexus Global Spiral - Special Issue on Transhumanism

stepheng — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:54:00 +0000

Metanexus’ eMagazine/eJournal - Global Spiral - has a special issue this month on transhumanism edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson from Arizona State University.

See Global Spiral, June 2008 (Volume 9, Issue 3) - Special Issue on Transhumanism

Articles include:

I will have to make time to read them all in the next couple of weeks - perhaps one or two per day on the train?

Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology blog

stepheng — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:49:52 +0000

In one of those â€œaround the housesâ€ moments I rediscovered the Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology blog attached to Arizona State University’s Templeton Research Lectures - Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, Technology project. Something to keep track of over the next few months.

Hat tip to a BetterHumans.com : â€œGeneral repudiation of Transhumanismâ€ posting - which is less than enamoured with the ASU blog.

Transhuman - The comic mini-series

stepheng — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:14:25 +0000

Picked up the first issue of Transhuman from Image Comics yesterday. It’s a four-part mini-series in a documentary format set in the not to distant future and deals with the initial commercial forays into commercialising technologies to produce ‘off-the-shelf’ human self-modification of a transhumanist nature. I thought the first issue was quite good, and offered some insight into the commercial agendas of biotechnology often glossed over in the transhumanist literature. I’ll be interested in where the series goes.

The comic made it onto the transhumanist-related Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies blog. See IEET - Transhuman, the comic, which includes a link to some sample pages from the issue here.

Various reviews of the issue can be found at:

WCC on Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright, and Christian Churches

stepheng — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:08:25 +0000

Love to share is a downloadable resource from the World Council of Churches that aims to give some direction and guidelines for churches when considering intellectual property rights and copyright and looking at alternatives to the current situation. At some point I’d like to have some students theologically investigate these ideas so I’ll be downloading it to see what it says. [Hat tip to Tensegrities]

On a related note I’ve also been reading the WCC booklet - Globalization of Communications - by Chris Arthur. It’s about 10 years old now, but there’s some interesting starting points for further discussion in it.

But wait, there’s more…

WCC and new and emerging technologies: Able-ism: A prerequisite for transhumanism is a discussion paper on new technologies by Gregor Wolbring, who blogs over at Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno, Synthetic bio, NBICS.

And there’s also the WCC report Science, Faith & New Technologies: Transforming Life, Volume 1 : Convergent Technologies, which has some stuff in it relating to transhumanism.

Martin Rees on the ‘posthuman’ future

stepheng — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:13:01 +0000

The website Edge: The Third Culture recently asked the question “WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?” to a range of commentators. Martin Rees (President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge) responded with interesting short piece - We Should Take the ‘Posthuman’ Era Seriously.

You can also listen to him as part of the panel on the most recent episode of BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time on the concept of the Multiverse.

Death, bioethics and transhumanism

stepheng — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:25:10 +0000

I can’t remember whether I’ve posted these links before (a quick search of the blog says not), but in a week’s time I’ll just back from Dunedin having attended the New Zealand Bioethics Conference: Wellbeing and Technology so it seemed apt to note them. There’s a session on transhumanism on the last day of the conference so I’ll be interested to see what the perspectives offered there include.

New Scientist magazine had a special focus on ‘death’ back in October (see Special Report on Death - New Scientist) with a bit in it on transhumanist aspirations to overcome death (or at least, short life) - Death special: The plan for eternal life - being-human - 13 October 2007 - New Scientist (including a link to the video YouTube - Quest for immortality featuring various transhumanists and ‘techno-progressives’).

On Singularity

stepheng — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:40:34 +0000

A new user-driven blog relating to transhumanist ideas, and in particular, the technological singularity. See On Singularity:

Interesting article on leaving the H+ community

stepheng — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:23:57 +0000

Justice De Thezier, one of the most frequent contributors to the transhumanist blog Cyborg Democracy (which tends towards the ‘left’ of the H+ spectrum), wrote a posting a few weeks back about how he’s decided to abandon the transhumanist label (and also membership in the WTA). It makes for interesting reading (and has some parallels with stories told by those who leave religious communities).

Interestingly, his three points that he sees hindering a broader, more inclusive transhumanism (1. An undercritical support for technology in general and fringe science in particular; 2. A distortive ‘us vs. them’ tribe-like mentality and identity; and 3. A vulnerability to unrealistic utopian and dystopian ‘future hype’) also came out quite clearly in my own research into the ideology. (And those three points also look similar to criticisms of faith communities by some who leave - uncritical approach to doctrine; us vs. them; and escapist eschatologies).

You can read the article at CybDem: De Thezier’s New Year’s Resolution: Quit Transhumanism and the follow up article at CybDem: 2 Weeks Later….

On a related note - here’s a link to an article describing a movie being developed about the technological singularity: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Singularity In a world where it’s hard to be an expert on the science and technology (say behind global warming claims or reproductive technologies) these types of movies seem to be as much about positioning their proponents as people you can trust, as conveying useful information about their ideas. Still, I look forward to watching it critically at some point.