Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: More, Max and Vita-More, Natasha (2013-03-05), The Transhumanist Reader, John Wiley & Sons, Retrieved on 2015-03-19Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: medical transhumanism Memes
19 MAR 2015
Principles of Transhumanism and Conflict
All transhumanists to date would likely also have no disagreement with the principles of intelligent technology, self-direction, or rational thinking. Intelligent Technology “means designing and managing technologies not as ends in themselves but as effective means for improving life. Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend ‘natural’ but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.” Self-direction means ...Folksonomies: philosophy transhumanism
Folksonomies: philosophy transhumanism
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notesBy Max Moore.
19 MAR 2015
Transhumanism and the Boundaries of the Self
Transhumanists’ commitment to technologically mediated transformation naturally generates great interest in the nature and limits of the self. The high level of interest in philosophy and neuroscience among transhumanists has led to a wide acknowledgment that the simple Cartesian view of the mind or self as a unitary, indivisible, and transparent entity is unsupportable. As we store more of our memories externally and create avatars, it is also becoming increasingly apparent that the bounda... 1 notes
notesBy Max Moore.
19 MAR 2015
Defining "Posthuman"
I shall define a posthuman as a being that has at least one posthuman capacity. By a posthuman capacity, I mean a general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means. I will use general central capacity to refer to the following:
healthspan – the capacity to remain fully healthy, active, and productive, both mentally and physically
cognition – general intellectual capacities, such as memory, deductive an...Folksonomies: transhumanism
Folksonomies: transhumanism
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notesFrom Nick Bostrom's "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"
19 MAR 2015
People With High Cognition Want More
First, it seems to me (based on anecdotal evidence and personal observations) that people who are already endowed with above-average cognitive capacities are at least as eager, and, from what I can tell, actually more eager, to obtain further improvements in these capacities than are people who are less talented in these regards. For instance, someone who is musically gifted is likely to spend more time and effort trying to further develop her musical capacities than is somebody who lacks a m...Folksonomies: cognition transhumanism
Folksonomies: cognition transhumanism
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notesFrom Nick Bostrom's "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"
19 MAR 2015
Can Identity Survive a 200-Year Lifespan?
Walter Glannon has argued that a lifespan of 200 years or more would be undesirable because personal identity could not be persevered over such a long life (Glannon 2002). Glannon’s argument presupposes that personal identity (understood here as a determinant of our prudential concerns) depends on psychological connectedness. On this view, we now have prudential interests in a future time segment of our organism only if that future time segment is psychologically connected to the organism... 1 notes
notesFrom Nick Bostrom's "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"
19 MAR 2015
Transhumanist Declaration (2012)
1. Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.
2. We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.
3. We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the...Folksonomies: manifesto transhumanism
Folksonomies: manifesto transhumanism
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notesThe “Transhumanist Declaration” has been modified over the years by several organizations and individuals, although there is little record of the specific modifications and their respective authors. Nevertheless, the original “Transhumanist Declaration” was crafted in 1998 by, in alphabetical order: Alexander Sasha Chislenko, Anders Sandberg, Arjen Kamphuis, Bernie Staring, Bill Fantegrossi, Darren Reynolds, David Pearce, Den Otter, Doug Bailey, Eugene Leitl, Gustavo Alves, Holger Wagner, Kathryn Aegis, Keith Elis, Lee Daniel Crocker, Max More, Mikhail Sverdlov, Natasha Vita-More, Nick Bostrom, Ralf Fletcher, Shane Spaulding, T.O. Morrow, Thom Quinn.
19 MAR 2015
The Chain of Human Rights to Morphological Freedom
The right to life, the right to not have other people prevent oneself from surviving, is a central right, without which all other rights have no meaning. But to realize the right to life we need other rights.
Another central right for any humanistic view of human rights is the right to seek happiness. Without it human flourishing is unprotected, and there is not much point in having a freedom to live if it will not be at least a potentially happy life. In a way the right to life follows from... 1 notes
notesFrom Anders Sandberg's "Morphological Freedom – Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It"
19 MAR 2015
The Umwelt Bubble
The biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term Umwelt refers to a concept about the subjective world of an organism. The world can be imagined as a soap bubble, which surrounds each individual and contains signifying markers relevant only to the world of that specific creature. This soap bubble, or Umwelt, is actively created by the individual organism in a process of forming a perception of reality, which is guided by the organism’s design, its physiology, and its needs.
According to Uexküll,...Folksonomies: perception transhumanism
Folksonomies: perception transhumanism
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notesBy Laura Beloff's "The Hybronaut Affair: A Ménage of Art, Technology, and Science"
19 MAR 2015
The Hybronaut
I have developed a concept that attempts to emphasize, cross, and further blur the borders of technology and the human. My artistic research work experiments with a networked human, whose body and environment are characteristically techno-organic. This concept developed as the techno-organic figure, what I call “the Hybronaut.” The Hybronaut proposes an “action” state of a human, whose existence and identity are deeply intertwined with its networked hybrid environment. It is understoo...Folksonomies: perspective transhumanism
Folksonomies: perspective transhumanism
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notes19 MAR 2015
Protocells
In 2007 two researchers, chemist Martin Hanczyc and artificial life scientist Takashi Ikegami, who were collaborating across disciplines agreed to test a hypothesis about the earliest forms of life (Hanczyc et al. 2007). They hypothesized that life’s precursors would need to move around their environment to take advantage of a resource-rich situation on early Earth. Hanczyc made a model system to test this hypothesis using an oil droplet that he bestowed with an internal chemical reaction, ...Folksonomies: biology origin of life
Folksonomies: biology origin of life
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notesFrom Rachel Armstrong's "Alternative Biologies"
19 MAR 2015
Filters on Text and Perception
Many of us are used to having incoming email filtered, decrypted, formatted, and shown in our favorite colors and fonts. These techniques can be taken further. Customization of spelling (e.g., American to British or archaic to modern) would be a straightforward process. Relatively simple conversions could also let you see any text with your favorite date and time formats, use metric or imperial measures, implement obscenity filters, abbreviate or expand acronyms, omit or include technical for...
1 From Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko's "Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality"
19 MAR 2015
Culture Fracturing from Information Filters
We can imagine that progress in human information-processing will face some usual social difficulties. Your angry “Klingon” relatives may find unexpected allies among “proboscically enhanced” (aka long-nosed) people protesting against using their alternative standard of beauty as a negative stereotype. The girl next door may be wary that your “re-clothing” filters leave her in Eve’s dress. Parents could be suspicious that their clean-looking kids appear to each other as tattooed... 1 notes
notesFrom Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko's "Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality"
19 MAR 2015
Religion Prevented Immortality
The other way was if you do various kinds of mumbo-jumbo then this great agent in the sky will come down and give you eternal life, in which case you could have an infinite number of sports cars. And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t... 1 notes
notesFrom Marvin Minsky'S "Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist"
19 MAR 2015
The Mind Needs Stimulation
A human totally deprived of bodily senses does not do well. After 12 hours in a sensory deprivation tank (where one floats in a body-temperature saline solution that produces almost no skin sensation, in total darkness and silence, with taste and smell and the sensations of breathing minimized) a subject will begin to hallucinate, as the mind, somewhat like a television tuned to a nonexistent channel, turns up the amplification, desperately looking for a signal, becoming ever less discriminat...Folksonomies: cognition perception
Folksonomies: cognition perception
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notesFrom Hans Moravec's "Pigs in Cyberspace"
19 MAR 2015
We are the Dreams of a Future AI
An evolving cyberspace becomes effectively ever more capacious and long lasting, and so can support ever more minds of ever greater power. If these minds spend only an infinitesimal fraction of their energy contemplating the human past, their sheer power should ensure that eventually our entire history is replayed many times in many places, and in many variations. The very moment we are now experiencing may actually be (almost certainly is) such a distributed mental event, and most likely is ... 1 notes
notesFrom Hans Moravec's "Pigs in Cyberspace"
19 MAR 2015
The Unmentioned Trade-Offs in Life Extention
Now it is not that the cell biologists can’t point to experiments which seem to fit their views, as is common in natural science. (After all, the Earth’s Moon does indeed have a geocentric orbit.) Good colleagues of mine like Robert Reis are able to produce nematode worms that live ten times longer than their unmutated controls, if they use ingenious genetic and environmental manipulation. But nematodes have well-developed physiological machinery for sustaining states of metabolic arrest,...From Michael R. Rose's "Immortalist Fictions and Strategies"
19 MAR 2015
Hyperlinks as Conversation
Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin... 1 notes
notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
19 MAR 2015
Transclusion
Now, with respect to literature, authors are frequently faced with the task of re-explaining and restating background material that has been explained well elsewhere. If you could just borrow that material, those existing good explanations, and incorporate them (with automatic credit where due), your efforts could be spent stating what is new. We introduce the concept of transclusion to separate the arrangement of a document from its content. There is an underlying shared pool of contents, an...Folksonomies: communication conversation
Folksonomies: communication conversation
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notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
19 MAR 2015
Amendments to Nature
Amendment No. 1. We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death. Through genetic alterations, cellular manipulations, synthetic organs, and any necessary means, we will endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date. We will each decide for ourselves how long we shall live.
Amendment No. 2. We will expand our perceptual range through biotechnological and computational means. We seek to exceed the perceptual abilities of any other creature and to devise novel... 1 notes
notesFrom Max More's "A Letter to Mother Nature"
19 MAR 2015
Whole Brain Emulation
We consider a strategy of straightforward duplication of the activity, and look at the numbers of some of the components. The human brain has up to one hundred billion (10^11) neurons and between one hundred trillion (10^14) and one quadrillion (10^15) synapses. But we have reached a point where for purposes of data acquisition these objects are now considered fairly large (e.g. 200 nm to 2,000 nm for synaptic spines and 4,000 nm to 100,000 nm for the neural soma), at least by the standards o...From Randal A. Koene's "Uploading to Substrate-Independent Minds"
