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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…
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…
Take the word ghost, for example. Always having seen it speld in this way, we hav come to associate the feelings arousd by the idea ghost with its accustomd form of visual representation. To meet the word in our reading instantly and instinctivly excites those feelings in our minds. To meet the same word speld gost…
As all regions below are replenished with living creatures, (not only the Earth with Beasts, and Sea with Fishes and the air with Fowls and Insects, but also standing waters, vineger, the bodies and blood of Animals and other juices {49} with innumerable living creatures too small to be seen without the help of…
At our Institute in Princeton we sometimes organize meetings which are announced as Shotgun Seminars. A Shotgun Seminar is a talk given by an Institute member to a volunteer audience. The subject of the talk is announced a week in advance, but the name of the speaker is not. Before the talk begins, the names of all…
"Crazy?" He rounded on her, all angles and motion, and shook a finger under her nose. "I know your type and your pathetic delusions. Oh, yes, I do. You think of a library as being like the mind of a great and noble Scholar—catholic, universally educated, and precisely organized. Every opinion balanced against its…
The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within…
Flexible thinkers are able to shift through multiple perceptual positions at will. One perceptual orientation is what Jean Piaget called egocentrism, or perceiving from our own point of view. By contrast, allocentrism is the position in which we perceive through another person's orientation. We operate from this…
Ancient Taoist and Zen masters wrote about something called, "beginner's mind," or translated, the Japanese word shosin. In contemporary counseling the revolution taking place is finally catching onto their ancient message. Until around the 1990's a therapist was considered expert, authority, and guide until diverse…
Causality itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause—of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an…
How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second…
To the social philosopher and the enlightened social reformer, and best of all to the plain citizen taking thought of these matters, the first step in the right direction, the first basic principle that must underlie an understanding of the present Social Disorder and be imbedded in the foundation of the Social Order…
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the…
Man is no new-begot child of the ape, bred of a struggle for existence upon brutish lines—nor should the belief that such is his origin, oft dinned into his ears by scientists, influence his conduct. Were he to regard himself as an extremely ancient type, distinguished chiefly by the qualities of his mind, and to look…
What is a scientist?… We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to…
Lecturing after a fashion is easy enough ; teaching is a very different affair. ... The transmission of ideas from one mind to another, in a simple unequivocal form, is not always easy ; but in teaching, the object is not merely to convey the idea, but to give a lively and lasting impression; something that should not…
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as…
It has become a cheap intellectual pastime to contrast the infinitesimal pettiness of man with the vastnesses of the stellar universes. Yet all such comparisons are illicit. We cannot compare existence and meaning; they are disparate. The characteristic life of a man is itself the meaning of vast stretches of…
Imagine that George, who is wearing a spacesuit with a small, red flashing light, is floating in the absolute darkness of completely empty space, far away from any planets, stars, or galaxies. From George's perspective, he is completely stationary, engulfed in the uniform, still blackness of the cosmos. Off in the…
Many people—including, presumably, most of those reading this book—believe that death is probably the final end of all personal experience and do not expect to continue their existence in some other life or other world. In this view, it is precisely the fact that our lives are limited that makes them precious. How we…