A blog focusing on some of the most prominent “-isms” surrounding humanity’s technological future: extropianism, transhumanism, posthumanism, the mouth-filling Singularitarianism, and others in that constellation.
March 19, 2010
• Don’t miss tweeting alter-Ray Kurzweil: All I’m saying is that if Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof read my books they would know how to write complex hypothetical narratives His bio reads, “While my physical self remains cryogenically preserved in Yucca Mountain, I maintain an active VR life where I blog in...
March 19, 2010
H+ Magazine‘s “humorist” Joe Quirk (author of “The Meaning of Life Lies in Its Suckiness,” which we discussed here) has penned another literary triumph. Watch out, Voltaire: It wasn’t until her bikini thong hit me in the face that I recognized her. It was the sophomore from Holy Cross College I’d...
March 19, 2010
The Singularity is coming this summer to a new course available at Rutgers University. The instructors are father-son duo Ted and Ben Goertzel (respectively), and a cabal of guest speakers will make appearances, including James Hughes, Aubrey de Grey, and Robin Hanson, as well as a variety of other colorful characters, including one...
March 11, 2010
Following up on my last post about artistic depictions of human life post-progress, the gentle reader is directed for his edification to our colleague Alan Jacobs’s New Atlantis essay on the “Culture” novels of Iain M. Banks. The novels are plainly meant first and foremost to be compelling science fiction, and Banks openly...
March 11, 2010
In another of the series of posts to which Professor Rubin recently responded, James Hughes argues that transhumanism has been marked by a tension between “fatalistic” beliefs in both technological progress and doom. Hughes’s intention is to establish a middle ground that acknowledges both promise and peril without assuming the...
March 9, 2010
My previous post on transhumanism and morality elicited a response from James Hughes, whose recent series of essays was my prompt. I thank Prof. Hughes for his response, although it seems to me to confirm more than not the main point of my original post. I’m confident that Prof. Hughes understands that what we are...
March 4, 2010
I don’t know if I’d take his intellectual history to the bank, but James Hughes is dealing with some serious issues in a series of blog posts about internal tensions within transhumanism as they relate to the Enlightenment ideas out of which he wants to claim it springs. In this post, for example, he notes how transhumanism is torn...
March 1, 2010
In a post that went up on his blog over the weekend, Michael Anissimov sketched out what he considers a potentially serious problem in transhumanist thinking, and he credits this blog, and particularly an important essay by Professor Rubin, with spurring his thinking. There is much in Mr. Anissimov’s post that we disagree with. There...
March 1, 2010
If you’re studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all. But philosophy, you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. -Steve Martin Anyone who sticks with a philosophy major long enough to take a philosophy of mind course will be familiar with some of the field’s...
February 26, 2010
A while back, Boing Boing featured photographer Philip Toledano’s portraits of “extreme” plastic surgery, “A New Kind of Beauty.” After posing some stock questions about the nature of beauty in his introduction to his portraits, Mr. Toledano asks, “Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and...