Christopher Butler

September 19th 2011

Nicholas Agar

Posted at 10:26pm and tagged with: philosophy, posthumanity,.

“

I think the most interesting and pressing current questions about human enhancement are philosophical. They address human nature and values tied to human nature. These questions can be frustrating partly because the values associated with our humanity are complex. And the notion of turning ourselves into nonhuman beings—transhumans, posthumans, various types of cyborgs—is new, something explored up till now only in the most speculative science fiction. Some people think we’ve been headed down this path for a long while. We’re certainly a technological species. But this means that we’re a species that uses technology—not a species that’s destined (as Ray Kurzweil seems to think) to become technology. I don’t see how we signed up for posthumanity the minute one of us picked up a jaw bone and bashed another one of us on the head, a la Brad’s 2001: A Space Odyssey example. You can renounce a technology that hasn’t been integrated into your brain or body. If you decide that life’s better without a smartphone, you can toss it. When we start technologically upgrading our brains and bodies, renunciation’s much harder. Not all ways of applying technology to human brains and bodies are bad. But they are dangerous in a distinctive kind of way.

”

July 23rd 2010

Your Move: The Maze of Free Will

|#

Interesting, though with all the mention of moral responsibility, it would be helpful to examine whether absolute moral values exist at all. Without that question answered as a foundation, sorting out whether we are culpable for our actions is a bit beside the point. After that, if you really want to see it through, address *to whom* we are culpable.

Posted at 2:52pm and tagged with: philosophy,.

February 3rd 2010

“Cognitive fluency” — a measure of how easy it is to think about something — shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who and what we think is beautiful.

3 notes |#

Posted at 5:01pm and tagged with: ideas, philosophy,.

November 14th 2009

|#

George Dvorsky

Posted at 4:09pm and tagged with: philosophy, science, the-future,.

“

And what about the more distant future when we have even more apocalyptic devices, including molecular assembling nanotechnology and advanced biotechnologies (not to mention artificial superintelligence)? It’s been said that we are unlikely to survive the 21st Century on account of these pending technologies. But given that there are some probability trees that require our ongoing existence, what kind of future modes will that entail? Will it make sense, or will the succession of improbably survivable events result in a completely surreal existence? Or will our ongoing presence seem rational in the face of a radically altered existence mode—like totalitarian repression or the onset of an all-controlling artificial superintelligence?

”

November 9th 2009

213 notes |#

“Paradox”

Posted at 3:08pm and tagged with: science, philosophy,.

November 5th 2009

|#

Clifford Geertz (Bryan Appleyard wants you to discuss…)

Posted at 10:04am and tagged with: quote, philosophy,.

“

The concentration on violence - riots, assassinations, uprisings, and civil war - valuable in itself for understanding how such things happen and what might be done to hinder them from happening, as well as for showing to what red hells our sightless souls may stray, gives a misleading picture of religious conflict by representing it in its most pathological forms. There are profounder matters at work than mere unreason, to which, after all, all human enterprises are subject, not just those concerned with the Meaning of Life.

”

November 4th 2009

|#

Todd May, on Happy Endings

Posted at 1:06pm and tagged with: quote, philosophy, death,.

“

It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments. It would become boring, but more deeply it would become shapeless. Just one damn thing after another.

This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.

”

November 2nd 2009

|#

Bertrand Russell

Posted at 12:08pm and tagged with: quote, history, philosophy,.

“

One of the most annoying things about the modern world is that it is so much less simple than it used to be.

”

November 1st 2009

|#

This is a some incredible footage from the laboratory of Doris Taylor, a medical researcher working on revitalizing organs using stem cells. In this video, you’ll see a pig’s liver and hear that were removed from a cadaver and then washed (using basic soap) to remove the dead cells. Taylor’s lab team eventually discovered that they could get a dead, washed heart to restart, using stem cell therapy. The systems and machines that her lab has built to wash and rebuilt hearts are amazing!

Listen to the entire interview for more >

Posted at 2:19pm and tagged with: science, philosophy, video,.

October 29th 2009

NYTimes Happy Days Blog: Kierkegaard on the Couch

|#

All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has been become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced…

Posted at 10:07am and tagged with: psychology, philosophy,.

October 27th 2009

1 note |#

Martine Rothblatt on Techno-Immortality:

Lingering objections to mindclones based upon inexactitude simply misunderstand the nature of identity. Identity is a property of continuity. This means that a person’s identity can exist to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the presence or absence of its constituents. We believe that we have the same identity as we grow from teenagers to adults because to a great extent our mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values have been continually present over those years. Of course we have changed, but the changes are on top of bedrock constancy. For the same reason it is not necessary for our mindclone to share every memory with its biological original to have the same identity as that original.

The problem I have is that what we’re really talking about is a copy made of your mind prior to your physical death. Sure, this copy may outlive your ‘first’ mind for millennia to come, but your ‘first’ mind still must die with your body. That mind retains its sense of self and personhood, so there really is no escaping death. You still will die, and will experience death. Given that nobody truly knows what that experience entails beyond the physical experience, it would be foolish to assume that creating a copy is enabling immortality, or at the least, the avoidance of death.

Posted at 4:11pm and tagged with: singularity, philosophy,.

Martine Rothblatt on Techno-Immortality:
Lingering objections to mindclones based upon inexactitude simply misunderstand the nature of identity. Identity is a property of continuity. This means that a person’s identity can exist to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the presence or absence of its constituents. We believe that we have the same identity as we grow from teenagers to adults because to a great extent our mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values have been continually present over those years. Of course we have changed, but the changes are on top of bedrock constancy. For the same reason it is not necessary for our mindclone to share every memory with its biological original to have the same identity as that original.
The problem I have is that what we’re really talking about is a copy made of your mind prior to your physical death. Sure, this copy may outlive your ‘first’ mind for millennia to come, but your ‘first’ mind still must die with your body. That mind retains its sense of self and personhood, so there really is no escaping death. You still will die, and will experience death. Given that nobody truly knows what that experience entails beyond the physical experience, it would be foolish to assume that creating a copy is enabling immortality, or at the least, the avoidance of death.

October 24th 2009

|#

Posted at 12:05pm and tagged with: video, philosophy, the-future,.

October 14th 2009

Olivia Judson: "A Long, Melancholy Roar"

|#

…about how the human species is its own worst enemy…

Although predators are not an important problem for most of us today, they surely were for our ancestors. Indeed, millions of years ago, fear of predators would have been one of the forces that caused our ancestors to evolve to live in groups. The seeds of our social lives were watered with blood and nurtured by the roar of the lion and the claw of the leopard.

More recently, however, it’s been the case that the mammal most likely to kill a human is: a human. Murder and war have long been more important causes of death for us than predatory wild animals.

You can see it in the landscape. In northern Romania, monasteries were fortified against marauding armies, and painted inside and out with scenes of martyrs being massacred. Further south, in Transylvania, the churches were fortified to withstand siege. In northern India, almost every town has a fort. Southern France is littered with the ruins of fortified castles and towns. In English forests, you can often find the remnants of iron-age defenses. All traces of peoples defending themselves from attack. We are our own most fearsome predator, and have been so for thousands of years.

Posted at 5:17pm and tagged with: philosophy, quote,.