A great deal of our behavior is determined by our instincts and prejudices, plus… Mental Laziness.

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Why are we preparing children to live in an environment that no longer exists?  The future generation needs new rules and lessons.

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IEET has introduced the Buddhist concept of Right Speech as the tool for moderating comments and adding civility to the community. As we are using it, Right Speech is a tool for deciding if a comment is useful to the conversation. Thus, a comment needs to be true, it needs to not be abusive or divisive, and it needs to move the conversation forward.

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Free will is becoming the subject of ever greater amounts of research. I want to look at the ethical questions that arise from the discussion.

Not all religions are created equal. In past articles I have argued that religion can be a powerful force for the transformation of humans, both individually and collectively. This is not to say that religion is necessarily and always a tool for the improvement of the human species. Religion in many times and places has been anything but helpful. For example; the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval period deliberately suppressed new knowledge, oddly enough, in favour of pagan Greek philosophers.

I was checking out a facebook posting in which people were asked to suggest one additional verse to the Bible.  What was interesting was the number that said directly or indirectly that we were expected to think for ourselves. One of Jesus’ final instructions to his disciples was that they were no longer slaves but heirs. Being an heir means responsibility. It means that we need to think about what we are doing.

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Aubrey de Grey’s video lecture Tutorial on the economy of immortality got me thinking about the ethical and religious dimension of immortality.

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One of the catastrophic risks that technoprogressives take more seriously than most policy analysts is the emergence of self-willed artificial intelligence and robotics. We are skeptical of the focus on “hard take-off” scenarios, which tend to lead to fatalistic or magical thinking approaches to risk mitigation, and we emphasize instead the importance of incremental steps such as regulation of computing to avoid the creation of self-willed machine minds until we have a better handle on how to safely integrate them. In this short story Alex imagines one way that the tension between human control and the self-awareness of machine minds might play out.

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It is the nature of transhumanism to work to make humans better.

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At first glance religion and transhumanism are at opposite poles of human endeavour. Religion with its superstitions and reliance on supernatural intervention is the very kind of thing that transhumanism is trying to free the human species from. Yet there are a lot of things that transhumanism can learn from religion. There are even things that could make transhumanism and religion partners in improving the human species.

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Human beings like being part of a tribe. For example, my younger sister refused to go to a school that required school uniforms. Why?  Already, she was consistently wearing the same clothes to school everday… the same clothes as every other member of her particular “tribe.”  The problem with the school uniform was not the requirement to wear it, but that it belonged to the wrong tribal group.

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We have become so dependent on the concept of ‘human rights’ that we have become morally lazy. I propose that we need to start thinking more in terms of ‘human responsibility’.

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