Virtual worlds are persistent online computer-generated environments where people can interact, whether for work or play, in a manner comparable to the real world. The most popular current example is World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online game with eleven million subscribers. However, other virtual worlds, notably Second Life, are not games at all but Internet-based collaboration contexts in which people can create virtual objects, simulated architecture, and working groups.
With the search and rescue efforts officially called off in Haiti, the time has come for reconstruction. But with nearly 200,000 dead and one in nine Haitians currently homeless, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of the primary lesson learned from the catastrophe. That poverty kills. And it kills big time.
Who is the IOC to determine what is physically normal in sport? Why should the attainment of fitness peaks (natural or otherwise) be prevented or constrained? And how could they ever come to describe the perfectly ‘normal’ human athlete?
I’m still reeling from the rather anticlimactic finish to the recent Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen. Like so many others, I was hoping for an internationally binding deal that would, at the very least, compel and motivate the nations of the world to address the climate crisis in a meaningful and precedent setting way.
Abstract: If God is morally perfect then He must perform the morally best actions, but creating humans is not the morally best action. If this line of reasoning can be maintained then the mere fact that humans exist contradicts the claim that God exists. This is the “anthropic argument.” The anthropic argument is related to, but distinct from, the traditional argument from evil. The anthropic argument forces us to consider the ‘creation question’: why did God not create other gods rather than humans? That is, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect then why didn’t He create a world populated exclusively by beings that are perfect in the same way that He is—ontological equivalents—rather than choosing to create humans with finite natures and all the suffering that this entails?
It is possible to both be a practical technoprogressive, working for safe, equitable consequences of emerging technologies today, and a visionary inspired by a future with immortal lives among the stars.
Mark Walker thinks through the ethics of Americans being denied both the right to health care and the right to self-medicate, while Philippe Verdoux suggests that taking the transhumanist path to the future may only be the best of a lot of very bad options.
IEET readers have weighed in with their opinions about why the LHC project kept running into seemingly endless delays on its way to running protons into each other. Now that it’s back up and operating, perhaps some of our more far-fetched conjectures will be proved wrong.
So the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down yet again – this time on account of a bird dropping a piece of a bagel onto some sensitive outdoor machinery. The incident is not expected to keep the LHC out of commission for too much longer, but it represents yet another strange event that has kept the world’s most infamous particle accelerator out of service. In fact, the LHC has yet to function at full operational capacity since its completion over a year ago.
How does the concept of “cognitive diversity” relate to those of neurodiversity, neuroconformism, neurotypicality, and brainwashing? Is Aspergers syndrome and autism something we should cure or embrace?
I’ve often said that transhumanism is supported and strengthened by three basic impulses, namely the upholding of our reproductive, morphological and cognitive liberties. Should any one of these be absent, the tripod cannot stand. We transhumanists stand divided on any number of issues; put us in a room together and you’re guaranteed to get an argument. But one aspect that unites virtually all of us is our steadfast commitment to biolibertarianism —the suggestion that people, for the most part, deserve considerable autonomy over their minds, bodies and reproductive processes.
Science and spirituality in Western civilization began to go their separate ways centuries ago, when astronomy, biology and other observational and experimental disciplines showed in no uncertain terms that the religious world-view inherited from the Bronze Age religions of the Middle East did not correspond to the world that could be measured. The Earth most definitely revolves around the Sun, and not the other way round.
Many people, including me, are now used to being always online. With my smartphone powered by Google’s Android operating system, I am used to sending and receiving email and IMs anytime, from anywhere. It is easy to see how this trend will evolve: most routine computing applications will migrate to smartphones, the coverage and bandwidth of wireless networks will go up, and their price will go down. In only a few years, we will be used to being permanently plugged in the global Internet, and of course the user interfaces will improve. For example, as described by the visionary science fiction author Charlie Stross in his novel Halting State, augmented reality technology based on smart glasses will soon permit overcoming the limitations due to the small size of phones. A first generation of suitable smart glasses is already available, but there is something much better on the horizon: instant telepathic communication.
Are we good enough? If not, how may we improve ourselves? Must we restrict ourselves to traditional methods like study and training? Or should we also use science to enhance some of our mental and physical capacities more directly?
One of my first impressions after reading Bill Bainbridge’s 1981 essay “Religions for a Galactic Civilization” was that it was dated (well, it was written 26 years ago). I wrote: “If Bill were to write the same article today, he would probably mention NBIC technologies (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive sciences) besides space travel and colonization. I hope he would give less space to Scientology, and I am sure he would discuss the works of transhumanist thinkers in great detail. I think the first sentence quoted below could be written, today, as “We need a new transhumanist social movement capable of giving a sense of transcendent purpose to dominant sectors of the society””. I asked Bill to write a revised and updated version of the paper, to be published (translated into Italian) in the print journal Divenire of the Italian Transhumanist Association and then discussed at the TransVision 2010 conference. A first draft of the revised and updated version has just been posted to the IEET blog.
Pick up a copy of Free Inquiry. They have a special issue out on Designer Moods: The Ethics of Neurochemical Enhancement with pieces by IEET ED James Hughes and IEET Board member Mark Walker.
Good news for Battlestar Galactica fans: the new Caprica series is excellent. I finally caught the two-hour pilot and was quite impressed with the new direction. If this first episode is any indication, this is going to be a provocative and fascinating series—one that will touch upon many topics near and dear to transhumanists, including artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, consciousness transfer, virtual reality and even immortality.
Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization.
“In sorting priorities, I adopt what I term the central principle of cultural evolution, which I refer to as the Intelligence Principle: the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved.”—Stephen J. Dick
Over on his Sentient Developments blog, IEET board member George Dvorsky has compiled and posted a list of what he calls “The Top 10 Existential Movies of All Time.” As a serious film buff, I was immediately prompted to respond by naming a few important—and great—existential movies that George left off his list. I’ll get to my own favorites in a moment, but first we should lay down some ground rules.
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The Ultimate City: Urban and Rural Values in Science Fiction 
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