Dreams of human immortality may remain so, but extending our lives beyond 100, even 150 years, can soon become a reality. ‘The Future is Now’ explores ground-breaking technology that might help us to slow down the ageing process and overcome our physical limitations.
3D-printing of brand new human organs, controlling bionic prosthetics with your mind, or invading your body with disease-fighting microrobots. Hosts Kate and Talish bring you the latest developments in biomedical engineering.
Subjects: consciousness, psychedelics, panpsychism, transhumanism, abolishing suffering, death and immortality.
My guest today is David Pearce, a well known philosopher and transhumanist, yet his views about consciousness set him apart from other transhumanists you might be familiar with. David believes that the nature of consciousness goes much deeper than can be explained through classical physics or from within a materialist paradigm. He suspects that consciousness may reflect an intrinsic feature of reality. Whether or not this is the case, David is confident that the unity of consciousness is facilitated by a quantum unity occurring in the brain. As a result, David is skeptical about the possibility of classical computation-based “mind uploading” or truly conscious artificial intelligences arriving in the foreseeable future. But while our descendents will continue to be biological, they will however be dramatically different to us, not only with their indefinite lifespan, physical fortitude, and resilience to disease, but most significantly, in the structure of their minds. According to David, our great grandchildren will inhabit profoundly blissful mind spaces which exist exclusively “above hedonic zero”. They will have abandoned retributive emotions such as jealousy and anger, and their ordinary conscious states will be comparable to today’s peak experiences. Most significantly for David, our descendants will set their sites on abolishing suffering in all sentient life on this planet, and finally, the entire reachable universe.
The IAmTranshuman (ist) web site is about the stories of transhumanists, from professors to artists and everything in between from all walks of life. IAmTranshuman is about helping humanity grow and be more then what we were through the responsible use of technology.
Foldit is crowdsourcing a cure and needs lots new players. All Transhumanist should participate.
The University of Washington is taking a novel approach to combat the spread of coronavirus around the world.
A new puzzle game from the university challenges scientists and the public alike to build a protein that could block the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game is on Foldit, a 12-year-old website created by the university’s Center for Game Science designed to crowdsource contributions to important protein research from more than 200,000 registered players.
A fancy futuristic word like transhumanism has become a daily reality and technology has already expanded our limitations. Here you will find JD’s thoughts about the future of humanity.
A young Star Wars fan and amputee has received an R2-D2 bionic limb and a phone call from Luke Skywalker himself.
Bella Tadlock, from Tallahassee, Florida, raised almost 14,000 dollars (about £11,000) for her bionic hero arm, created by Bristol company Open Bionics.
The 11-year-old started a fundraiser that first caught the eye of actor Mark Hamill in November — Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, retweeted her appeal to his 3.6 million followers.
I interviewed the director of recently released movie ‘2030’, about the life of transhumanist pioneer FM-2030, about his film and what it was like knowing FM-2030 personally — full video here:
My interview with Johnny Boston about his film 2030, which focuses on the life of FM-2030 (born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary) — a noted transhumanist and futurist thinker.
Many of you know the sad news that theoretical physicist & mathematician Freeman Dyson has passed away, so in celebration of his life and achievements, Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute) discusses Freeman Dyson’s influence on himself and others — How might advanced alien civilizations develop (and indeed perhaps our own)? We discuss strategies for harvesting energy — star engulfing Dyson Spheres or Swarms, black hole swallowing tungsten dyson super-swarms and other galactic megastructures, we also discuss Kardashev scale civilizations (Kardashev was another great mind who we lost recently), reversible computing, birthing ideal universes to live in, Meinong’s jungle, ‘eschatological engineering’, the aestivation hypothesis, and how all this may inform strategies for thinking about the Fermi Paradox and what this might suggest about the likelihood of our civilization avoiding oblivion. though Anders is more optimistic than some about our chances of survival…
Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford) is a seminal transhumanist thinker from way back who has contributed a vast amount of mind blowing material to futurology & philosophy in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Sandberg
the photo series by vintner and fletcher illustrates three gradual stages of transhumanism from ‘testing ground’, ‘patient zero’ to ‘humanity 2.0’. at the lowest tier, ‘testing ground’ looks into individuals who have created wearable technology to expand their human abilities, improving everything from concentration to mental health.‘patient zero’ studies those who have taken permanent action to become half human and half robot. in the final chapter, ‘humanity 2.0’, the transhumanist subjects focus on life extension and immortality.
