The British Institute of Posthuman Studies provides a visual explanation of the three dominant areas of transhumanism: super longevity, super intelligence and super wellbeing,
The revolutionary ideas of thinkers Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil and David Pearce are briefly covered in the clip.
Transhumanism is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
– Nick Bostrom, A history of transhumanist thought – Journal of Evolution and Technology.
Does consciousness exist? Why is it that we are so intimately aware of it everyday, yet incapable of properly identifying or defining it?
Why is Consciousness so Mysterious? – Notable Excerpts
Ray Kurzweil: …some philosophers say that consciousness is just an illusion, it doesn’t really exist. Do you think otherwise?
David Chalmers: I think consciousness is a thing we know about more directly than we know about anything in the world.
Ray Kurzweil: You can question that “I think consciousness exists” and that “I seem to have a focal point”…you think you’re this unified conscious but really you have these streams of data that you’re focusing on, and that’s all it is.
David Chalmers: I can question your consciousness, I can’t be 100% certain that you’re conscious…I can’t question my consciousness. I’m experiencing, I’m experiencing it directly. It’s more real than anything else.
Ray Kurzweil: …During the evolutionary process consciousness somehow came in, it was selected for because if we have an awareness of our environment we can avoid tigers a little better, maybe plant the crops better. Who knows what? But consciousness was a selected factor that maybe emerged at random then developed.
David Chalmers: The fact is any story anyone’s every told about the evolutionary role of consciousness has been quite obscure and doesn’t quite make sense. The trouble is, anything you want evolution to explain; how we react, what we see and so on. I can find some explanation for how that happens that goes wholly in terms of mechanisms and algorithms in the brain and so on. Once I spell out that story you say, “Why do you need consciousness for that?”
Ray Kurzweil:You’ve become quite well known for defining the easy problem and the hard problem. Go for it.
David Chalmers:You might want to explain how my brain perceives something in the environment. A stimulus is my retina, my brain integrates information; I react, I point, I say something. Maybe you could give an explanation of those things in terms of circuits in my brain or algorithms in my brain. But those are just the easy problems of consciousness…
David Chalmers:The hard problem of consciousness is, why is all that processing accompanied by conscious experience? Why does it feel like something from the inside? Why do we have this amazing inner movie going on in our minds all the time. The whole story you tell about neural circuits and computational mechanisms just leaves that question out.
Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller Interview with Jason Silva
Biological and Technological Convergence
When the internet does is it connects all of our minds together. And we sort of transcend the limitations of time and distance, so now we move into a post geographical world where we can come together and self organize, and have unexpected relevancy, and serendipity based on shared passions, not bounded by the skin bag. Amber Case, the Cyborg Anthropologist says that every time we make a telephone call, we’re actually creating a techno social wormhole. It’s technological mediated telepathy. Andy Clarke (Natural Born Cyborgs) says “We should stop thinking of the mental apparatus as bound by the skin bag because the reality is the mental apparatus is dance between brains, their environment, their technology, and their tools.” The extended mind thesis talks about how our iphone is not just a tool but its actually outsourcing our cognition, storing parts of our memories. Just like we have a neocortex, the iphone is part of the extended man.
Psychedelics and Technology
It’s interesting to draw the analogy between psychedelics and computers. Timothy Leary used to say you take psychedelics to get rid of your mental filters, to get rid of your preconceptions, to expand your sphere of possibility, to unbound…to free your mind. When he saw the potential of the computers and the internet, he came out in the 90s as a techno optimist and said the computers are the LSDs of the 90s. A lot of the engineers who invented the personal computer and the microprocessor, they were all tripping when they had those realizations of extending the mind with technology.
