Josh's Goo: A Digital Journal

Mark Roth on therapeutic suspended animation

2010-03-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Here is a very interesting presentation given at TED by Mark Roth, who has conducted research into ways in which people could be 'de-animated' in order to allow more time for them to be treated if they are suffering from some sort of trauma. Roth uses the example of a heart attack, and says that the methods he's pioneered along with his fellow researches, involves lowering oxygen levels as well as the introduction of very small amounts of hydrogen sulfate to the patient, would allow us the ability to make a trauma patient 'hibernate' so that their metabolic functions slow almost to a halt. This would buy essential time in order to treat the patient before re-animating them. Here is the video -- while Roth may not appear to be the greatest public speaker, the ideas he sets forth are not that complicated, and the huge benefits we could see (and are already seeing) from this research could save thousands of lives:

I admit, when I first saw the title of this video, I was rather skeptical. Is suspended animation really in our grasp? As Roth says, he is not talking about the sort of suspended animation we might be familiar with in science fiction, where astronauts are 'frozen' and re-awakened years later when they reach their destination. Rather as I outlined above, this is a very practical sort of suspended animation which would be used in the medical field. Perhaps this technology is just the beginning of the sort of suspended animation we have seen in science fiction. However what I think is most important is that this research is being done in the medical field -- 'far out' possibilities may be fanciful, but I am at least glad to see some so called 'transhuman' sort of technology like this being used to make our own mortal lives a bit better; to buy one time or to give one a second chance where injuries may be so severe that the patient dies before any treatment can be administered.

Of course, that is the ideal side of this research. The fact is, as Roth mentions (and at least he is open and honest about this) much of his research is funded by DARPA, which researches science and technology for use in military and defense applications. As I said, I think it is wonderful to see that some of these life saving products are already being used and helping people. At the same time, however, I think it's sad that in the world we live in, the organization funneling much of the money for this research is associated with the American military. I know, it is probably better them than some rogue nation, but I just think that it would be nice if we, as a species, could fund research like this without the technology's application for the military being the primary impetus for its development. I suppose that DARPA has the money, and has the interest, in such technology, and it is good that it has been developed so quickly and can now be used to help people all over the world. I just think it would be wonderful top live in a world where technology was not primarily driven by a nation's desire for success in war. Yet, war seems to be a part of life for humans -- especially these days, it seems there is always some armed conflict occurring somewhere in the world -- so perhaps that is too much to hope for.

Frankenstein (My "To Read" List)

2010-03-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

As the title suggests, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is now on my 'list of books to read before I die.' I was used to the cheesy, black and white Hollywood re-imaginings of Frankenstein, however we watched an illuminating documentary on the development of the story and how it has since been treated in theater, cinema, and other media.

I want to read this book for two reasons. The first is that, the themes explored in the novel -- one such theme, creating life and then turning away from it, or having it turn away from its creator, is also a common theme in other science fiction stories as well as mythology (like Lucifer or Adam and Eve from the Christian tradition for instance). Others mentioned in the documentary, include the scientists creating a 'monster', something he or she is not prepared for -- opening Pandora's box as it were. These stories, I argue (quite often and vehemently), offer not only the professional scholar but also everyone else the opportunity to gain some exposure to these ideas and issues, which may (in the area of transhumansim) very soon begin to affect us all. The second is simply that I love reading science fiction, so I would like to read this book simply because it belongs to a genre I enjoy anyway, aside from the 'food for thought' science fiction can offer everyone.

Last Flesh

2010-03-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

Since I was ill last seminar, I decided to begin re-reading Christopher Dewdney's Last Flesh. We looked at this book in my Introduction to Philosophy course, and it is nice to be able to come back to it, after I have had a few years to study more philosophy and to learn more about culture, which are important for understanding Dewdney's ideas.

One things I find interesting about Dewdney's writing on the topic of transhumanism, is that he examines the aspects of western culture that he feels are bringing us to a transhuman age, rather than simply the science and technology, which thinkers such as Kurzweil tend to focus on. I think considering culture is rather important, and sadly it's something that tends to be neglected nowadays by scientists and philosophers (in fact one of the only philosophers I've read who pays serious attention to culture was Nietzsche, and I would argue that Nietzsche's thought is very important with regard to transhumanism...so important it may require an honours thesis dedicated to the subject...but I digress).

Further, Dewdney is also cognizant of what he calls a "new hubris" which is occurring amongst some of the scientists and philosophers who could be called transhumanists. This, combined with what he points out concerning the availability and rapid dissemination of misinformation (for instance, he points outs a sizable number of people believe in ghosts, UFOs, etc), leaves us vulnerable to a "new dark age" (something I've often pondered about on my own and which I could probably dedicate a whole entry to). Those are just a few of the ideas that I am re-discovering as I re-read this book, and I shall elucidate on some more of them as I continue to read and as we examine Dewdney's work in class.

Food Inc., and how humans use "stuff"

2010-03-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

A couple of seminars ago our class watched the film Food Inc. by Robert Kenner. This is a documentary film about how our food production, according to the claims made in the film, is bad for us, bad for animals and plants, and even bad for our wallets. The film has received very positive critical reviews, but of course has also generated its share of controversy among major food producers (or food "engineers," as one might start to call them after seeing this film). I myself felt that it was probably a fairly accurate portrayal of the food production industry and the oligopoly that controls so much of North America's food.

Of course there's no need to get into too much detail about the film in order to see just how it relates to our discussions in seminar. The one thing that stands out to myself the most, then, is simply the way that (if you accept the argument in the film) food producers wish to save time and money at the cost of providing food that actually meets the requirements that food should meet. What I mean is, food ought to satisfy our nutritional requirements while at the same time not bestow upon the eater an excess of things which they do not actually need for their bodies to function. Of course, everyone likes to eat a little junk food now and then. My kickboxing instructor for instance, despite instructing us on how important it is not to eat poorly and to make sure your body gets all of its necessary 'fuel' in the right proportions, maintains that if one were to eat this healthy all the time, eating wouldn't be any fun. So, a little bad food once and a while is fine. However from the impressions I got from those who were interviewed in the film, the food industry seems to be sacrificing the requirements that food ought to meet in order to save themselves time and money.

The decline in product quality to save companies time and money is something that, since I watched the Food Inc, seems to be abundant throughout all sorts of markets today. It is shocking that even the food production industry is suffering from this, but perhaps not so shocking in other industries. One thinker whom we've discussed who immediately comes to mind is Ray Kurzweil, who often demonstrates to his audience the manner in which technology has become more cheap and more powerful as the years go by. But what sounds good to Kurzweil in technology studies would probably seem rather odd in the food industry. Yet, that seems to me to be exactly what is happening -- food is cheaper and more available than ever in the west, however, a lot of these foods are very bad for us, and are having an impact on our health that we are only starting to realize. So perhaps it is not always desirable to have the cheapest, most plentiful sorts of food at our disposal. If I have to pay a little more money to eat meat that has come from a local farm and not a 'factory farm' where the animals are kept in horrible conditions, living in their own excrement, and eating food that their bodies are not naturally evolved to process, then frankly that seems perfectly acceptable to me, even if I can not afford to eat meat as often as I do now (...of course I can make up the difference by eating fewer potato chips and more broccoli, etc).

Of course all of this brings up some deeper philosophical questions, some of which Ben touched on in lecture (which got me thinking more and more about technology and nature). It is difficult enough to draw the line between natural and artificial. Just now, I said I should eat more vegetables than junk food, junk food being highly processed and perhaps even 'unnatural' (a potato chip is not the natural form of a potato). Yet the very potatoes that my crisps come from are not the same potatoes that grew wild before humans began cultivating them. Even our 'natural' potatoes are the product of years of artificial selection -- thus the variety of potatoes one finds at the grocery store today. All this started me thinking that what is natural and what is artificial are two questions that have only one part in the question of technology and nature.

If the artificial (such as domesticated vegetables and animals) has been a part of human life since the agricultural revolution, then I think the next part of the above mention question is to determine how best to incorporate our artificiality with the naturality of nature. Nature is, according to many things we've learned about it so far, simply "stuff" -- matter in motion, that obeys certain laws, as it were -- there's no pre-ordained purpose in anything in nature. This has perhaps been taken as an opportunity for humans to simply do what we will with nature, like using animals as sources of food in factory farms. However we often seem to forget that however purposeless nature can seem, it still seems to form a system of living and non living things of which we are a part, and I would argue that we cannot manipulate that system to the degree that we currently are and expect nothing bad to happen to us, for we are a part of that very system as well. It sounds a little cheesy, but we really are part of a 'circle of life,' and we cannot simply try to remove ourselves from this system by creating these artificial systems that use "stuff" from nature. Of course, nature will probably be fine whatever we do to it...but we may not be fine. We may make ourselves sick (for instance, because of the abundance of e. coli in factory farms, due to the animal's atypical diet of corn) or unhealthy (by eating foods human beings are not evolved to eat like corn products, which are in so many of our processed foods). Thus I would further argue that any sort of 'environmentalism' or 'naturalism' should really come down to what is good for human beings as well as the planet, not simply the planet.

Such are some of my thoughts about how what is presented in Food Inc. relates to the material we've been covering in class. Since this is a rather 'stream of thought' entry, I think I'd like to do some more research into philosophers who talk about science and technology. I've had the good fortune to have studied science and scientists in school (Darwin in this course, for example), and now I believe I would like to learn more about thinkers like Heidegger and Arendt, who discussed how technology affects us at many pointsd in their philosophy (so I hear).

The Dignity of Artificial Life: Animatrix and Caprica

2010-02-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

In one of our recent seminars we watched two episodes of The Animatrix, a collection of animated shorts that have to do with the universe of The Matrix films. The two which we watched in this particular class were "Flight of the Osiris" and "The Second Renaissance," and it is the latter about which I've though up a few things to write down in my journal.

"The Second Renaissance" describes the events which led to the war between humans and machines, from the advent of AI, to the creation of a nation of machines, to the destruction of the sky and the creation of the matrix, all important back-story points in The Matrix. However this is also important in one other way: it is important to consider as an example of speculative, science fiction (just like Atwood's Oryx and Crake). Indeed one particular scene from this short stood out the most at me. This was the scene where the audience sees a mob encroaching upon who is apparently a young woman. When the crowd of men begins to attack her, gradually, as more and more pieces are torn off, we see that it is not a human woman, but a robot who simply appears as one. As the mob continues to beat 'her,' we hear the robot's final words, shouted over and over at the attackers, "I'm real!"

So, that started me thinking about what I realized when I was writing my previous entry on Julian Savulescu, namely, that the question 'is humanity unfit for life?' has the potential to become a very divisive question the moment 'post-humanity' comes into being. I suppose this scene struck me as this possible divisiveness playing itself out. Granted, many other scenes in "The Second Renaissance" portray equally divisive possibilities, for instance, the competitive edge the robots have in world economic affairs produces animosity amongst the humans which reminds one of Moravec's point -- which Bill Joy also mentions -- about how even if artificial life were benevolent, its vast superiority at doing whatever robots do may simply push us, who are no longer fit to compete, out of the struggle for life (this has already happened to a large extent within the manufacturing industry). However out of all these other scenes, the one recounted above stands in my mind the clearest -- I think it is because of that machine's dying words.

All of these things in turn got me thinking even further on the matter of how on earth it could be possible for humans and artificial lifeforms to co-exist amicably. After all, all of this dark science fiction stuff aside, humans have had a pretty lousy time just getting along with other humans! (Although perhaps we've made some larger strides in the right direction these past few centuries?) In any case, if one is cognizant of how different human cultures and nations have had such a time of co-existing peacefully, then one doesn't need to read Bill Joy or Margaret Atwood to know that such a post-human future could pose some significant obstacles for the human race to contend with.

One glimmer of optimism comes from the ironically dark world in which Battlestar Galactica, which I've mentioned before, takes place. In a new series entitled Caprica, which recounts the creation of the Cylons -- robot soldiers developed for the military who rebelled against their masters -- and the war between human and Cylon, the question of the dignity of artificial life is constantly being explored. Much of this centres around a digital copy of a young girl, whose creator was killed in an act of religious terrorism early on in the story. This girl's avatar eventually finds its way, through a rather devious scheme on the part of her father and his new lawyer/mafia friend whose daughter and wife were killed in the same bombing (both of whom wanting to see their loved ones again), into one of these robot soldier prototypes. The result is essentially a new being, made of the original designer of the avatar, the avatar itself, and the robotic body, operating in unison. This robot is carted around and worked on as if it were a piece of simple machinery, but the audience is constantly shown this treatment, not from a machine's perspective, but from a human's -- the avatar of one Zoe Greystone. Such are the opportunities to explore the possible nature of artificial life, and reasons to accord it some measure of dignity as a type of life-form, in Caprica: many of the characters view this 'person' simply for what they see on the outside, a piece of machinery, a 'tool'; others see it/her as a 'work of art' and treat it with the respect they feel 'it' deserves'.

All in all, I felt that watching The Animatrix was a good springboard for launching myself into a meditation about transhumanism(s). Indeed, much of the science fiction we've been able to look at in this seminar, as well as some of the works I've encountered on my own, tie in very well with what we've been learning from the more scholarly transhumanist thinkers, especially in all the explorations these authors and thinkers make, about how we might co-exist or fail to co-exist with a post-human species of some kind. I think how we regard these possible future forms of life will probably have some influence on how they come to regard us, so devoting some study toward the question of the dignity of artificial life might be very worth our while indeed.

The Singularity as religion

2010-02-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

I was working on a entry on this very video, and then before I finished, I had yet another occasion to reflect on it because we watched it in seminar. Id like to make a few small notes on this video, since I never got my last entry finished, and since this is one of those topics I really need to get writing about. The video:

The question, in a nutshell, is whether or not 'the singularity' is a religious movement within the scientific community, which is typically seen as 'cold' and atheistic'? Kurzweil indicates that it isn't, because Kurzweil claims he is not motivated by the same things as religion is. Instead he says that he was merely interested in technology trends, and that his ideas about the singularity grew from there. Although, he concedes, his ideas on the (apparently) coming singularity do indeed fulfill some of the things religion sought to fulfill: a rational means to forestall death (science and technology) instead of rationalizing death as a positive thing when to rations means around it could be found (religion).

I do not agree with Ray Kurzweil's predictions with regard to the singularity, but I do agree that science, and seeking to understand, can provide a sort of fulfillment that I can only best describe as 'spiritual' -- spiritual in a 'Carl Sagan' or a 'Friedrich Nietzsche' sort of way. However I also think that religion and spirituality are pretty obviously two very different things. Also, Kurzweil himself seems to confuse the issue with the words he uses; he claims "the singularity doesn't start with religion," yet his own writings are replete with religious terminology. The subtitle of the book we read in seminar is "When humans transcend biology." Kurzweil could have chosen any number of more philosophical words here if he wanted do, for as he says at the outset, "[the singularity] has philosophical implications." Perhaps, "when humans overcome biology?" Don't get me wrong, I have no problem if a scholar wishes to frame their system of thought with such terms as this -- just as long as that scholar at least acknowledges what they are doing.

The questioner then repeats his question -- actually, after watching the video a few times, I'm beginning to wonder if the questioner could have thought of a better way to put his questions -- in any case, Kurzweil repeats his position, adding that religion is pre-scientific. I remember there was a little disagreement about whether science is a religious activity or not in seminar, but I agree, science is not religious: indeed even the very first scientists, like the presocratic philosopher Thales, sought to explain nature (phusis) without recourse to the gods. So my problem isn't so much with Kurzweil's claim that religion is pre-scientific. Rather it is with his claim that the idea of the singularity is scientific.

We've all studied and talking about this quite a bit in seminar so I don't need to go into too much detail here: suffice to say that after getting to study Kurzweil's ideas a little, it seems to be the case that his singularity idea is just a very big abstraction on our science and technology, out into the universe and the great metaphysical beyond of the immense past and the distant future. To sum it up, I think David Hume would have a field day with Kurzweil's book (might he have committed it to the flames because of its sophistry and illusion?). Granted Kurzweil's research into technological and scientific progress within recent history seems very sound, I just don't believe his singularity idea follows from this -- the connection between the two is a vague abstraction as I so far understand it.

So, to conclude: is religion pre-scientific? Sort of -- at the very least, science, as it began, was 'post-religion'; but is the singularity itself a scientific idea? I think Kurzweil would like to think so, although I certainly have some disagreements with regard to that.

Is humanity biologically unfit for life?

2010-02-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

That is the question which Julian Savulescu, who is "Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration, and a former editor of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics," asks in a talk given at the 2009 Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, Australia, entitled "Unfit for Life: genetically enhance humanity or face extinction." (More Info) I'll admit that the first time I watched this video, I was rather taken aback by Savulescu's rather cavalier attitude regarding his very own ideas about how to solve the problems humanity faces in the near future. However watching it a second time has allowed me to better reflect on the talk. I'll make some comments now which I've made out of the notes I took while watching Savulescu's lecture.

This time, I noted what it said in the description next to the video on the web page upon which this video is posted: "[Savulescu] argues that humans' biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design." Upon my first watching I was, as I said, a little dumbstruck (this is a rather dense presentation after all), but I decided to keep these words in mind -- that it could be all of humanity and not one particular element of it that may be unfit for life. This offered a promising freedom from the usual connotations of Nazism which can follow from the words of transhumanists, and so I decided to make sure that Savulescu's speech really was consistent with the words in the video description. Maybe, after all, all of this transhumanism(s) business isn't that dark and scary at all when it comes to our future?

Thus I set down for my re-watching of this video. Savulescu begins with some good ol' Stephen Hawking, who has said that between all sorts of threats such as asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, et cetera, that humanity's best chance of long term survival survival is to spread out into space. "However," he continued, "perhaps genetic engineering could be used to make us wiser and less aggressive" in the mean time. Beginning with Hawking's words, Savulescu begins his argument: humanity itself simply isn't biologically fit for the life in the society we would imagine ourselves living in. Upon my second watching -- and thus the relief from the dumbfoundedness of my first watching -- I realized Savulescu seemed to be stressing 'fitness' in a Darwinian sense. That is, we are not well adapted to our environment. What is our environment? To Savulescu, it could be represented in a triangle made up of Radical technological Power, Liberal Democracy, and Human Moral Limitations -- we exist, with our natural moral limitations, in a tenuous relationship with our rapidly growing technology and our liberal democratic way of life. So much for our environment, and if we find ourselves unfit for life in such an environment, then something must change. Savulescu goes on to argue that humanity might opt to change itself, by altering our genes to eliminate aggression and instill altruism -- to effect our own evolution, in an environment we've partially created (liberal democracy and our technology are both obviously human inventions). However if we've had a had in created our own environment, I cannot help but stop and ask, why can we not change our environment rather than ourselves? I shall return to this in a moment...

Savulescu then goes through a number of examples of how humanity is unfit for life in our current environment. In fact his examples all seem to illustrate something else, beyond our unfitness for the current situation -- indeed he argues we are 'stuck in the past' -- humanity is perhaps, very well evolved for life in small, hunter gatherer societies, but not for life in a liberal democratic society that possesses high science and technology. One example in particular which I shall discuss is that of love. In so doing perhaps my feelings about Savulescu's lecture might become less ambiguous.

Savulescu puts forward the idea that humans are simply not well adapted for life long monogamous relationships -- in other words, we're not fit to live up to the idea of love that has come down through the ages to us in religious institutions, et cetera. To illustrate this he provides the audience with a number of statistics and facts: 50% of marriages end in divorce, across cultures; our genes tend to make it so that we are not pre-disposed to long term monogamous relationships, and so on. If we want to live up to/fulfill our own ideas about love, then humanity requires a change in its basic nature, Savulescu continues. A change, he says, which we are now capable of making thanks to the continually advancing science and technology of genetics. This is the point at which I once again find myself stopping and asking, "Why change our genes? Why not change our ideas about ourselves?"

Take the example of love once again: if we find ourselves unable to live up to our own ideas about love, then perhaps what is needed is not to change ourselves but to simply change our ideas. Indeed, what is so bad about being wrong? If indeed it is the case that humanity is not well suited for life long monogamous relationships, then perhaps our ideas of love ought to become a little more flexible in order to accommodate relationships that could be considered more akin to our 'natural' tendencies with regard to pair bonding and reproduction? (Of course, this idea has implications of its own with regard to Savulescu's triangle, as we'll see).

Savulescu continues with a number of other examples: firstly he discusses the danger he sees us facing in the near future, where "psychopaths" (Savulescu never clarifies exactly what he means when he talks about "terrorists, psychopaths and sociopaths" -- although I tend to think that he means people like Crake from Atwood's Oryx and Crake), combined with the ease of producing lethal weapons (Savulescu notes it is now possible to manufacture a super lethal strain of human small pox, and that there is also enough insecure fissile material in the world for 20,000 nuclear bombs) spells significant reason for alarm, so he says. This, combined with our natural moral limitations -- in other words, because we function best in small, hunter gatherer societies of about 150 or less -- means that we are unlikely to survive the next century. He cites a number of authorities on this including Astronomer Royal Martin Reese, who puts our chances of surviving the next 100 years at 50%.

This, along with the fact that our previously mentioned natural limitations with regard to morality, also means we are not suited for the sort of liberal democratic society we want to live in. Indeed if everyone on the planet were to assume the same standard of living enjoyed in the West, we would quickly use up every resource on the Earth! So what is the best solution to all of these impending problems? Once again, it is to change our genes in order that we might make ourselves "wiser and less aggressive." However I once again stress the importance of changing one's ideas instead of changing one's genes: perhaps we ought to consider changing some of the ways we live? Who knows? Savulescu argues that we would all have to undergo a significant reduction in our standards of living and well as forsake some of our liberal democratic values, but this does not have to mean we'd become like some kind of Orwellian global commune. Granted, we probably would have to all undergo a drop in material wealth, or have to give up meat -- but if this were done democratically to preserve our human rights and freedoms, then would this not be an expression of freedom rather than a stifling of it? I admit, it does sound a little far fetched, but I think that the day when all of us can agree to be more responsible toward each other, and toward the planet, will be a welcome one, and a step forward for the human race. In any case, an idea such as this can always be changed. We can change our minds, but once we change our genes, those changes start to become a permanent part of the species, so I would argue that we shouldn't be as hasty as Savulescu thinks when it comes to making such changes.

That is pretty much all I have to say on Savulescu for now, although I realize, as I've mentioned, that his lecture his a dense one. I could probably write a whole thesis on these ideas if I wanted to be that meticulous, however I shall just say one more thing (I will return to look at the Q & A section on part 2 of the lecture, since it is interesting and deserves some of its own treatment in another entry). The question Savulescu asks, "is humanity unfit for life/the future?" seems a harmless enough question while we are still confined to the world of philosophical speculation and technological and scientific estimation -- to my mind, at least. However, I offer this: as soon as a 'neo-human' exists, this question will be yanked from the realm of speculation and estimation and into our real, practical, human affairs; as soon as a number of neo-humans exist -- a species of neo-humans, if you will -- then the question "is humanity unfit for the future?" has the potential to become one of the most divisive questions ever asked. Which way could all of this go? Will post-humanity live along side humanity in peace? Or will we simply be surpassed by a superior -- a more fit -- species of our own design? Thus, the very means Savulescu would have us take to avoid our own demise may also, ironically, bring in about, in the worst of all possible scenarios.

Even more Oryx and Crake

2010-02-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in one of my last entries that I wanted to talk a little more about Oryx and Crake as science fiction (for well known, perhaps over-discussed reasons). I also wanted to talk about some of the characters in the book...indeed, our professor has directed us to talk a little about this novel as a work of philosophy, as well as to make comments on the characters, and about other things Atwood presents the reader with throughout the story: her portrayal of drugs (another perspective, Baudelaire's, we have already had occasion to discuss in seminar); of men and women and gender roles; of science and technology; of sex...certainly there are many things which Atwood treats often in Oryx and Crake. So this entry is going to be a 'sort of' continuation of my last entry that dealt with this novel. I shall just talk a little bit about what I think of the characters, as well as how the book succeeds/fails as a work of sci-fi or of philosophy, and the rest will (hopefully) follow. So, here goes...

The writing was technically good, no doubt about that from me. However I found the story, at first, perhaps a little boring -- although I concede that this is purely a matter of my own personal taste. The fragmented, fast-paced read that the book provided did make up for this, however, at some points the story just seems to plod along as Jimmy did through his life. I suppose this was probably Atwood's intention, to recount the events in a very 'Jimmy-like' way, so the book is successful in this regard. The story also provides a thoughtful example of some of the elements in Bill Joy's writing.

As to whether this is actually a work of science fiction or not, I just read something interesting. Atwood herself disputes whether this book actually is a work of sci-fi as opposed to 'speculative fiction'. As a kind of sci-fi buff myself I felt I ought to talk about this a little too. Indeed quotes from Atwood such as "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen...Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians" are often brought up in discussion about what science fiction is. To my mind, what Atwood describes in the above quote is merely one kind of science fiction; not all science fiction shares in these things (The Matrix has no intergalactic space flight or martians; Battlestar Galactica has no aliens, no laser beams, and no matter-energy transportation, to name just a few examples...) Indeed the kind of "monsters and space ships" science fiction is a pretty recent invention that came with radio and television, and many of its conventions like lasers, monsters or transporter beams are a consequence of that (the 'transporter' on Star Trek, I hear, was originally conceived not for its technical ingenuity, but because it was a simple way to move the characters from one scene or another without having to do long, drawn out spaceship ride scenes). In short, I guess I feel that Atwood is splitting hairs here. Some science fiction is not speculative, some is. Some have space monsters, some don't (Star Trek has space monsters and is speculative...just saying...) There are also speculative works that do not rely on imaginative, futuristic technologies to tell their story, but what they do rely on may still be technical or scientific: Atwood's novel seems to me to fit in here. It is indeed speculative, but it also involves a lot of scientific and technical details that just happen to be a part of the world we live in. Perhaps it is speculative science fiction.

As for the characters in the story, I found myself having a hard time liking anyone in this dystopian future. Jimmy, as I've already briefly mentioned, just seems to plod along through life, convinced he's in love with a women he never actually meets until nearly the end of the story. Indeed, Oryx's death seems spur Jimmy to take one of the most significant steps toward making a difference in the world -- shooting Crake -- except that by that point in the novel, it was too late for everyone. Oryx's naivete was a disappointing feature, and again, it contributed to the downfall of everyone. Indeed, Jimmy and Oryx both exhibited their share of naivete and obliviousness toward Crake, who turned out to be a misanthropic psychopath (although psychopaths, as Julian Savulescu pointed out in his lecture, can be notoriously difficult to recognize). Out of all of the characters I suppose I'm the most puzzled by Crake -- sure, we see streaks of his misanthropy throughout the story, but that's no guarantee that the person one hears this from is going to use a biological weapon for the purposes of genocide. I suppose, I don't really understand what Crake's problem with humanity was. Indeed it was almost as if he thought of us as nothing but very technically proficient animals ("monkey brains" he often says in the book) whose evolutionary baggage was too dangerous to let them survive; thus the children of Crake.

I will probably have more to say as I continue thinking over the novel -- sometimes, those things that I dislike eventually grow on me as I think about them more.

David Blaine: Overcoming one's limits

2010-01-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

"At fourteen minutes I had these awful contractions...like this urge to breathe..."

Recently I stumbled across an interesting video on YouTube. I love watching the videos from the TED conferences which can be found there, and usually, it isn't hard to find one that has something to do with what we are studying in our seminar. Even many of the transhumanist thinkers we have studied make appearances of course -- Ray Kurzweil has several videos up, in which he discusses his singularity idea. However this time I found something that I thought interesting and important to keep in mind when considering any of the ideas that involve human enhancement through artificial means. It is (surprisingly enough) magician David Blaine giving a talk at a TED Med conference about how he was able to hold his breath for seventeen minutes. The video is below...it's a good idea to watch it all, even if one thinks Blaine is just a moron with a death wish or something.

First a word on Blaine and his quests to overcome his limitations. Whether through hard work, or by using science and technology (which are both ultimately also advanced through the hard work of the scientists), I think keeping an attitude like Blaine's in mind can be beneficial. Blaine is, after all, a magician, but he is not the usual sort of magician. Indeed I tend to think of him as more a performance artist than strictly a magician. For instance in the above video, when Blaine asks his doctor about holding his breath longer than anyone has ever done, his doctor simply suggests that as a magician, Blaine could simply create the illusion of not breathing. Yet Blaine actually wanted to be able to do it -- to actually keep his breath held longer than anyone ever had. The end result was his breaking of the pure O2 static apnea record: after oxygenating his blood with pure O2 and flushing out excess CO2, Blaine held his breath for over 17 minutes. As a performance artist, he shattered a record that free-divers train for their entire careers to simply approach, let alone surpass.

The moral of the story is that science and technology are just one side of the human-enhancement coin. One must also be able to work hard, set goals and overcome them -- in short, I would argue that anyone who wanted to genuinely better themselves in any way needs the determination that Blaine showed for his attempt at breaking the record, for the science and technology that allows us to enhance ourselves are simply tools. One needs the ability to properly use these tools, and this can be developed without the technology that is just barely over the horizon.

Once again, I'd say we ought to continue steaming onward into the future (after all we don't really have a choice at this point). But just has we ought to keep in mind what happens when we 'small humans' let our hubris get the better of us, or, that there are any number of reasons why the future is not required to keep us around for ever, we should also remember the importance of that determination which performance artists such as Blaine use to help them achieve their goals, and to overcome their limitations. This power, I'd argue, is not something that can necessarily be developed artificially like an artificial eye or a nanoprobe-sized cell, yet is all the more necessary the further into the future (and thus, the more we think about enhancing ourselves) that we travel.

More on Oryx and Crake (or, why the future still doesn't need us)

2010-01-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

I finished reading Oryx and Crake a few weeks ago, and we've now begun to take a look at it in class in order establish some connections between the things we are learning about (the latest scientific and technological advances that are relevant to transhumanism(s)) with the strange world Atwood would have us imagine.

As I wrote in an earlier entry, I was rather looking forward to this particular book, since it is the only one of our readings which qualifies as science fiction. Of course, sci-fi is one of the best ways to explore ideas and issues (if not the "technical details", which I'll explain shortly) of transhumanism(s) is through this very genre, where our everyday technological and scientific situation is expanded and expounded upon even more that what's inside of Ray Kurzweil's brain. I was not disappointed with either the story or Atwood's writing. For instance the story, while not terribly exciting (Of course I would say this, being used to the almost soap-opera like 'cliffhangers' of Battlestar Galactica or the action of movies like The Matrix) actually reminded me of some of the ideas which were floating around in my mind from my Origins of Western Philosophy class, during which I submitted some ideas for a dystopian sci-fi story of my own for an assignment. So in this respect, Oryx and Crake provided me with some 'food for thought' when it came to exploring and developing my own ideas about transhumanism in my own novel (if it ever gets finished of course). Atwood's writing style was a treat as well -- I had never read one of her novels before this class, although I have had occasion to read a few of her poems, which I found dark, kind of creepy, etc (in other words, I liked them). So, while I may have taken issue with a few of the themes Atwood presents in the book (which I'll come to soon) I still found the tone of the book pretty enjoyable, and that it read at a fast, enjoyable pace (some people knock short chapters, but I find a book with shorter chapters can add to the pace of the story -- indeed, the shorter chapters are what gave the story what pace it did have).

As for what the novel had to do with class, I suppose the one thing I ought to say since I never finished my response to Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," is how that very theme which appears in Joy's article also appears throughout Atwood's novel. It seems to me that the one thinker we all keep coming back to in the course of our seminar is Kurzweil, however I think the gem within this book that glimmers the brightest is really more along the lines of something we would hear from Bill Joy or one of the thinkers he quotes such as Hans Moravec. Indeed, where Kurzweil abstracts a quasi-religious work of teleology that applies to the entire universe (or so he argues) from simply the course of development of information technology, Joy reminds us of any number of things -- from the "Grey Goo" scenario involving nanobots, to homo sapiens simply 'dying out' as we are surfaced and replaced by a more 'fit' (in the Darwinian sense) form or life: artificial life perhaps. Indeed he reminds us that even when our intentions are good, and our knowledge is comprehensive, there is still nothing essential -- nothing necessary about our survival or our place in the universe -- that could stop us from being thrown down into the sea; our wings destroyed by our flight, which carried us too high.

I should mention, however, that although I see this theme in Oryx and Crake, it wasn't an ignoble figure with a Ray Kurzweil bent who brought the world to ruins. Rather it was who I would ultimately describe as a people who didn't care enough about the future (humans in the domes, outside of the pleeblands), and a misanthropic sociopath nick-named Crake. However I believe the point still stands: the future does not need us, whether we are ignobly charging into the future, setting ourselves up for some unforeseen disaster, or some madman makes an attempt at the downfall of the human race like Crake does in the novel, there are still no guarantees. Whether it's a meteor, Grey Goo, pissed off former robot slaves, or one of our own fellow human beings -- I should still argue that the only real way to prevent something such as these scenarios is to keep flying upward, alright...however we must leave our hubris and our other all-too-human tendencies on the ground (of course whether this idea itself involves a 'transhuman' answer or a more 'traditional' answer is a topic for another entry.

Next time I write about Oryx and Crake, I'd like to continue on and talk about the book as sci-fi and as philosophy. I'd also like to talk about some of the characters in more detail, which should follow this entry shortly.

We're comfortable with technology (and it's going to get more comfy)

2010-01-25T12:47:00.000-08:00

Indeed, how comfortable are we with our technology -- not the obviously disquieting things like nuclear bombs or things like that -- but our more 'everyday' technologies? Obviously the fact that we sometimes call them 'everyday' technologies at this point should say that we are all indeed very comfortable making the latest technical developments part of our lives. Even I used to say that I'd never get a cell phone, simply because it wasn't necessary: there are pay phones everywhere after all. However now, text messaging is such a big part of my social routine that I could not continue to operate within my social network the same way without it, now that it has become such a part of said routine. The same goes for my mp3 player, my facebook account, my digital camera, my computer (which I myself built ^.^ ), the internet, and so on. But here is one fellow who may be a little more comfortable with his technology than the rest of us are:

Of course, as the reporter says, many in Japan (and indeed, all over the world, thanks to the internet of course) aren't taking this terribly seriously -- if I had to sum this case, I might say it is really just "all in good fun." After all a marriage between a human and a character in a game is less similar to actually getting married and perhaps a bit more like, say, getting a tattoo of a quote, phrase, picture, person, or any other thing like that which people regard as important -- important to themselves in a much more personal way than my computer, or my phone, or my facebook page (or my Nintendo system) are to me. So I view this situation as more similar to, say, one who loves books having a few lines from, or perhaps a picture of, their favorite author tattooed on their person. Indeed, advanced as video games and other such things are becoming, I should still argue that (for now!) video game characters are not persons the way human beings are. Rather they are still simply characters. They do not yet posses the tools a human being has, nor the environment that a human being finds itself in, to develop as a 'person' in the same way that people -- human people -- really do.

However I also have to stop myself and ask, will this always be the case? After all if there is anything this little video shows us, it is that we are -- some of us, perhaps a little more than others -- very comfortable with our technology. I could probably launch into a whole new digression on what Mike and Ben have often mentioned in class about the technological imperative, and how technology can direct us perhaps more than we direct it, however, keeping that in mind and setting it aside so that I don't get too off track, let's confine ourselves to the simple fact that there are people who are comfortable enough with technology to marry their favorite video game character. Even if it is only half serious, it still takes a society that is rather comfortable with technology such as ours to even half seriously undertake such a "relationship".

(Then again, I know many people who are so dependent [maybe even addicted] to things such as cell phones, video games, facebook, twitter, etc., that in some ways I suppose the argument could be made that they are already practically 'married' to whatever piece of technology is in question. This is arguable and open to interpretation however, so I won't make too strong a case on this point here.)

Such cases as this one make me think about the future. Why?

...

As silly as it sounds...and I admit, it sounds a little silly to me at this point in time (I'm not the only one who might say so! Just listen to yourchonny here), a quick Google search of something like "sex with robots" turns up a mass of articles on that very topic, many of them about the public perception of such a thing (goodness knows that, even if right now, a human and an artificial human in love seems at odds with our current perceptions of love or humanity, it may not always be -- there could come a time when humans and androids honeymoon together!). These articles often also raise the issue of what it is to be a human, or a person, and this is something that quickly goes from sounding a little silly to being very interesting and serious at this point. Would a machine that is capable of having an emotional or even a physical relationship with a human really be thought of as a machine in the first place? A machine with such capabilities would, to my mind, be a person. So are these differences that don't make any difference really differences (to borrow a line from Caprica's Dr. Greystone)? An artificial human could, in this sense, still be a person, however 'artificial' said being's origins are in comparison to our 'natural' origins.

All of this has got me thinking that as we move toward the future, we'll have to keep in mind what we mean when we say things like 'human' or 'person'. It's arguable that, if many of the researchers, scholars and scientists involved in transhumanism(s) are right, we may be soon share the planet with people who aren't quite human -- at least not the way many of us currently think about what it is to be human.

Initial thoughts about Oryx and Crake

2009-12-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

As we're on our holidays now, I want to try to devote some extra time to catching up with this journal. There are lots of little thoughts I have throughout the day that I forget to jot down so this may take a while -- however one thing I can begin is reading our next book, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

As anyone who happens to be reading this will no doubt already be aware, I love exploring the ways philosophy is treated in literature, TV and film. I suppose this if for the same reason I enjoy popular science so much: just as the so called 'popular science' genre is the only place where many of us who did not end up in a science education are able to gain some small education on the subject, many of us are exposed to philosophy for the first time by reading a great story or watching a compelling television series or movie, and since a sizable number of these people are not actual philosophy majors, these media are often times one of the only sources of decent exposure people receive of philosophy (I would like to say that 'popular philosophy' books are a good source as well, except that many of the book stores I've come upon posses philosophy sections which are often stocked with a poor selection -- even the philosophy section of Indigo in the Eaton's Centre, which I visited this summer, was surprisingly small). Thus, I think that through good story telling, we can also get some philosophizing done, if we pick an appropriate work to look at. As I've already mentioned, I think this approach to learning philosophy is valuable, and given my propensity to make sudden references to Battlestar Galactica or Fullmetal Alchemist, I'm sure anyone reading this thing could have figured that out about myself anyway.

All of this is why I am very excited to read Oryx and Crake. In my grade 12 year of high school, I read George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for an essay I was to write about utopias and dystopias. Actually, the essay was really for teaching us to write essays -- something I think it failed to do in my case -- anyhow, although I found both of them a pretty dry read, they both would give me this kind of weird, curious yet "creeped out" sort of feeling (1984 especially, but there were moments in Huxley too: the different sorts of 'designer' people (Alphas, Betas, Gammas and Deltas); the cursing of the name 'Ford' instead of God or Jesus, etc.), and I find I get that same feeling as I open up and read the first chapters of Oryx and Crake. I think it is a safe bet that I'm not only going to enjoy the story but also the issues Atwood explores in her novel.

So far I've made it through the first two chapters, which are themselves divided into smaller parts. The world Atwood shows the reader is gloomy, to my mind, despite the "bleached blue" sky the Snowman faces. I've already met the Children of Crake: they seem to be some kind of new generation of people, ignorant about the past. Snowman, however, describes the past in detail, and it is a past that is not all that dissimilar from our present -- no wonder I keep getting that funny feeling when I read these books...of course, that's the point of a dystopian story, isn't it? One of the points, at least. The present is obviously some kind of 'post-apocalyptic' (technocalyptic?) world where everything has gone wrong (a theme I am interested in learning more about for another story of my own -- yet another reason I am excited to read more of Atwood). This is airly typical of a dystopian novel, although Atwood is writing about technologies and scientific knowledge that really exists now. I feel like reading this will remind me more of Huxley's book than Orwell's, however I shall have to see as I continue to read.

More on Baudelaire: drugs and technology; how "Man becomes God"

2009-12-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

I want to write a little bit more about some thoughts I've been having on the first essay in Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises, "On Wine and Hashish," which I didn't really elaborate on much in my last blog entry. However, I find these ideas kind of tie in well to other ideas we've encountered in the course as well as other things which I have brought up in this journal, so I'll give them a little more treatment here.

Mainly, I found it interesting that one of the results of consuming hashish is that "all contradictions are resolved. Man becomes god." (God with a lower case g, however...) I began thinking again about science and technology in general, and I arrived at the conclusion that, regardless of whether we call where we are going with our technology some 'post-human future,' or just the future plain and simple, there is certainly a similarity between our species' relationship with scientific knowledge and technology', and our relationship with drugs, and seeking altered states of being. For what else are we trying to accomplish with our science and technology?

Granted, "becoming gods" is a rather lofty expression of this tendency that our species seems to possess, even though it is coming from a poet. However Baudelaire uses 'god' with a little g after all, and I would argue that since we're reading a poet, we ought not to overlook the way the word is used here. We may not express it in the same terms, but our technology, which is a product of the knowledge we gain in the pure sciences, serves to remove or curtain our natural limitations -- indeed, to a primitive society, a 21st century north American, with a cell phone and a computer, flying on an airplane, might indeed seem like a god. Of course, just as Baudelaire writes about the rather paranoid and physically fatiguing experience of 'crashing' after being high on hashish, "This is the punishment you deserve for having so carelessly, and with such impious prodigality, spent your vital energies," I can't help thinking of Hiromu Arakawa's Elric Brothers once again, as well as their classical counterparts Daedalus and Icharus. It may be that we use our scientific knowledge, and the technology we subsequently bring into existence with it, indeed makes us more godlike. However, like with drugs such as hashish or opium which Baudelaire used, and other substances which we are more familiar with, we must of course be careful not to fly too close to the sun. In short, a cautious optimism about our future is what I should advocate once again, rather than simply "boldly going where no one has gone before."

I also remembered something which Paul mentioned in our last seminar to the class, during the part of our discussion on what addiction is, and why humans and even some animals use substances in such a way, and even sometimes display addictive behaviour. I remember the conversation going something like, even if one can function as a successful member of society as say, a heroin addict, or even as someone who just enjoys a few glasses of wine or smoking a joint after the day is at an end with a good book -- well, what would happen if we were to suddenly remove that element from that person's life? I think that, it would probably result in the same frustration in the frequent coffee drinker or smoker as the hashish user of the 19th century, or a heroin addict (although physical withdrawal symptoms would probably differ in each of these cases), however, just as I was thinking in my last blog entry, this relates almost perfectly to our relationship with technology -- indeed, what would happen if we suddenly removed all of the technology from our lives? I can speculate quite imaginatively about this, but t avoid getting too carried away, I'll just say that it seems certain we would all have a hard time coping, at least as hard as an addict coping with his or her addiction after the cessation of the use of their drug/behaviour of choice.

Just imagine if all of our technology were to vanish. Here in North Bay, we'd be rather ill-equipped to cope with the coming winter, to say the least. Then, of course, there would be the 'withdrawal' from our more day to day technologies: no more cell phones or Internet, so communications would basically be ground to a halt compared to what we're used to nowadays; there would not even be any way to hear about the news, for television, radio, and printing are of course all technological innovations (fairly recent ones in human history too!!); transport would become immensely difficult, especially in winter -- even those of us who aren't reliant upon cars would still not have any public transit to resort to as an alternative. Needless to say, it is arguable that the removal of even only some of our most recent technologies would be like cutting off a heroin addict.

After thinking over these things, I definitely see a similarity between our relationship with drugs, and our relationship with science and technology, and thus, the relevance of Baudelaire's writings to our course. No longer confused about how these topics could be interrelated, I am curious to explore more of the work of writers like Baudelaire and other explorers of alternate states of consciousness, in order to gain more insights like this. I will have to keep all of these things in mind for my academic future, as areas to keep on exploring and writing about.

Thoughts on Baudelaire and 'augmenting the individuality"

2009-12-03T13:24:00.000-08:00

We've quickly moved through Darwin and onto Charles Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises. While I was sick for a while and thus have some catching up to do when it comes to The Descent of Man, I've been making some headway with Baudelaire, the piece that I've really been looking forward to since the beginning of the semester. I've been looking forward to it because I was at a loss for how things like drugs and altered states of consciousness might relate to transhumanism[s]. Although I saw this topic hinted at in the documentary Technocalypse, in the interviews with Terrence Mckennah on how psychedelics might be useful in preparation for something like transfering your mind to a computer, I was curious about how someone from the nineteenth century could develop these topics in a way that would be relevant to our class.

However, as soon as I began reading "On Wine And Hashish" I noticed something interesting. The subtitle, "Compared as Means of Augmenting the Individuality" screams transhumanism[s] at me -- augmenting the individuality seems like it might be an appealing idea to Ray Kurzweil or Max More, just like augmenting the body or the might might be appealing. So, I began to scour the essay and make little marginal notes wherever I found a reference to how wine and hashish 'augment the personality' in Baudelaire's account.

I know it's a bit of a simplistic approach, but I found that, with regard to augmenting the personality in Baudelaire's comparison of wine and hashish versus augmenting the personality with really advanced science and technology, the former and the latter are almost seamlessly interchangeable. Here is the first example I found:

Wine is like man: you can never be sure how much it should be esteemed or scorned, loved or hated, nor of how many sublime deeds or monstrous deceits it is capable. Thus we should not view it more harshly than we view ourselves. Let us treat wine as our equal.

Here Baudelaire's words speak of what I might call a 'cautious but due respect' for a substance that can produce states in humans that range from the 'sublime' to the 'monstrous', but if we substitute the words "science" or "high technology" for "wine" we find Baudelaire's philosophy applies equally well, since science and technology have played and will continue to play a sizable role in how we humans 'augment' ourselves:

Science and technology are like man: you can never be sure how much they should be esteemed or scorned, loved or hated, nor of how many sublime deeds or monstrous deceits they are capable. Thus we should not view them more harshly than we view ourselves. Let us treat science and technology as our equal.

With this change, I can easily conjure up several real world examples of how this new quote could be applied to our own society where science and technology are more prevalent than they have ever been. I can think of what Anne Druyan has called "the soaring spiritual high" that comes from the ultimate revelation of science, "our oneness with the cosmos." As her late husband Carl Sagan was famous for saying, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." I can hardly think of a more sublime revelation, which is due entirely to the enterprise of science and technology, and the men and women throughout history that have worked to further both of these fields. Conversely, there are many examples of monstrosities that have been borne out of the same technology and scientific knowledge: the atom bomb, for instance. Then again there are also the unforeseen consequences of science and technology which are often to us as well: the advent of the gasoline engine and the processes of mass production made transportation convenient for millions of people around the world, but have also contributed an enormous amount of greenhouse gas pollution, compounding climate change and smog pollution. It's interesting to note that the unforeseen consequences that come with the use of drugs like wine or hashish can also be dangerous. Baudelaire himself died an opium addict after all, as we read in the Introduction and as we've discussed in class.

Baudelaire also reports the occasion anecdotal report on how one of these substances seemed to bestow miraculous 'augmentations' upon people:

I knew of one individual who found that when he was drunk, his feeble eyesight fully regained its original, penetrating power. Wine made an eagle of the mole.

I think this is probably a rather suspect account. Nevertheless isn't this what we aim for with our science and technology now? To augment things like our poor eyesight? I wear glasses because I'm near-sighted, and many others have begun using less apparent prostheses like contact lenses (as another professor of mine once said to our class, the best technology is the technology we don't notice). Others seek the more advanced lazer eye surgery procedure to correct the problem altogether. Baudelaire sought to augment the individual with wine and hashish, but once again we can see a parallel example in our modern day science and technology, where we make small augmentations with glasses, hearing aides, prosthetic limbs, and other things like that which are so common that we don't think of them as augmentations, but helpful tools.

Baudelaire praises the personality augmenting powers of hashish but decries how it "destroys the will," as he says. However where he has something positive to say about hashish, we find that we can still see similar features in the science and high technology that drives much of transhumanist thought:

I sometimes happens that people thoroughly inept at word plays improvise interminable strings of puns, connect completely unrelated ideas, and dream up such deeds as to perplex even the strongest master of this absurd art.

The above quote reminds me of the words of the aforementioned Sagan, who wrote on Cannabis in The Dragons of Eden, "Marijuana is often described as improving our appreciation of and abilities in music, dance, art, pattern and sign recognition and our sensitivity to nonverbal communication. To the best of my knowledge, it is never reported as improving our ability to read and comprehend Ludwig Wittgenstein or Immanuel Kant...I wonder if, rather than enhancing anything, he cannabinols simply suppress the left hemisphere [of the brain] and permit the stars to come out..."(p 177 note). So, I suppose we ought to be open to the possibility that Baudelaire wasn't ever really enhancing his personality with any of these substances, but perhaps, re-arranging it in a way. However with technology and science, perhaps we could be more sure of our augmentations or enhancements, should we choose to pursue that road?

So much for the first essay. I'm going to try to finish this one off quickly so that I don't fall even further behind. I'd like to say some more about the whole 'man becoming god' idea that keeps popping up throughout Baudelaire's writing. I've also got something to add regarding the hallucinations, and idea of 'projection' from Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica (not the same idea as Feuerbach's 'projection', but it will make sense once I'm done writing it all down).

Sad Robot

2009-11-25T10:14:00.001-08:00

It's interesting how these things find their way to you.
I'm not going to try to tie it into class, I'm just going to post it up here so that anyone who wishes can appreciate this little film. It made me happy and sad at the same time.

Sad Robot from mrtreve on Vimeo.

Darwin

2009-11-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

This week we began looking at Charles Darwin's book, The Descent of Man. I've been 'sucked in' to this book -- I'm enjoying it because I like the topics of biology, anthropology, and the history of science in general. Darwin really is a fantastic science-writer as well, and I think that the topic of his contributions to the 'popular science' genre, while being a separate topic from what we are looking at in this seminar, would be very interesting to study all by itself.

So far we've been through the introduction and the first chapter. I think the authors of the introduction make an interesting case about Darwin's motivations to formulate his ideas about evolution and common ancestry were driven by his abolitionist bent and his hatred for racism. I certainly agree that the fact that these two ideas were intertwined crossed Darwin's mind many times, however, I would argue that his pursuit of evidence for his theory was ultimately driven by the scientist in him, and perhaps, later and penultimately, by his anti-slavery ideals.

As for the first chapter, this is where the real fun began for me: here Darwin explores all of the examples of the commonalities in anatomy, morphology, embryonic development, between human beings and other animals (one example is the comparison Darwin makes between the embryos of a dog and a human). With prose that is shockingly not dryer than an overdone crumpet, like I've often found in 19th century writing, he outlines just how similar all of the different ethnic groups of humanity to one another, and indeed, how similar humans are to the other great apes and lower animals, in an age when genetic evidence was not available nor even concisely conceived of.

In brief, while I slightly disagree with the introduction given in our edition of the book, I find the text of Descent of Man itself very stimulating, and I'm looking forward to finishing it off and discussing it more in the coming weeks.

Also, here is a really great documentary-drama about Darwin's life and scientific work. It isn't the same documentary we watched in seminar, however, it is still an excellent program, and ranks at the top of my 'favorite documentaries' list:

What can I say about Salad Fingers?

2009-11-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Early on in our seminar we were directed to make some comments on David Firth's Salad Fingers flash cartoons. I had already seen all of them, and I finally decided I should at least try to say something about them (although I can't really fit it into the context of the course).

I've never really tried to decrypt what meaning(s) might be hidden away in Salad Fingers' quest to find and touch rusty spoons, or his tenuously thin grasp on reality. However this is the sort of thing I just like to put on when I'm 'tuning in, turning off', so to speak -- it's best not to spoil the enjoyment I already get from the absurdities these little cartoons depict than try to make them make sense, which would take away the absurdity, and thus, the fun of watching them.

So what can one really say about this cartoon in comparison/relation to our seminar, no that we've been exploring transhumanism(s) for a few months now? I can only think of Salad Fingers' lack of a grasp on the world around him. I certainly wouldn't say that the futurists and philosophers of the transhuman studies are as out of touch as our green-skinned rust-stroker, however, I do occasionally question the picture of the world conjured up by, say, Kurzweil, who seems idealize his own picture of the future of the cosmos so much, that I don't think he looks at the world the same way I do (the same way a Christian or a Buddhist would look at the world differently). Whether this tendency to idealize these possible transhumanistic futures actually is widespread throughout transhumanist-thought, I don't think I've read enough to say for certain yet. Or maybe the quest to transcend our biology or to become physically immortal is just like Salad Fingers' search for rusty things (or the Elrich's search for the Philosopher's Stone I mentioned in a previous entry).

And now, for something completely different, here is another one of David Firth's cartoons (also pretty f%cked and very funny):

More Robots

2009-11-04T19:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a link a friend of mine hooked me up with, which I thought might be pertinent to the class. It's of a robot that has human-like walking motion. It's amazing how similar to us this thing looks (...actually it also kind of looks like a little AT-AT walker from Star Wars too).

PetMan: The Walking Robot

There are some other robotics videos there as well, all pretty neat-o and worth a good watch. I'm going to go through some more of them now.

How singular is 'The Singularity', and what is a singularity anyway?

2009-11-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

Now that we've finished looking at Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near in class, we've been directed to write a little bit about what the author means when he writes about 'the singularity'. Like I'm sure I must have already mentioned, the term singularity is what he uses to describe the moment of "the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots" (p 9).

Kurzweil borrows this term from three sources, which had all previously adopted the word because of it's original meaning -- a "unique event with singular implications." One source is mathematics, where a singularity describes a mathematical function that approaches infinity. It never actually gets there (infinite is an adjective, not a noun: thus it doesn't describe some 'thing' or state of being; there is no number infinity), but its value exceeds any possible finite limit. So for all practical purposes we can call this infinite, since it is really all in the abstract anyways. The second source is physics, where a singularity, or "black hole," is created when a very very massive star runs out of 'fuel' to 'burn'. These nuclear reactions that kept the star illuminating the sky, and prevented it from collapsing under it's own gravity, come to a halt, and the star collapses in a supernova explosion. What's left is nothing but the star's gravity, and not even light can escape past it's even horizon (hence to term black hole). Finally there is reference to an "intelligence explosion" in the 1960s, which could occur once machines begin designing their own next generation without human help; the vast increase in this AI would be exponential in nature, argues Kurzweil, and thus the term singularity as adopted by himself, when we transcend our own biology (pp 21-23).

I can certainly see how we are continuing to integrate ourselves with out technology -- at least, those of us who have the means to -- artificial limbs and organs, gene therapy, computer-implants and many other such examples already exist today, and they grow more and more prevalent. I can also grasp that technology, and indeed knowledge in general, seems to accumulate and move forward exponentially. Kurzweil demonstrates this with a massive amount of charts and graphs and figures, which seem to make enough sense to me as depictions of the general trend of science and technology rather than actual 'laws' (like how Moore's Law is called a 'law'). However I do not agree that this will culminate in "the universe waking up." Indeed what parts of the book I did manage to finish along with the rest of the class (I haven't read it cover to cover yet, but I'm going to, since this hefty tome deserves it) seemed equally typical of some kind of "techno-pantheistic" work of prophecy, as well as a popular science book on future technology from a futurist with a proven track record.

Why don't I agree? I think it is what Mike said in class: if this can happen, why hasn't it happened yet? Indeed, the universe is so old and vast, one would think that we certainly wouldn't be the first species to hit upon this notion, and then to fulfill it, if it were indeed possible. So, I do think we will continue to integrate with our technology...one day this technology will be so perfect that we will probably barely notice it at all, and that's when we'll really be 'post-humans'. However I don't think the knee of the curve of the exponential growth of our science and technology represents a cosmos altering moment in human history -- rather I just think it's another point along our evolution (now that we are looking at Darwin's Descent of Man, I am hoping I will gain some more insights about how to formulate and express my thoughts about whether this would ne a 'natural' part of human evolution).

So all in all, Kurzweil's facts are not what I take issue with, rather, how he interprets them. And I feel he adopts the term 'singularity' to boost the impacts of what his writings on the reader. Of course, what he writes already hits hard, for it challenges ones views about the world as well as one's ability to grasp the sheer mountains of data, quotes, stories, 'dialogues', and ideas Kurzweil throws at his readers. Putting some extra punch behind all of this by making it sound as singular as it is in Ray's mind was perhaps only natural to him, since I think at the end of it all, Kurzweil was evangelizing his own worldview in Singularity.

Robot Nation: A Uniquely Japanese Answer?

2009-11-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

In class last week we watched a documentary called Japan: Robot Nation. It explored the possibility of Japan replacing it's rapidly diminishing workforce -- due chiefly to low immigration rates, and a falling birth rate that will constitute a decrease of 2/3 of Japan's population within the next one hundred years -- with robots. This is a pretty cool/freaky enough idea all by itself, but is it, as host Adam Yamaguchi asked at the end of the program, a uniquely Japanese solution to a uniquely Japanese problem, or is it a sign of more things yet to come?

Certainly Japan faces a unique population situation: the population is set to drop sharply within the next century, rather like it will in North America and Europe after the passing of the Baby Boomer generation. However, unlike in Europe and North America, there is high resistance to foreigners and to immigration in Japan. Walking down the streets of Tokyo would provide a much more ethnically homogeneous experience than walking the streets of, say, Toronto. Moreover, as Yamaguchi says in the program, Japan is often thought of by the rest of the world as a society that embraces technology readily, and which is at the forefront of scientific and technological development -- a vision of the future as it were. So, what do I think is the case? Is this a all really a vision of the future or simply an answer to a particular set of problems, which happens to work very well for the society in question?

I feel that it is actually just one possible solution, and that the other potential solution which seemed to be left out of the documentary was addressing immigration policies and overall attitudes concerning human contact and social interaction. I know, tall order -- but to me this program just seemed to point out that these problems exist, and then turned to address the more quirky, speculative solution offered by scientists and conservatives who are resistant to immigration reform rather than one which seems to make more sense to me: a re-evaluation of the Japanese's anxiety concerning foreigners and and increase in human contact throughout the population. I say this makes more sense, not because I don't think that robots could or will eventually be integrated into day to day life, but because to my mind, it addresses the root causes of the problems that japan currently faces, and not just fixing the symptoms (filling the space of the humans with robots). Indeed, I think that one day, it is certainly possible that robots will be a part of our everyday lives in the way that Saya is a part of the daily lives for people at Tokyo University, perhaps even more so, if robot intelligence reaches a point that makes it possible to talk about the machine in question being 'alive' or having a 'mind/soul'. However, just as I don't feel a dramatic transformation of the universe is just around the corner (Kurzweil's 'singularity'), I don't feel the replacement/integration of robot and human will happen quite the way/ for quite the same reason as this program of Vanguard suggests.

Tables, graphs, and neat little pictures...

2009-10-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

We were asked this week in seminar to write about Ray Kurzweil's extensive uses of numbers, statistics, dates, tables, graphs, and so on throughout his book, The Singularity is Near. Indeed, throughout most of the beginning of the book (I haven't finished this whopper off quite yet I'm afraid...), the reader is blinded with science and mathematics...mostly, chronological representations of the exponential growth of science and technology, often depicted logarithmically to emphasize the seemingly steady trend between one generation, or paradigm, to the next, and so on. Not being a math wiz, I don't exactly know whether to take these 'representations' as accurate depictions of real historical trends, or just Kurzweil's 'spin' on those data. Needless to say, the book will take one or two more thorough readings perhaps before I can truly let myself make any concrete opinions about it (I'm a slow digester of words).

Anyhow, as I was saying, were it not for that fact that this book is aimed a pretty intellectual audience, I should accuse Kurzweil of blinding us with science (or math). But even though I don't fully understand all of the formulae and logarithms and whatnot, doesn't mean I don't get the gist of what he is saying: technological and scientific development is happening faster and faster, and an exponential rate. We'll soon be at the knee of this curve -- what Kurzweil calls 'The Singularity' -- when we transcend our current biology/merge with machines/the universe begins to wake up. The first point, that science and technology are advancing at an exponential pace, seems to be pretty evident and not even that 'earth-shattering' of a revelation to many people who work with technology everyday (which in this day and age, is most of us). However the inference Kurzweil draws from this, that the universe will ultimately 'wake up' and we all become this one 'God-consciousness', are speculative to say the least (pp 14-21). Of course all of these ideas depend upon a number of assumptions Kurzweil is making which are still rather hypothetical about the fundamental nature of the universe. Moreover, as one classmate mentioned in a previous lecture, the universe is 14 billion years old, and is immense. Why hasn't the universe already 'woken up?'

I think what I'm trying to say here is that the facts Ray Kurzweil uses for his thesis are probably correct, however the conclusions which he derives from these premises are a little shaky. Nevertheless, as I said, I shall definitely give it one or two more really good close readings before formulating my final opinions about -- I have been finding this stuff requires lots of thought, which requires time -- Kurzweil, while maybe a little imaginative to me, is clearly a genius, whatever that's worth.

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1) For instance in Star Trek there are many examples of technologies which transhumanist philosophers and scientists would say are just barely beyond the horizon, yet, while day to day life aboard the Enterprise might be fun and exciting for the bridge officers, real life in such an environment would probably seem as mundane to a person in such a situation as my situation does to me on its average, monotonous day. However this is hardly what I would describe as singular in the sense that Kurzweil is.

Gattaca

2009-10-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Today we watched the film Gattaca in our seminar, and I wanted to leave a few thoughts here while they are still fresh in my mind.

Rather than go on about what I imagine the usual themes conjured up in the audience's mind are (things like bioethics and tampering with human DNA), I'd just like to try to re-articulate a thought I had during our class' break. I've written here about exploring this stuff (transhumanism) in sci-fi, and a few other classmates were also talking about that very thing today in fact, and while the film thought-provokingly grapples with some possible moral and ethical conundrums that we might possibly face in the future (and are starting to face now -- for example, it is now possible to have your DNA sequenced my mailing a sample to a lab, whose websites can be found easily with a quick internet search. But since it is done by mail, what is to stop me from having someone else's DNA sequenced by simply mailing in another sample that didn't come from me?), I found that some of those conundrums could potentially be solved with other technologies that we associate with transhumanism and not just things like eugenics.

For instance, the protagonist in the story suffers from a number of hereditary pre-dispositions to disease because his parents did not make use of the genetic modification technologies available in the film's universe, and so he belongs to the class of society known as 'invalids': genetically 'inferior' people who were conceived and born without genetic modifications. But what if we did live in such a post human future, and someone wanted to acquire such enhancements even though he or she didn't undergo the gene therapy -- well, if changing my genes won't make me run faster or think more quickly, perhaps nanotechnology and robotics will? Indeed, this film speculated about genetic technologies, but much of the focus in transhumanism today is on not only genetic technology but also robotics and nanotechnology, so even if there were to be a future where one sort of technology might potentially create social stratification, might it be that other technologies could arise that will then bridge and eliminate those gaps?

Of course this is all very speculative and very optimistic. One could say the N and R technologies could solve the problems of the G technologies before there are any serious issues to face. However, in the area of biology, it may be too late -- we have already committed rather questionable acts in the 20th century -- I speak of course of the Eugenics movement in Europe and the Americas begun by Sir Francis Galton, which resulted in the sterilization and violation of the human rights of thousands of invalids, and, arguably provided the foundations for The Holocaust to come. It is comforting to think that transhumanist technologies are moving so fast they can solve their own problems before they become manifest. However, as I've always said, cautious optimism and small steps rather than intrepidly charging toward such an uneasy-sounding future seems to me to be the right approach here. That, and of course, taking lessons from history as well as speculative, futuristic science fiction.

Post-human prosthetics of a past period, and the utopian and dystopian aspects of post-humanism

2009-10-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

I am such a Geek. Although this isn't exactly strictly relevant to our course, I keep finding myself drawn to science fiction as one of the best ways to explore transhumanism; its ideas, its technologies, its opponents' and proponents' positions -- which, as research has shown me, are often used by writers in their materials, even if those people's ideas are never explicitly discussed in the story.

Lately I've been watching a lot of anime. One franchise which has caught my attention in particular is Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist, which is a science fiction/fantasy story, set in an 'alternate world' where alchemy, the science of analyzing, deconstructing, and rebuilding the matter of the world, is one of the most advanced sciences, and affects the characters' world in ways similar to how mechanical or digital technology effects us today. The level of technology and science in the story's universe may remind the audience of some of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century European societies.

The story centers around two young boys who are studying alchemy in their father's absence; the boys' impressive abilities remind their mother of her husband, who left long ago, so she encourages the boys to continue studying until the day she dies. The boys, grief-stricken, attempt to resurrect their dead mother by committing the forbidden human transmutation: creating a human life with alchemy, using the basic materials that make up an average human like water, carbon, etc. The boys tragically fail to revive their mother. The older brother, Edward, loses his leg as 'material' in the failed reaction, and also his right arm as he attaches his brother Alphonse's soul to an empty suit of armor in the corner, Alphonse's whole body lost in the failed transmutation.

The details of the story vary between the two anime series, and the original comic or manga. However several themes, all relevant to some of the issues we will be looking at in seminar, appear throughout all of the adaptations of the story. Just a few "for instances":

...after the events described above, the boys undergo rehabilitation and further training. Edward is fitted with artificial limbs, and Alphonse is shown to have become pretty much like a robot: he is just a soul or a mind attached to an armor body. And here is why I think all of this is relevant: the boys, deciding not to attempt yet again to revive their mother, make another interesting decision in light of what many of the transhumanist 'utopians' or 'optimists' like Ray Kurzweil or Max More often tell us. Instead of embracing much stronger artificial limbs, or a body that doesn't get tired or that bullets cannot even harm, something that fellows like Kurzweil or Max Moore would think are awesome, they decide to seek a way to restore their original bodies using the legendary alchemical enhancer, The Philosopher's Stone.

Indeed, the boys' machine/robot like zombies, is often treated as a punishment for trampling 'on holy ground', or having gone too far in their search for knowledge and control over nature, and I think these things are kind of interesting for a number of reasons. The first one is that Japan is probably one of the most technophiliac societies in the western world, as we saw in the film Technocalypse. So I think it's pretty neat that out of such a society such a story could come; a story which has reminded me time and time again of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus who flew too close to the sun -- the obvious comparison here being between the hubris of Icarus flying too high, and the hubris of the Elrich brothers.

Of course this is all cool to bear in mind, or to have a little chat about if you happen to be a fan of the television show or the comic series, but how serious should we take these morals? Firstly I should say that I don't think that the moral of Fullmetal Alchemist is supposed to seem Luddite at all -- rather, the messages about science and the future that it ultimately conveys could be described as 'humbly optimistic' (but that topic needs a whole other blog entry). Not to mention, there are very simple counterarguments to a lot of the examples of being cautious in the face of post-human ideas which I've provided. One example: Alphonse's armor is bulletproof, but he cannot enjoy things like tastes or smells, so he laments the loss of his body. But I bet if Ray Kurzweil wanted to transfer himself to a new body, he'd probably pick one with an even more extraordinary sense-capabilities than our current biology offers us.

All in all, I guess this is all just 'armchair philosophy' that I'm talking about: something fun to casually chat or to speculate with friends about. Yet still, the themes and morals I carry with me from the story are a way for me to explore ideas that scientists and philosophers are talking about in universities, books, papers, and so on. The message that I always seem to come away with is one similar to Bill Joy's: simply, let us move forward, but let us be wary of the possible dangers ahead, as well as the possible rewards. There is also the more general message I'm always trying to get people to have a think over -- that science fiction is one of the best places to explore all of this stuff. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think that by a long shot, so there may be others who might agree with this view.

Lastly, just to remind myself so that I don' forget, I would really like to take a stab at writing a real paper on this sort of thing, rather than just a blog entry. I'm going to have to see if there are any reputable 'television and philosophy' journals out there...

Thoughts about Bill Joy's "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us"

2009-10-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading Bill Joy's article, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us," from the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine, which was one of the things we were all to begin looking at and thinking about over our reading week. I've read this article once before, in my intro to philosophy class two years ago, but it is refreshing to have another look at it, now that I've been exposed to more of the history of philosophy, science, and technology, and especially within the context of our Transhumanism seminar. I can certainly appreciate the alarms Joy raises, not because he may be predicting actual forthcoming technological doom and gloom, but because I do think that given the history of technology, a sort of 'cautious optimism' is needed. Otherwise, the excitement of new technologies, and the changes to our lives that they bring, can cause us to get carried away with all of the benefits of technology while paying almost no attention to any of it's possible long-term detrimental effects.

Joy begins by presenting us with a quote from one of Ray Kurzweil's books, which delivers a dark, yet by no means at all unfathomable, post-human future -- a worst case scenario to be sure, yet a possible scenario all the same -- where humans are surpassed by our technology or our posthuman 'children'(1) to such a degree that we would move from the dominant species of the planet to become either 'obsolete' or completely dependent upon machines. We later find out this gloomy quote was supplied to us by the Unabomber. While Bill Joy does not sympathize with Kaczynski and his methods, he does acknowledge some of the concerns his manifesto raises:

"Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.

Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved."

Essentially, we don't know where the future will take us. Let's keep going, but let's also keep these things in mind as we go. That is how I read Bill Joy here.
And he quotes others, others who aren't mad bombers but are respected scientists, like Hans Moravec who believes humans will eventually become extinct, surpassed by the machines. What I liked most overall at this point in my reading of the article was that Joy shows us it is possible to be concerned about where the technologies of the future will take us, to voice those concerns, and to perhaps act on them (in social rather than anti-social ways, of course) without feeling like a "Luddite". Of course, one could sympathize with Joy and be a Luddite, just as one can see the merit of the Unabomber's arguments without acting anti-socially...

...anyhow. More to come. This article is sending me into a downward spiral of exponentially increasing ideas that deserve their own entries (forgive me if any of this seems outrageously dis-jointed, by the way...).

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1. The obligatory Battlestar Galactica reference. In Ronald D. Moore's re-imagining of the 1970s series, the robotic race of Cylons (an acronym for Cybernetic Life Form Node), were created as robot replacements for human military personnel, and thus refer to themselves as the "children of humanity".

A few thoughts about Technocalypse

2009-10-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

If I had some sort of futuristic, high-tech post-human upgrades, I'd probably remember to make entries in this digital journal more frequently...

Anyhow, rather than beginning with Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises, our seminar has been watching a three part documentary called Technocalyps, and we've begun reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near.

The documentary's content seemed to be coming from a very pro post-humanist position, and the entire film (but especially the second part) struck me as being somewhat 'polarized' as well. What I mean by that is while the advocates of transhumanist ideas and G.N.R. technologies seemed to be coming from a very pro post-humanist point of view, the critics seemed to sound almost like Luddites by comparison -- however while I thought the environmentalist was the most Luddite, the other two critics, an historian of technology and a researcher of AI, seemed to espouse views a lot more akin to those of Bill Joy, and so I didn't really find them to be as extreme in the other direction away from the transhumanists as the film's makers seemed to want to portray them.

I've got a bit more to say about this film, but I will probably try to watch it again over reading week, and then post a proper response to each video in its own journal entry. Also, I've some thoughts about Bill Joy vs Ray Kurzweil (or rather, their respective takes on our posthuman futures) that I need to articulate a bit better and then jot down here.

A transhumanism blog

2009-09-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

This is how I decided to keep my digital journal, which is part of my philosophy seminar. This year the topic of the class is transhumanism, so I'm going to go ahead and record my reactions to material, readings, ideas, whatever else I can think of, etc. here.

We're going to begin by looking at Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises, a touchstone for what I think is going to be some interesting philosophical ground to cover: what is up with human beings and wanting to escape from reality into artificiality (be it into technology, into drugs, into music or art, etc), and what does this have to do with the transhumanist movement. I'm really looking forward to it -- have to wait until the student loans are in until I can go and pick up the book for myself, so I may have to find a copy in the library, but that will give me something to do tomorrow before class.