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Introduction Why is it important to explain the self in an interdisciplinary manner? Let me answer that question by presenting one example. People who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease are constrained by a decaying brain; even their own person. Hence it is argued that the person slowly disappears. If there is nothing more to the…
Introduction In the lectures I delivered as the 2007/8 senior lecturer for the Metanexus Institute I covered a wide variety of themes, all of which were connected in one way or another with a book I just finished writing1 and another book that I am still researching to write2.† I cannot deal with any of…
The transhumanist community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future.
Cybernetics calls to mind a series of familiar images that turn out on closer inspection to be highly doubtful.
Cybernetic immortality is the idea that we can achieve a sort of immortality by downloading (or uploading) our consciousness into a computer.
Transhumanists assume that progress is inherent in nature and culture. The direction is set; the task of transhumanist technology is to increase the speed forward.
The issues of the human, the posthuman and the transhuman revolve around distinctive narratives, and these are often highly slippery.
It is by the theories of philosophy and the sciences that we probe the deeper nature of, and construct explanations of, all that we experience. No such theory can fail to be regulated and guided by some religious belief or other.
“But how can I, an amateur, be expected to settle a question which the philosophers have not yet ceased to argue?” (W. Somerset Maugham. The Summing Up) I am happy to represent our Society for the Integration of Science and Human Values, based in the Department of Pali & Buddhist Studies at the University of…
According to the thinking of many societies, spiritual forces outside of ourselves exist. In our illnesses and breaks from normalcy, there then opens a space for something spiritual to “come through” to us. This is not a matter of mere belief, however; those who have had their lives transformed in this way insist they know…