Transhumanism

[Mark Thibodeau]

I bet there aren't too many members of this list who wouldn't find a
lot to admire in the three episode documentary series TechnoCalyps,
which is available for free on Youtube.

TechnoCalyps Part 1 - TransHumanism
https://youtu.be/7MXQSbjBL7Q?

TechnoCalyps Part 2 - Preparing for the Singularity
https://youtu.be/u1n0QSnWyAA?

Technocalypse Part 3 - Digital Messiah
https://youtu.be/EvWuF_KXuDk?

I found it thought provoking and occasionally challenging. I'd love to
hear what P-Listers have to say about it.

Jerky

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 12:53 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Transcending Death via whatever technologies are available or imaginable is
> nothing new.  Those technologies include AI (as in transference of personal
> consciousness to an artificial brain), cryogenics, genetic engineering, etc,
> as Pynchon noted in that essay (which was it?).
>
> David Morris
>
> On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Part of a longer article which will look long so many will not even start
>> reading it.
>>
>> If this doesn't remind you of the dismantling of V, tell me why?
>>
>> "Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
>> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the
>> body politic, in much the same manner."
>>
>>
>> Part of longer article:
>>
>> There is, in transhumanism itself, a strain of old-timey historical
>> romanticism: a sense of history as an inexorable progress toward a
>> teleological vanishing point, where all human meaning is subsumed and
>> obliterated by a godlike technology. This belief that flesh is a dead
>> format, and that our future — or that, at least, of a technological elect —
>> involves a final merger with machines is one that interlocks in sinister
>> ways with the view of democracy as a failed and outmoded institution.
>> Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
>> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the
>> body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a
>> mind-set — a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system —
>> inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and
>> democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human
>> inefficiencies and failings. As eccentric and fringe a phenomenon as Dark
>> Transhumanism may be, it’s usefully viewed in this sense as an extrapolation
>> of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of Silicon
>> Valley.
>>
>> *A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of New
>> YorkMagazine.
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l