Susan Schneider, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and Assistant Professor of Philosophy, discusses Future Brains…

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Sam Harris’ goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing his book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful…

Click here for the complete article written by Sam Harris and found on the Huffington Post website. Thanks to blog reader T.L. for bringing this article to my attention.

Click here for more information from and about Sam Harris.

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Do transhumanists hold a set of beliefs that effectively offer an alternative to traditional religions? And if so, is that necessarily bad?

Click here for the complete article found on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies website.

Click here for more information on transhumanism.

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Last month, Matt Williams, an adjunct professor at the University of Akron, opened an e-mail from his bosses about the school’s new rules for hiring and was “absolutely blown away,” he says, “when I saw the reference to collecting DNA samples.”

The university was saying it could ask new workers for a DNA sample — to run background checks. But Williams knew his DNA could also be used to discover the most private of information about his health — like his genetic risk for cancer, heart disease or mental illness.

To Williams, who taught in the School of Communications, it was one more insult in the hard life of an adjunct professor. (He’s an officer in a national organization, New Faculty Majority, that advocates for adjunct professors.) He says adjuncts at the University of Akron sign new contracts from year to year, so he expected to be counted as a new worker the next time his contract came up.

So he quit. more>>>

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It’s called the anthropic universe: a world set up so that human beings could eventually emerge. So many physical constants, so many aspects of our solar system, so much seems to be finally tuned for our benefit. But was it? We hear from Professor Martin Rees, Paul Davies and Frank Tipler, as well as many others, about one of the ultimate questions.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: ABC Radio National, this is The Science Show, and in the wake of Charles Darwin’s birthday on the 12th it may be a good time to ask how come we’re here, why is the world apparently so exquisitely organised for our convenience? Here’s a special view from my friend and colleague Martin Redfern.

Brandon Carter: The fact that we are here tells us something about the universe.

Paul Davies: The laws of physics are almost fine tuned to encourage matter and energy to develop along certain pathways of evolution leading to greater and greater complexity and ultimately to consciousness.

David Deutsch: One has to ask why is it that those choices were made?

Martin Rees: One is trying to answer Einstein’s famous question, did God have any choice in the creation of the world?

Owen Gingerich: In so many ways, the universe is made with unusual characteristics that are exactly the ones to make thoughtful life possible.

Martin Redfern: Anyone who has looked out into the vastness of the universe is filled with awe. Anyone who has glimpsed the beauty and complexity of life on Earth feels a sense of wonder. We don’t need to be poets, prophets or physicists to share those feelings and speculate on the purpose of it all. It’s a field where science can seem to touch on the domain of, but since the time of Galileo it has been an uneasy meeting ground. Today, atheist reductionists try to reduce the cosmic story to a series of random accidents and religious fundamentalists try to show it as evidence of some sort of intelligent creator external to the universe. I, like many scientists and thinkers, have never been happy with either of these extremes and this is my personal journey through the maze of cosmotheology, guided by some of the best minds in the field.

Our starting point is the simple fact that we’re here at all, staring out into the universe with that sense of wonderment. It’s an observation that has some profound implications. In 1974, Brandon Carter, a cosmologist at the Paris Observatory, gave it a name - the Anthropic Principle. more>>>

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Dan Dennett talks about purposely-confusing theology and how it’s used. He also describes his new project interviewing clergyman who secretly don’t believe anymore, and introduces a new term: “Deepity.”

Dan Dennett is the author of many excellent books, including “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” and “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. He is also featured in the video “The Four Horsemen” along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

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The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question “Where does evolution leave God?” Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results…

Click here for the full report.

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Click here for some singularity commentary from the BBC.

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With a pair of feature films due for release in 2009, Ray Kurzweil is poised to shotgun the Singularity mega-meme to the mainstrean.

But how will the message and messenger be received? And what effect will Kurzweil’s rising star have on associated memes such as accelerating change, transhumanism, extropianism, futurism, AGI and other less extreme Singularity definitions?
If recent Newsweek (”is this the next great leap in human evolution, or just one man’s midlife crisis writ large?”) and slanted io9 (”the famous futurist’s meat brain has made some ludicrously inaccurate predictions”) coverage is any indicator, the seeds of a Kurzweil backlash are beginning to sprout — a social dynamic that probably also extends to technology in general. more>>>

Chris Williamson responds:

This is exactly why I’m shooting a documentary that doesn’t follow just one person around or presents only one idea about the future. And that’s why I’ve also asked others to get involved. I believe that more voices – not less – are needed. These ideas may get backlash because it’s seen as ‘one man’s crazy idea’ instead of as a full-on social movement.
It’s easier for the media to call one man a lunatic but try labeling tens of thousands as such!
We Are The Singularity intends to present it as just that – a social movement involving many individuals, companies, and organizations.
Putting all of the attention on one man such as Kurzweil makes it seem like it’s just HIM, his ideas, and nobody else’s when that is just NOT the case. There are a lot of views about the future.
But you know how the media are – everything’s a popularity contest!
I would definitely like to get you guys at futurescanner involved.
wearethesingularity.com

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I received an email from Jeremy Ryan a loooong time ago and he clued me into this. The email was lost until now. Lifenaut.com has over 9,000 subscribers. I produced an experimental film several years ago about a man who hopes that future humans could extrapolate his soul through a video he left behind.

I hope you check out LifeNaut.com!

—

LifeNaut.com is a web-based storage space for organizing and preserving critical information about one’s unique and essential characteristics for the future, and to share with friends and relatives in the present.
LifeNaut.com is funded by the Terasem Movement Foundation, Inc. The long-term goal is to test whether given a comprehensive database, saturated with the most relevant aspects of an individual’s personality, future intelligent software will be able to replicate an individual’s consciousness.

So, perhaps in the next 20 or 30 years the technology will be developed to upload these files, together with the futuristic software into a body of some sort - perhaps cellular, perhaps holographic, perhaps robotic. more>>>

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For Immediate Release - Please Share
Re: WeAreTheSingularity.com

This transmission goes out to all Futurists, Analysts, Media Personnel, Scientists, Researchers, Writers, Bloggers, Investors, Organizations, Artists, Longevists, Singularitarians, Transhumanists, Concerned Citizens, Enthusiasts, and Friends:

We Are The Singularity is a new Feature-Length Documentary Film Project beginning production soon. it’s not the title of the film but the name of the project. Participants will get to help title the documentary!

You can view the Press Release HERE and the Film Proposal HERE

It’s about The Singularity and those who work in fields of emerging technologies, speak about it, write about it, talk about it, and teach it.

The public is out there and as the meme spreads there is an exponential desire for guidance and enlightenment through engaging, thoughtful, well-produced media.

They’re not going to get it through Hollywood.

“New models based on direct personalized communication with the customer will transform every industry, resulting in massive disintermediation of the middle layers that have traditionally separated the customer from the ultimate source of products and services.”

-Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

I hope that you will visit WeAreTheSingularity.com and participate in this important outreach project and have an impact on making history - about the future. I look forward to good times working with all of you!

Sincerely,
Chris Williamson
Producer - Director - Editor
Pacific Earth Media
bloggingthesingularity.com

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ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — Orphaned chimpanzee infants given special ‘mothering’ by humans are more advanced than the average child at nine months of age.

In the first study to examine the effect of different types of care for infant chimpanzees on cognition, researchers found chimpanzees who were given extra emotionally-based care were more cognitively advanced than human infants.

Humans overtake chimpanzees in development terms as they grow older but the study sends stark warnings that looking after just an infant’s physical needs is likely to result in a child who is maladjusted, unhappy and under-achieving. more>>>

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The CBS article title reads: “How Technology May Soon “Read” Your Mind” but readers of Blogging the Singularity know very well it’s not that they may - THEY WILL!

How can a multi-billion dollar mainstream media outlet describe the advancing pace of “neuroscience research into…what we’re thinking” as only “stunning”?

We here at Blogging the Singularity as well as our readers tend to prefer the more technical term: EXPONENTIAL!

Great story but as usual the media conglomerate ignores the big picture. They want you stunned, we want you informed.

Subscribe to the feed and keep reading….the pace is picking up!

My favorite quote from the video:

“…there is no Science Fiction anymore. All the Science Fiction I read in high school we’re doing.” more>>>

“Screwdriver isn’t one place in the brain. It’s many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like, what you use it for,” Just explained. more>>>

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First let me say I grew up in a small New England town. My parents went to town meetings where they voted on issues of the day. However, at the same time I was raised in a conservative environment. I was instructed that one should not bring up the subjects of religion or politics in polite company.

Now here comes the probability of human enhancement - on a grand scale! I recently discovered a website that documents and encourages “The great enhancement debate”. Can you imagine anything that could possibly have more impact on both religion and politics?

Click here for a project titled “The great enhancement debate”. Next be sure to click on the “Project description” window and then on the 3 videos by nina that will appear. Enjoy or better yet “THINK”.

If you recall, “THINK” was a one-word slogan developed by IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. It certainly applies to this - the Great Enhancement Debate.

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