wee halve houses because, (s)mutch liȇk cured accuraysee, hutch liȇk vid’ veil-lid-ity, touch lijȇk acyrillic pewrity, wee liȇk two be rheborn bye the day And houses within houses beakause wee liȇk a fire fractal Liȇk the Phoenix feather front-tier fringed bye Its population-liek seethe ov sunny Tongues liȇck transient paint upawn space sitself Thus rooms four wombs withinside the larger twomb ov house Thrue puckerparting labiassed doors wee move head first out from form, to be rhesearected bye the (-m-) Inute (h)as well/s Four wee on-live the day liek it was h/our life mand night liek a no ther’s And wee live-on-e’er the (-m-) inute liek {-t-} it was the day Hand each second as though {-t-} it were the first minute Cand secowned second Thus halls liȇk vul[can]vic Passaways (…burn–, werrm–, I mean pass ages) Tube e (…-t–urn–, mum–, knot tubey, butt two be) revoluted minutely, Too be the not now, to be the knotted not then not now, t(w/h)o Both be and beenaught bye becoming inst.ed; altimetely two bhe Born and die bye The passling ov pulsed doors and halls In microcosmic cataclysm sublime, wee pass two and fro as Though {-t-} it were e’er forth and foremost fireward Hinto the forge[t]fall [f]org[e]
A( )negative prefix is a( )n indefinite article taken’ a( )step back 2 look back a( )head. Thus not U or mue or me, but yus. Thus no chair is the chair, a( )nd therefore no chair a chair, for the particular is not the category a( )nd hence the category, in particular, isn’t.
The Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Institute of Astronautics & Aeronautics (AIAA) will be having their 2nd Annual Technical Symposium, October 25 2013. The call for papers ends May 31 2013. I would recommend submitting your papers. This conference gives you the opportunity to put your work together in a cohesive manner, get feedback and keep your copyrights, before you write your final papers for journals you will submitting to. A great way to polish your papers.
Seamingly: I think, therefor I am. At least: I remember thinking, therefor I was; Be-cause. we can see ourselves thinking. Cause seeing is be-leaving and believing is synominous with being (I think?). Does one virtually need to think in order to really be? How could thought itself predicate being if one needs to be before(.) the(y) can see for(e) the(m)selves the selfseen eye of this idea of I (infingressive twin-twin(n)ed mirrors that see eachother with equal clarity and con|fusion)? Might it be that existence is everythere and what I vainly call “I am” is nought butt our awareness of our awareness of our own(ed) existence in interlaced relation to our underbase awareness of (n)or(m)ative awareness itself? In other wor(l)ds refedbacklooped perception, butt a type(o)n) of more me(x)t{r}a-convoluted ware of a-wareness. No need for some irreproachable animessence, just a sum}airy folding whose phasal geodynametry a hydrological analog to (more…)
noostore credit exchange for battered sciches and slightly-used memoROMs
(My?) exifesto turns T pale through the lens of y{ou(‘r}e?) Cleased selfwearware. Why does (your?) pruined neurocology so belligerently insist that (I?) must hate (my?) h/alted self-it/er/at/i/on now when glimpsed through the mödel-defferred intereceptor arrays of (you?)/(neome?)? Why couldn’t (you?) have con-figured a less divergent cognicodebase; one that shared at least some of that strangeseem lamestream remenistranger’s redememelictions allchem/lest, when (my?) child ride through (your?) wild mind alterminates, (I?) might have a st chance of re
One common argument against Radical Life Extension is that a definitive limit to one’s life – that is, death – provides some essential baseline reference, and that it is only in contrast to this limiting factor that life has any meaning at all. In this article I refute the argument’s underlying premises, and then argue that even if such premises were taken as true, its conclusion – that eradicating death would negate the “limiting factor” that legitimizes life — is also invalid.
Death gives meaning to life? No! Death makes life meaningless!
One version of the argument, which I’ve come across in a variety of places, is given in Brian Cooney’s Posthuman, an introductory philosophical text that uses various futurist scenarios and concepts to illustrate the broad currents of Western Philosophy. Towards the end he makes his argument against immortality, claiming that if we had all the time in the universe to do what we wanted, then we wouldn’t do anything at all. Essentially, his argument boils down to ‘if there is no possibility of not being able to do something in the future, then why would we ever do it?”.
This assumes that we make actions on the basis of not being able to do them again. But people don’t make decisions this way. We didn’t go out to dinner because the restaurant was closing down… we went out for dinner because we wanted to go out for dinner… I think that Cooney’s version of the argument is naïve. We don’t make the majority of our decisions by contrasting an action to the possibility of not being able to do it in future.
His argument seems to be that if there were infinite time then we would have no way of prioritizing our actions. If we had a list of all possible actions set before us, and time were limitless, we might (according to his logic) accomplish all the small, negligible things first, because they’re easier and all the hard things can wait. If we had all the time in the world, we would have no reference point with which to judge how important a given action or objective is, which ones it is most important to get done, and which ones should get done in the place of other possibilities. If we really can do every single thing on that listless list, then why bother, if each is as important as every other? In his line-of-reasoning, importance requires scarcity. If we can do everything it were possible to do, then there is nothing that determines one thing as being more important than another. A useful analogy might be that current economic definitions of value require scarcity. If everything were as abundant as everything else, if nothing were scarce, then we would have no way of ascribing economic value to a given thing, such that one thing has more economic value than another. What we sometimes forget is that ecologies aren’t always like economies.
They don’t call it fatal for nothing. Infatuation with the fat of fate, duty to destiny, and belief in any sort of preordainity whatsoever – omnipotent deities notwithstanding – constitutes an increase in Existential Risk, albeit indirectly. If we think that events have been predetermined, it follows that we would think that our actions make no difference in the long run and that we have no control over the shape of those futures still fetal. This scales to the perceived ineffectiveness of combating or seeking to mitigate existential risk for those who have believe so fatalistically. Thus to combat belief in fate, and resultant disillusionment in our ability to wreak roiling revisement upon the whorl of the world, is to combat existential risk as well.
It also works to undermine the perceived effectiveness of humanity’s ability to mitigate existential risk along another avenue. Belief in fate usually correlates with the notion that the nature of events is ordered with a reason on purpose in mind, as opposed to being haphazard and lacking a specific projected end. Thus believers-in-fate are not only more likely to doubt the credibility of claims that existential risk could even occur (reasoning that if events have purpose, utility and conform to a mindfully-created order then they would be good things more often than bad things) but also to feel that if they were to occur it would be for a greater underlying reason or purpose.
Thus, belief in fate indirectly increases existential risk both a. by undermining the perceived effectiveness of attempts to mitigate existential risk, deriving from the perceived ineffectiveness of humanity’s ability to shape the course and nature of events and effect change in the world in general, and b. by undermining the perceived likelihood of any existential risks culminating in humanity’s extinction, stemming from connotations of order and purpose associated with fate.
Dead Immortalist Sequence - #1: Immanuel Kant (1724−1804)
Kant is often misconstrued as advocating radical conformity amongst people, a common misconception drawn from his Categorical Imperative, which states that each should act as though the rules underlying his actions can be made a universal moral maxim. The extent of this universality, however, stops at the notion that each man should act as though the aspiration towards morality were a universal maxim. All Kant meant, I argue, was that each man should act as though the aspiration toward greater morality were able to be willed as a universal moral maxim.
This common misconception serves to illustrate another common and illegitimate portrayal of the Enlightenment tradition. Too often is the Enlightenment libelled for its failure to realize the ideal society. Too often is it characterized most essentially by its glorification of strict rationality, which engenders invalid connotations of stagnant, statuesque perfection – a connotation perhaps aided by the Enlightenment’s valorization of the scientific method, and its connotations of stringent and unvarying procedure and methodology in turn. This takes the prized heart of the Enlightenment tradition and flips it on its capsized ass. This conception of the Enlightenment tradition is not only wrong, but antithetical to the true organizing gestalt and prime impetus underlying the Age of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment wasn’t about realizing the perfect society but rather about idealizing the perfect society – the striving towards an ever-inactualized ideal which, once realized, would cease to be ideal for that very reason. The enlightenment was about unending progress towards that ideal state – for both Man as society and man as singular splinter — of an infinite forward march towards perfection, which upon definitively reaching perfection will have failed to achieve its first-sought prize. The virtue of the Enlightenment lies in the virtual, and its perfection in the infinite-perfectibility inherent in imperfection.
This truer, though admittedly less normative, interpretation of the Enlightenment tradition, taking into account its underlying motivations and projected utilities rather than simply taking flittered glints from the fallacious surface and holding them up for solid, tangible truth also serves to show the parallels between the Enlightenment gestalt and Transhumanism. James Hughes, for one, characterizes Transhumanism as a child of the Enlightenment Tradition [1].
