Lifeboat Foundation

Yeah, death is scary and freaky, but on the other hand, I have no direct idea of what it actually involves (having never been dead myself). Given that reality, my job is to live this life as completely as possible. You can engage fully in its richness, its sorrows, and its beauty, or you can miss it by worrying about when or how this aspect of being ends.

From this perspective, the transhumanist desire to “conquer” death sounds like the worst forms of religious zeal. Both science and spiritual practice are supposed to help us look directly into the truth of life, the Universe, and Everything. Death, whatever it means, is part of all three. To spend effort thinking otherwise is to, quite sadly, miss the point profoundly.

Even more important, however, is the wrong-headedness of the transhuman conception of what it means to be human. Their idea is that it’s literally all in the head. Your life, in the transhumanist conception, is reducible to the computations happening in your brain. The totality of your experience — its vibrancy and immediacy and the strange inescapable luminosity of its presence — is all just meat computing. And if that’s the case, who needs the meat? Let’s just swap out the neurons for silicon chips, and it will all be the same. Heck, it will be better, and it gets to go on forever and ever.

Time to replace X-ray machines with bionic fingers.

A team of researchers at Wiyu University (WYU) in China has created a bionic finger that can create 3D maps of the interiors of any object just by poking it gently and repeatedly, according to a press release.

Imagine your son or daughter has an electronic toy train that they love to play with, but then due to some problem, the train stops working, and your kid starts crying… More.

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What if, instead of using X-rays or ultrasound, we could use touch to image the insides of human bodies and electronic devices? In a study publishing in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science (“A smart bionic finger for subsurface tactile-tomography”), researchers present a bionic finger that can create 3D maps of the internal shapes and textures of complex objects by touching their exterior surface.

“We were inspired by human fingers, which have the most sensitive tactile perception that we know of,” says senior author Jianyi Luo, a professor at Wuyi University. “For example, when we touch our own bodies with our fingers, we can sense not only the texture of our skin, but also the outline of the bone beneath it.”

“Our bionic finger goes beyond previous artificial sensors that were only capable of recognizing and discriminating between external shapes, surface textures, and hardness,” says co-author Zhiming Chen, a lecturer at Wuyi University.

Dr. Ben Goertzel.
SingularityNET

The Coming Consciousness Explosion.

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Transhumanists hope to use AI to achieve immortality, but they will still be dead and gone. data-react-helmet= true.

Transhumanism is the idea that technology and evidence-based science can and should be used to augment and improve humans in order to overcome the limitations that evolution has left us with. As the name suggests, it stems from humanism, but it adds an optimism that cognitive and physical improvement is both possible and desirable.

On the face of it, the idea that humans should be permitted to use technology to live healthier and happier lives does not sound dangerous, or even contentious. But it does provoke strong opposition: in 2004, Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea”. The force of that claim is somewhat undermined when you consider how wildly wrong his previous big idea turned out to be: in 1992 he declared that because the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, history had come to an end. Nevertheless, Fukuyama is not alone in fearing transhumanism.

Some people object to transhumanism because they think we should strive to be “natural”, and to be content with what evolution – or their god — have given us. But of course the definition of what is “natural” changes over time. Nature didn’t endow us with spectacles, and few people now argue they should be banned. Now we have cochlear implants, and many people feel that their smartphones are extensions of themselves. In the future we will have the option of raising our IQ with smart drugs or with gene therapy, and these will be hotly debated.

CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS: presenting my published works in a recent talk. Topics include evolutionary cybernetics, computational physics, consciousness, philosophy of mind, cybernetic theory, Omega Point cosmology, physics of time, simulation theory, Global Mind, AGI, VR, Metaverse, Cybernetic Singularity, transhumanism, posthumanism, cybernetic immortality, synthetic telepathy, mind-uploading, neurotechnologies, Fermi Paradox, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, the Argument for Cybertheism, and more.

The main 45-minute slide presentation is followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. This presentation is in Russian with slides and subtitles in English.

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José Cordeiro, PhD, talking about his international bestseller “The Death of Death” during the coming DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at i24 news discussing about aging as the “mother” of all chronic diseases!

José Cordeiro is an international fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, vicechair of HumanityPlus, director of The Millennium Project, founding faculty at Singularity University in NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, and former director of the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter), the World Transhumanist Association and the Extropy Institute.

Continue reading “The Death of Death during the coming #DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at #i24” »