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DENVER – Colorado’s first drive-up testing facility for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) opened Wednesday in Denver’s Lowry neighborhood and saw several dozen vehicles in line after it opened.

The drive-up facility, located at 8100 E. Lowry Blvd. in Denver, will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and next week’s schedule will be posted on the state’s website once the schedule is decided.

Coronavirus in Colorado: COVID-19 cases, locations and live updates across the state.

Subjects: consciousness, psychedelics, panpsychism, transhumanism, abolishing suffering, death and immortality.

My guest today is David Pearce, a well known philosopher and transhumanist, yet his views about consciousness set him apart from other transhumanists you might be familiar with. David believes that the nature of consciousness goes much deeper than can be explained through classical physics or from within a materialist paradigm. He suspects that consciousness may reflect an intrinsic feature of reality. Whether or not this is the case, David is confident that the unity of consciousness is facilitated by a quantum unity occurring in the brain. As a result, David is skeptical about the possibility of classical computation-based “mind uploading” or truly conscious artificial intelligences arriving in the foreseeable future. But while our descendents will continue to be biological, they will however be dramatically different to us, not only with their indefinite lifespan, physical fortitude, and resilience to disease, but most significantly, in the structure of their minds. According to David, our great grandchildren will inhabit profoundly blissful mind spaces which exist exclusively “above hedonic zero”. They will have abandoned retributive emotions such as jealousy and anger, and their ordinary conscious states will be comparable to today’s peak experiences. Most significantly for David, our descendants will set their sites on abolishing suffering in all sentient life on this planet, and finally, the entire reachable universe.

We discussed these subjects and more in our conversation. Whether or not you find David’s vision hard to believe, this will be an interesting episode! If you value these conversations, please consider supporting Waking Cosmos on Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/wakingcosmos

David’s website

Editor: Juergen Kroymann, CNRS UMR 8079/Université Paris-Sud, France.

Received: June 7, 2010; Accepted: July 7, 2010; Published: July 30, 2010.

Copyright: © 2010 Paungfoo-Lonhienne et al. This is an open-access distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors. In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.

“This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation,” says UNSW’s Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. “Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science.”

That a nuclear spin can be controlled with electric, instead of magnetic fields, has far-reaching consequences. Generating magnetic fields requires large coils and high currents, while the laws of physics dictate that it is difficult to confine magnetic fields to very small spaces—they tend to have a wide area of influence. Electric fields, on the other hand, can be produced at the tip of a tiny electrode, and they fall off very sharply away from the tip. This will make control of individual atoms placed in nanoelectronic devices much easier.