Philosopher argues for guided evolution: Guided by technocrats

According to Anjana Ahuja’s “Enhancing the Species in Timesonline”:

The whiteboard in John Harris’s office declares: “John is cool.” Many hold a different opinion of one of the most controversial philosophers in Britain. Here are some of his views: abortion and euthanasia are both fine, desirable even; parents should be allowed to create designer or cloned babies; there’s nothing wrong with a drug-fuelled Olympics; scientists and medics should strive to make us immortal, even on a crowded planet; our bodies should be routinely plundered after death for organs, even if the dead and bereaved do not wish it; it is morally justified to compel people to participate in scientific trials, just as we compel them to do jury service.

Well, read it for yourself and see what you think. I think it’s theatre of the absurd. We are living in a world where we can’t prevent people from dying of malaria or getting murdered by terrorists. This stuff would only make things worse.

The Spiritual Brain: Radio and TV

New! Milt Rosenberg interviews Spiritual Brain author Mario Beauregard as well as genome mapping star Francis Collins, author of The Language of God. Here's the link.

Also, Lorna Dueck of Listen Up TV interviews The Spiritual Brain co-author Denyse O’Leary on Mother Teresa’s spiritual struggleshttp://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2007/09/mother-teresas-dark-night-of-soul.html, as revealed in her published letters, Come Be My Light .

Upload human memories onto a computer? Some are serious about that!

Danielle Egan reports for New Scientist on the Transhumanists who want to acquire immortality by uploading their minds into computers:

I'M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains - memories, emotions and all - onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough - a few decades perhaps - the technology will surely catch up.

I’d heard vaguely about this, mainly via my favourite science fiction writer Rob Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment and non-mainstream physicist Frank Tipler’s Physics of Christianity.

I think that the Transhumanists have missed the point. The problem with the farrago of uploaded memories is that there won’t be a mind for them to be the memories OF. But their project raises an interesting question: What if - as neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I argue in The Spiritual Brain - on the balance of the evidence, it is best to assume that the mind survives the body anyway? Wouldn’t those files left on the computer be a sort of embarrassment? I could see a good sci fi moving coming out of this.

Re the Transhumanists, Egan notes,

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Well, of course, before we get carried away by the significance of these numbers, we need to stop and remember one of the laws of (human) numbers: It is much easier for a group of 2000 to grow to a group of 5000 than for a group of 2 billion to grow to 5 billion. Small groups can grow more quickly than large ones.

A video of Tranhumanist Sandberg is also available here and a look at the cutting edge (literally, for once) technology here. Ray Kurzweil is said by Egan to be the group’s “unofficial prophet.” I guess that will reassure whoever it reassures.

Other New Scientist death stories are linked here.