[DOWNLOAD] "Whereto Transhumanism? the Literature Reaches a Critical Mass (Essay)" by The Hastings Center Report " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Whereto Transhumanism? the Literature Reaches a Critical Mass (Essay)
• Author : The Hastings Center Report
• Release Date : January 01, 2007
• Genre: Life Sciences,Books,Science & Nature,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 177 KB

Description

Transhumanism is, according to its proselytizers, the "intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities." (1) Transhumanists look forward to descendents who are posthumans, "future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards." (2) These posthumans may be "resistant to disease and impervious to aging," have "unlimited youth and vigor," and "reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates." They may have "increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity" and "experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access." (3) Posthumans may go so far as to escape the limitations of physicality by uploading themselves onto computers. When last I checked the Web site of the World Transhumanist Association, an organization formed to agitate for transhumanism, I learned that it had a global membership of 3,744. But transhumanists are not the philosophically marginalized, technology-obsessed Trekkies that this number might suggest. Transhumanist thinkers present their view about where we should be headed with a keen awareness of how we might get there. Their opponents, not they, tend to be the ones guilty of arguing from caricatures of the technologies in question.

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