"Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it." Transhumans, sometimes called Posthumans, are people who have exceeded the normal mental and physical abilities. The "how" that happened can be anything from magic to science, the only thing that's common among all of them is that they are better than was possible before. A positive portrayal of transhumanism generally places a work on the Enlightenment side of the Romanticism Versus Enlightenment spectrum while a negative portrayal or conspicuous absence of it does the opposite. In fact, most popular media deals with transhumanism and anything relating to it as being 'dehumanizing' or even comparable to Eugenics with little chance for anything different. Thus, it has become a cliche that transhumanists are Sci Fi Nazis or Evilutionary Biologists with a God complex, even though it has an equal potential to be used for good. Generally, anarcho-Cyber Punk writers focus on the evils of Transhumanism. So do religious Moral Guardians, when ironically, many religions espouse a Transhumanist plane of existence free from the sinfulness of flesh. On the other hand, transhumanists and utilitarians themselves focus on the benefits. The main reason why Transhumanism's opponents tend to be very uncomfortable about it, however, is because of the implied radical alteration of what it means to be human. It is therefore assumed by said opponents that, while the idea does have potential for positive outcomes, if there was to be a negative outcome, then it probably would not be reversible. Even though this trope is called Transhuman, it's not actually limited to humans. Other species or entities that are enhanced count as well. The word 'transhuman' is actually found in legitimate scientific and political debates far more often than in fiction, although this has began to change in recent years courtesy of authors such as Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds and Greg Egan. In spite of this, being transhuman encompasses many of other science fiction staples with their distinct tropes: Artificial Human: A man-made biological/organic human, often with purposefully modified genes. Artificial Limbs: A limited form of enhancement that's specific to the limbs. Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The mystical or religious variant. Assimilation Plot: Transforming an entire species into a Hive Mind with an unified purpose. Badass Transplant: See Artificial Limbs above. Being Human Sucks/Humans Are Flawed: A major motivation. Beware the Superman: Where transhumanism has an overall negative net effect on the world. Bio-Augmentation: Biological enhancement, as compared to a Cyborg. Brain Uploading: The physical limitations of a body are outright removed. Cloning Blues: Are Clones People? Or just expendable? With LEGO Genetics, they may end up being more than we could ever imagine. Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Artificial limbs and organs make you less "human" in a way that has some sort of measurable or observable consequence. Used as a "balance" for being enhanced, usually seen in Cyberpunk RPGs. Cyborgs: Cybernetic enhancement. This is what most people think of when they think of transhumans. Designer Babies: Making a person better before they're even born. Emergency Transformation: If you become better than you were before. Better. Stronger. Faster. Evilutionary Biologist: A transhumanist who thinks that Utopia Justifies the Means and believes that what they do is the "natural" evolutionary path, rather than some controlled change. Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Genetics = magic. Humans Are Psychic in the Future: The concept is self-explanatory, if not the science. Magic Enhancement: Magical transhumansim, when applied to people, at least. Nanomachines: One of the most common ways to become Transhuman is through them. Pro-Human Transhuman: Despite no longer being (fully) human, the character still identifies with humanity. Super Breeding Program: Using genetic trait inheritance to create better people. Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Nearly always have advanced themselves to god-like power instead of starting out like that. Super Human Trafficking: Abuse of transhumans via slavery, organ trafficking, and other means. Super Serum: One of the ways to become one, but be wary of it's Psycho Serum cousin. Super Soldier: This one usually relies on the physical aspect of transhumanism for war. The Singularity: A hypothetical scenario where we become transhumans due to acceleration of progress. Transhuman Aliens: Where what appears to be a species of aliens turns out to actually be transhumans. Transhuman Treachery: For when this makes you go bad. Touched by Vorlons: Aliens or whatnot might be the cause. bermensch: Gratuitous German, meaning "Over-man" or "superman". Transhumans are likely to be transcendent not just on physical, but also on psychological and moral perspectives. Ultimate Life Form: The end-all and be-all of transhumanism (if they were purposely made). Uplifted Animal: A Trans-Animal, basically. We Can Rebuild Him: Forced to be enhanced due to injury, instead of personally seeking it out. Working for a Body Upgrade: Enhanced because they earned it as a job perk. For some of the abilities a Transhuman might have, see Stock Superpowers. See also No Transhumanism Allowed. This may be used as an aspect of a Cyberpunk or Post-Cyberpunk setting.

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

Comics

Fan Fiction

Film

Live Action TV

Literature

Music

'Cause it's gonna be the future soon, I won't always be this way/As the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away...

Read the rest here:

Transhuman - TV Tropes

AUSTIN, TEXASYou've seen Her. You've heard about the upcoming Ex Machina movie. Now, meet Martine Rothblatt, a transgender, transhumanist who wants to help you live forever by creating your own personal mind clone. If that sounds like science fiction, it is a fiction the board of her company, United Therapeutics, is sold onlast year she was the highest paid female CEO in the nation, earning $38 million.

Siri is just the beginning, she told the crowd at this year's SXSW conference here in Austin.

"There will be continued advances in software that we see throughout our lives. Eventually, these advances in software will rise to the level of consciousness," Rothblatt said, predicting that at that point, there will be no reason why the human consciousness can't live on indefinitely.

The core idea of transhumanism is that technology will someday free us of our mortal coil. The first step is creating what she calls a mind file. A mind file is a digital record that encapsulates your thoughts, mannerisms, relationships, and morebasically, it's a digital record of your entire self. And if you have a Facebook profile, according to Rothblatt, your mind file is well underway.

"We are living in a world where all of your life is captured," she said. "There is work going on at Amazon, Google, and Apple that is Mindware. It is software designed to process and recreate all of these inputs to create a consciousness."

Once the Mindware has its inputs, it just needs a robot to host it, Rothblatt said. Trust her, she's already done it.

Rothblatt hired a team of roboticists to create a "mind clone" of her wife, Bina Aspen. The mind clone, named Bina48, is a head and torso, albeit one that looks eerily like the real Bina Aspen. Bina48 is remarkably sophisticated for a home-built mind clone: she carries on a conversation, she tweets, and she expresses novel ideas. Rothblatt says soon everyone will be able to have a mind clone like Bina48.

"If I can do this as one person with a robotics team, what happens when we have 100 million makers in the world?" Rothblatt challenged the crowd. "What happens when open-source mindware gets put up on the Web for anyone to download?"

Extending human life isn't just a software problem for Rothblatt; she is also at the forefront of organ transplant technology. One of her current projects involves breeding genetically modified pigs to reduce the rates of organ transplant rejection.

"When we started doing this, the longest a genetically-modified pig organ could survive was two hours, and now we are up to over eight days. It's mind-blowing," she said.

See the rest here:

Tranhumanist CEO Wants to Help You Live Forever

AN international movement is growing where theists work with atheists in using advances in science and technology to improve the over-all quality of life on earth for all humans. It is called transhumanism because Christians, for example, who join this movement, transcend their prejudices against science and work closely with non-believing scientists in using scientific technological advances to improve the conditions of life on earth.

The movement in effect affirms on one hand that we do not have to believe in a God to work to improve the human condition and, on the other hand, that the faith of believers in a father-God should result primarily in improved relations and conditions among all of Gods children. Religion and science should, therefore, complement each other for the betterment of the human condition.

In sum, believers or not, we are one human family. We should transcend all our prejudices and instead close ranks to work to improve conditions on earth for the entire family. Prejudice should be overcome. It is anti-human because it degrades brother and sister humans with preconceived negative attitudes that are not based on reason or actual experience.

Knowing this, I wonder if we could not perhaps start a national movement that substantially resembles transhumanism. Can we not transcend our religious and cultural differences and together find ways to improve the over-all condition of not just some but all Filipinos by using all the advances we as a people have made not only in science and technology but also in history, religion, economics and politics?

We have made so much progress in all those areas. Yet the Mamasapano incident seems to have thrown all of it overboard and we are again backpedaling as anti-Muslim prejudices resurrect and thrive to destroy our chances for a better quality of life for all.

Labelling as pro-Muslim those who present a sober historical and social justice perspective to the Mindanao problem is anti-Filipino. It leads to a hardening of positions and scares the timid from coming out with good ideas for fear of being condemned as pro-Muslim.

It is also anti-Filipino for politicians with entrenched vested interests to ride the wave of prejudice against Muslims in trying to take over power if possible without benefit of popular election.

It is most anti-Filipino to advocate for war in Mindanao. For who will be the victims? Muslim and Christian ordinary civilians and rank and file soldiers. Meanwhile politicians control the war in the relative comfort of their palatial homes.

Peaceful living is the only pro-human, hence, pro-Filipino position. This can only be attained by being in a big way trans-human and overcoming prejudice.

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on March 11, 2015.

See the rest here:

Carvajal: Prejudice

Google, a search company filled with people who believe that individual consciousnesses will be uploaded into virtual reality environments, has announced plans to rate websites on the basis of factual accuracy.

The company, which is famous for using bizarrely complicated interview questions that have no value in the hiring process except to make its managers feel smarter, has said that substituting its judgment for the public's will make search results more accurate because its managers are so smart.

Google, which is also infamous for rarely hiring minorities and women, says it sees absolutely no downside to this plan, according to thousands of white male engineers in their 20s.

"For nearly 20 years, Google has maintained that information wants to be free and that gatekeepers were an impediment to human advancement," said Vincent Donaldson, Google's Senior vice president of Smugness. "Now, with what we're tentatively calling 'Google Memory Hole' we're going in a different direction. It's not that we were wrong before, it's just that we can get away with it now."

The new technology is based on approaches originally developed by Joseph Stalin to make inconvenient people disappear from history, but won't be evil since Google is doing it.

Donaldson touted the benefits to society of Google Memory Hole. "Right now a lot of websites that deny climate change on the basis of spurious science get unfortunately high page rankings because people actually want to read them," Donaldson said. "But Google Memory Hole will make the things that people are looking for harder to find, thus making it a better search engine."

Many Google users say they are already reaping the benefits of the new system, which pushes whatever Google engineers believe to the very top.

"I had no idea that transhumanism was so important," said Monica Charles, an accountant in Minneapolis. "But it keeps turning up in my searches now."

Jed Keillor, who works at an Oakland nonprofit, said he'd always thought that Google's actions might be causing Bay Area rents to skyrocket. "But I guess nobody else feels that way. At least, I can't find them."

"Also," he added, "didn't there used to be Hispanics? I could have sworn that was a thing."

Originally posted here:

Company That Believes in Utopian Singularity to Rate Websites on the Basis of Truthfulness

This article is about an evolutionary concept. For the ideology and movement, see Transhumanism. For the Believer album, see Transhuman (album). For a person identifying as male or as female, respectively, after having been socially and/or medically assigned the opposite sex identification at birth, see trans man and trans woman.

Transhuman or trans-human is an intermediary form between human and posthuman.[1] In other words, a transhuman is a being that resembles a human in most respects but who has powers and abilities beyond those of standard humans.[2] These abilities might include improved intelligence, awareness, strength, or durability. Transhumans sometimes appear in science-fiction as cyborgs or genetically-enhanced humans.

The use of the term "transhuman" goes back to French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote in his 1949 book The Future of Mankind:

Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of 'trans-humanizing' himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent.[3]

And in a 1951 unpublished revision of the same book:

In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things.[4]

In 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine, English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.[5]

One of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the Human" at The New School of New York City in the 1960s, used "transhuman" as shorthand for "transitional human". Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings", FM argued that signs of transhumans included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values.[6]

FM-2030 used the concept of transhuman as an evolutionary transition, outside the confines of academia, in his contributing final chapter to the 1972 anthology Woman, Year 2000.[7] In the same year, American cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger contributed to conceptualization of "transhumanity" in his book Man into Superman.[8] In 1982, American Natasha Vita-More authored a statement titled Transhumanist Arts Statement and outlined what she perceived as an emerging transhuman culture.[9]

More:

Transhuman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"It's what you know (and believe) that saves your life - and so knowledge, figuratively speaking, is an 'ark', one that can keep you afloat when others without it are sinking in a deluge of perplexity. If you desire to arm yourself with knowledge, the kind that may save both you and possibly your children - I recommend reading: 'As The Days of Noah Were', by Minister Dante Fortson." - C. Heidt

"Interesting and well explained. Though this goes totally against all I was taught growing up it has given me allot to think about. There are so many places in scripture that just didn't make much sense to me. M.F.'s explanation does make these passages fit better." - Carol Motsinger

"Get this book, I could not put my kindle down. The book is well written and extremely well researched. Minister Fortson takes a subject, gives you a variety of angles from other texts than just the Bible and shows how they all seem to connect in very important ways and allows you the reader to find your own solutions." - J.K. White

"As a student of eschatology I must congratulate this author for a job well done! Very insightful, informative and interesting!!! One of the best books on the Great Flood and the Nephilim." - M. Torres

"This book is sure to challenge you, regardless of your previous research and beliefs about ufology, genetic hybrids, the Nephilim, end-times prophecy, or a host of other issues covered in this book. It is clear that Minister Fortson is passionate about this subject matter and has spent a great deal of time researching and forming his own beliefs. Whether you agree or disagree with his ultimate conclusions, this book is a must read for those interested in the topics mainstream media refuses to touch." - Andrew Hoffman

Here is the original post:

Animal Human Hybrids , Transhumanism, and The Bible :The ...

February 10, 2015|9:03 am

In 2000, Craig Venter, along with Francis Collins, joined then-president Clinton in announcing the mapping of the human genome.

Since then, Venter has been a leader in the field of synthetic biology, a multi-disciplinary field related to genetic engineering.

And what he recently told the Wall Street Journal sent chills down my spine. Venter said, "We're going to have to learn to adapt to the concept that we are a software-driven species and understand how it affects our lives. Change the software, you can change the species, who we are."

The Journal's selected headline of the article described how we can now "control our evolution," which because evolution is supposed to be an unguided process, must be a misnomer. What Venter was actually describing would be better characterized as playing Creator to everyone else's Adam.

Humans, by the way, have quite a history of trying to reinvent our species. The Communists spoke about building the "New Soviet Man," a "selfless, learned, healthy and enthusiastic" person who would help build the Utopia described by Karl Marx. Fascism spoke of a "New Man who is a figure of action, violence, and masculinity," free from the taint of individualism.

Well, both failed, but not before causing previously unimaginable suffering.

Now it's scientism's turn to take a crack at reinventing the human species. And fittingly for a worldview that holds that empirical science is the only measure of truth, its approach is to reduce people to biological machines and see if they can produce something new by swapping parts and tinkering with the "software."

These efforts are known as "transhumanism." The goal of transhumanism is to "fundamentally [transform] the human condition by developing technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities."

For a long time, transhumanism was thought to be a kind of fringe movement, the stuff of science fiction movies. But now you have Venter, who is as significant as it gets in the field of genetics, talking about "changing the software." Transhumanism is not fringe anymore: It's mainstream. In fact, just last week the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with genetic material from three different parents!

Read more here:

When Adam Plays God: Why Transhumanism Won't End Well

February 12, 2015|8:10 am

In 2000, Craig Venter, along with Francis Collins, joined then-president Clinton in announcing the mapping of the human genome.

Since then, Venter has been a leader in the field of synthetic biology, a multi-disciplinary field related to genetic engineering.

And what he recently told the Wall Street Journal sent chills down my spine. Venter said, "We're going to have to learn to adapt to the concept that we are a software-driven species and understand how it affects our lives. Change the software, you can change the species, who we are."

The Journal's selected headline of the article described how we can now "control our evolution," which because evolution is supposed to be an unguided process, must be a misnomer. What Venter was actually describing would be better characterized as playing Creator to everyone else's Adam.

Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/when-adam-plays-god-why-transhumanism-wont-end-well-133846/

Hackers Declare Cyberwar on ISIS

Android 5.0 Lollipop Update for Samsung Galaxy S4 Release Date: Download Now Available

Continue reading here:

Are 'Transhumanists' Trying to Play God?