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Dying in a Transhumanist and Posthuman Society

Author : Panagiotis Pentaris

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 127 pages

File Size : 43,4 MB

Release : 2021-11-25

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1000479560

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Book Description

Exploring both the intrapersonal (moral) and interpersonal (ethical) nature of death and dying in the context of their development (philosophical), Dying in a Transhumanist and Posthuman Society shows how death and dying have been and will continue to be governed in any given society. Drawing on transhumanism and discourses about posthumanity, life prolongation and digital life, the book analyses death, dying and grief via the governance of dying. It states that the bio-medical dimensions of our understanding of death and dying have predominated not only the discourses about death in society and the care of the dying, but their policy and practice as well. It seeks to provoke thinking beyond the benefits of technology and within the confinements of the world transhumanists describe. This book is written for all who have an interest in thanatology (i.e. death studies) but will be useful specifically to those investigating the experiences of dying and grieving in contemporary societies, wherein technology, biology and medicine continuously advance. Thus, the manuscript will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including health and social care, social policy, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and, of course, thanatology.



Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative

Author : Sonia Baelo-Allué

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 335 pages

File Size : 42,50 MB

Release : 2021-05-05

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1000374017

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Book Description

Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative brings together fifteen scholars from five different countries to explore the different ways in which the posthuman has been addressed in contemporary culture and more specifically in key narratives, written in the second decade of the 21st century, by Dave Eggers, William Gibson, John Shirley, Tom McCarthy, Jeff Vandermeer, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Cixin Liu and Helen Marshall. Some of these works engage in the premises and perils of transhumanism, while others explore the qualities of the (post)human in a variety of dystopian futures marked by the planetary influence of human action. From a critical posthumanist perspective that questions anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism and the centrality of the ‘human’ subject in the era of the Anthropocene, the scholars in this collection analyse the aesthetic choices these authors make to depict the posthuman and its aftereffects.



Vibrant Death

Author : Nina Lykke

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 29,80 MB

Release : 2022-01-13

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1350149721

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Book Description

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine ”I”, who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning “I”'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject.



To Be a Machine

Author : Mark O'Connell

Publisher : Anchor

Page : 221 pages

File Size : 30,20 MB

Release : 2017-02-28

Category : Computers

ISBN : 0385540426

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Book Description

“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans—in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world’s biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.



The Transhumanist Movement

Author : Francesco Paolo Adorno

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 237 pages

File Size : 38,72 MB

Release : 2021-11-02

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 3030824233

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Book Description

The book is published as part of the "PRIN 2017 The Dark side of the Law". This volume analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of the academic transhumanism movement, beginning with the relationship between anthropology and technique. The author focuses on the question of immortality, which can be considered the core of transhumanism. The true depth of immortality will be discussed, through which and how many transformations could be produced in order to change our society, which is basically shaped by and for human mortal beings, in a society composed by immortal persons. Some writers have written about what a future populated with immortals might look like, which is far removed from both the bright future painted by transhumanists and from the disappearance of humanity feared by bioconservatives.



Philosophical Posthumanism

Author : Francesca Ferrando

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 296 pages

File Size : 27,73 MB

Release : 2019-06-27

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1350059498

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Book Description

The notion of 'the human' is in need of urgent redefinition. At a time of radical bio-technological developments, and in light of the political and environmental imperatives of our age, the term 'posthuman' provides an alternative. The philosophical landscape which has developed as a response to the crisis of the human, includes several movements, such as: Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism and Object Oriented Ontology. This book explains the similarities and differences between these currents and offers a detailed examination of a number of topics that fall under the “posthuman” umbrella, including the anthropocene, artificial intelligence and the deconstruction of the human. Francesca Ferrando affords particular focus to Philosophical Posthumanism, defined as a philosophy of mediation which addresses the meaning of humanity not in separation, but in relation to technology and ecology. The posthuman shift thus emerges in the global call for social change, responsible science and multispecies coexistence.



Posthuman Bliss?

Author : Susan B. Levin

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 371 pages

File Size : 38,75 MB

Release : 2020

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0190051493

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Book Description

Transhumanists would have humanity's creation of posthumanity be our governing aim. Susan B. Levin challenges their overarching commitments regarding the mind, brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality. Her critique unmasks their notion of humanity's self-transcendence via science and technology as pure, albeit seductive, fantasy.



Posthuman Gaming

Author : Poppy Wilde

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 243 pages

File Size : 38,48 MB

Release : 2023-09-21

Category : Games & Activities

ISBN : 1000963071

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Book Description

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman. With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of "self", and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an "I" in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming. This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies. Chapters 2 and 7 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.



Posthuman Studies Reader

Author : Evi D. Sampanikou

Publisher : Schwabe Verlag (Basel)

Page : 336 pages

File Size : 29,59 MB

Release : 2021-04-20

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 3796543189

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Book Description

The new reader presents an up-to-date collection of seminal texts dedicated to all branches of debates on Posthuman Studies: Transhumanism, Critical Posthumanism and Metahumanism. It includes classical as well as cutting-edge contributions to these debates. The Posthuman Studies Reader is an indispensable resource for studying as well as teaching key concepts, central claims and main arguments of contemporary debates in the field of Posthuman Studies. The reader includes texts by: Neil Badmington, Karen Barad, Nick Bostrom, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Jaime del Val, FM-2030, Francis Fukuyama, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Ihab Habib Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, James Hughes, Julian Huxley, Brian Massumi, Max More, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More and Cary Wolfe. "This Reader is a perfect guide to get into bleeding-edge philosophy."Nicolás Rojas Cortés, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile "The Reader can be used not only as a textbook in higher education, but also by all researchers and students in these fields as reference. [...] I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in these movements and those works from which excerpts are included in it."Yunus Tuncel, The New School, New York "Since Sorgner, Sampanikou, Stasienko and their colleagues, almost singlehandedly, are crafting and advancing this discipline through its forming stages, when they publish a book with handpicked canonic texts, it should be treated as a landmark."Carmel Vaisman, The Cohn Institute and The Multidisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Tel Aviv University "What makes the Posthuman Studies Reader interesting and exciting is the facility to have in one volume the basic ideas and essentials of transhumanism, critical posthumanism and metahumanism. The reader provides in a condensed version an introduction to posthuman studies for both academic and nonacademic audiences."Leo Igwe, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town "The Posthuman Studies Reader serves as a comprehensive guide and/or manual of an evolving and expanding Post/Trans/Meta Humanism discourse. [...] because of the clarity of organization by the editors and the highest scholarship of the writers, the collection was able to drive the interest of readers a notch or two higher."Joseph Reylan B. Viray, Polytechnic University of the Philippines



The Transhumanist Reader

Author : Max More

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

Page : 480 pages

File Size : 27,13 MB

Release : 2013-03-05

Category : Medical

ISBN : 1118555996

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Book Description

The first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the origins and current state of transhumanist thinking The rapid pace of emerging technologies is playing an increasingly important role in overcoming fundamental human limitations. Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist Reader is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature.