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Help Teach 1000 Children That Death is Wrong – Indiegogo Fundraiser
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II This is the description of my ambitious new project in conjunction with MILE – the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension – to distribute 1000 copies of Death is Wrong to children, free of cost to them. You can visit the Indiegogo project page and contribute here. Project Description Who are you and what are you trying to do? I am an actuary, author, philosopher, futurist, and advocate of indefinite life extension. I have published The Rational Argumentator, an online magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress, since 2002. You can find out more about me here. For this project, I am partnering with the Movement for…
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Transhumanism and Mind Uploading Are Not the Same
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II In what is perhaps the most absurd attack on transhumanism to date, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com equates this broad philosophy and movement with “the entire idea that you can ‘upload your mind to a computer’” and further posits that the only kind of possible mind uploading is the destructive kind, where the original, biological organism ceases to exist. Adams goes so far as calling transhumanism a “death cult much like the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult led by Marshal Applewhite.” I will not devote this essay to refuting any of Adams’s arguments against destructive mind uploading, because no serious transhumanist thinker of whom I am aware endorses…
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Feedback Loops and Individual Self-Determination
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II I have always been fond of the concept of feedback loops, and it is indeed the case that much of humankind’s progress, and the progress of a given individual, can be thought of as a positive feedback loop. In the technology/reason interaction, human reason leads to the creation of technology, which empowers human reason and raises rational thinking to new heights, which enables still further technology, and so on. This, I think, is a good way of understanding why technological progress is not just linear, but exponential; the rate of progress builds on itself using a positive feedback loop. Negative feedback loops also exist, of course.…
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Why I Wrote a Children’s Book on Indefinite Life Extension
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II My greatest fear about the future is not of technology running out of control or posing existential risks to humankind. Rather, my greatest fear is that, in the year 2045, I will be 58 years old and already marked by notable signs of senescence, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee, and wondering, “What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now? Why did it not come to pass? Why does the world of 2045 look pretty much like the world of 2013, with only a few cosmetic differences?” My greatest fear is that, as I stare into that mug of coffee, I…
