Cryonics Magazine- New Evidence Keeping Brain Sharp and Active Wards off Alzheimer’s
- New Discoveries in Cell Aging
- Eye Trials Give Hope for Stem Cells
- How Stem Cell Implants Help Heal Traumatic Brain Injury
- Victory For Crowdsourced Biomolecule Design
- New Approach to Preventing Fatal Septic Shock
- Alzheimer’s Damage Occurs Early
- Oxidative DNA Damage Repair
- Messenger RNA Self-destruct Mechanism Revealed
- How the Brain Cell Works: A Dive Into Its Inner Network
- Fight Aging!
- Chronosphere
- Cryonics “Castle”
- Doing the Time Warp
- Interventive Gerontology 1.0.02: First, Try to Make it to the Mean: Diet as a life extending tool, Part 3
- Interventive Gerontology 1.0.02: First, Try to Make it to the Mean: Diet as a life extending tool, Part 2
- Interventive Gerontology 1.0.02: First, Try to Make it to the Mean: Diet as a life extending tool, Part 1.
- Fortune and Men’s Eyes
- Interventive Gerontology 101.01: The Basics
- The Kurzwild Man in the Night
- Fucked.
- You Bet Your Life!
Category Archives: Society
Non-existence is hard to do
A review of contemporary antinatalist writings Originally published in Cryonics, 2nd Quarter, 2010 (PDF) “Coming into existence is bad in part because it invariably leads to the harm of ceasing to exist.” David Benatar “If they could get a corpse … Continue reading
Posted in Arts & Living, Cryonics, Death, Neuroscience, Science, Society
Tagged Antinatalism, Consciousness, Cryonics, David Benatar, Empiricism, Free Will, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Reichenbach, Hard Determinism, Jim Crawford, Marquis de Sade, Max Stirner, Thomas Ligotti, Transhumanism
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Cryonics, trans-temporal communism and future squatters
Cryonics advocate Eugen Leitl puts forward some hard-hitting and thought-provoking observations about cryonics (reminiscent of Mike Darwin’s more recent thoughts on the subject): Cryonics, like Natural Selection, or the theories of General and Special Relativity, is core-smashing in character, and … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Society
Tagged Cryonics, Eugen Leitl, Futurism, Medicine, Mike Darwin, Transhumanism
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Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience
Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson believes that a major reason why the social sciences have made so little progress is that its practitioners have ignored the biological basis of human behavior. He is not impressed with arguments that purport that the … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Alexis Carrel, Consilience, Edward O. Wilson, Empiricism, Free Will, Hans Reichenbach, Logical Empiricism, Logical Positivism, Sociobiology, Unity of Science
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Buddhism and the scientific worldview
On his blog The Life of Man Qua Man on Earth Mark Plus takes a critical look at Buddhism: Transhumanists who endorse Buddhism tend to annoy me. Buddhism not only has the problems John Horgan points out, but the empirical … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Society
Tagged Atheism, Buddhism, Calvinism, Free Will, Mark Plus, Neuroscience
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The low-hanging fruit of technological progress
The website Alternative Right has an interesting article on the declining pace of technological progress: The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Cryonics, Eric Drexler, Molecular Nanotechnology, Singularity, Technological Progress, Technological Singularity
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The presumption of death
Bertrand Russell once said that “most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.” One does not need to look any further than the many responses to Kerry Howley’s recent article about cryonics and hostile partners in … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Society
Tagged Bertrand Russell, Bryan Caplan, Cryonics, Hostile Relatives, Hostile Wife Phenomenon, Immortality, James Hughes, Kerry Howley, Life Extension, Peggy Jackson, Robin Hanson, Sati, Thomas Donaldson
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Humanist death apologetics
Some contemporary atheists and secular humanists do not stop at debunking the idea of God but seem to think that making a persuasive case against religion requires them to refute all of its associated ideas as well; including the desire … Continue reading
Posted in Death, Society
Tagged Atheism, Boredom, Ethics, God, Herbert Marcuse, Humanism, Immortality, Longevity, Paula Kirby, Religion, Secular Humanism, Susan Ertz
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The ethics of cryonics interference
Advocates of human cryopreservation argue that death is not an event but a process. Cryonics patients are stabilized at low temperatures in anticipation of a second medical opinion in the future. This raises an important ethical issue. What is the … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Death, Society
Tagged Bioethics, Cryonics, Cryostasis, Do Not Resuscitate, Ethics, Hostile Relatives
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Biological enhancement and evolution
In the March 2010 issue of Reason magazine Tim Cavanaugh writes about the rift between transhumanists who favor biological enhancement versus those who favor non-biological “mechanical” enhancement: These days transhumanists talk a lot about subcutaneous data ports, permanent immersion in … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged 21st Century Medicine, Anthony de Jasay, Bayesian Optimization, Cryonics, Greg Fahy, Michael R. Rose, Tim Cavanaugh, Transhumanism
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The case for cryonics
The biology-of-aging blog Ouroboros has posted a skeptical post about cryonics that is highly representative of how most biological scientists respond to questions about cryonics. The discussion of cryonics is largely reduced to a discussion of the technical feasibility of … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Society
Tagged Aging, Bio-nanotechnology, Biogerontology, Cryobiology, Cryonics, Decision Theory, Ouroboros, Pascal's Wager, Rational Choice, Rejuvenation, Science
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Peter Thiel: Utopian Pessimist
Peter Thiel, one of the few original minds in the life extension and accelerating-technological-change community, is featured in a short interview at Wired. Thiel seems to be aware of the limitations of extrapolation of trends: We’ve been living in a … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Anti-Aging, Futurism, Peter Thiel, Singularity, Transhumanism
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The singularity is not near
Singularity skeptic Mark Plus drew my attention to the following blog post. The author writes that: Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at … Continue reading
The “yuck factor” and cryonics
In sensationalized accounts of cryonics, explicit descriptions of cryonics procedures, and that of neuropreservation in particular, are used to invoke a negative response in the reader. Some bioconservatives have argued that disgust experienced in response to certain ideas and practices … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Society
Tagged Alcor, Bioconservatives, Cryonics, Leon Kass, Medical Myopia, Neuropreservation, Ted Williams, Wisdom of Repugance, Yuck Factor
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Five important empiricist philosophy books
Most contemporary philosophers and social scientists have little interest and understanding of logic or the physical sciences and therefore have little to offer to those who want to understand the philosophical aspects of knowledge. The following five books have been … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Alfred J. Ayer, Analytic Philosophy, Berlin Circle, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Empiricism, Hans Reichenbach, Logical Empiricism, Logical Positivism, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Philosophy, Rudolf Carnap, Skeptical Empiricism, Vienna Circle
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The scientific conception of the world
The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis)
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Hans Hahn, Hans Reichenbach, Logical Empiricism, Logical Positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Vienna Circle, Wiener Kreis
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Interview with Alcor member David Croft
David Wallace Croft is an Alcor member in the Dallas area where he lives with his wife Shannon and five children, Ada, Ben, Tom, Abe, and Ted. He is employed as a Java software developer and is a part-time doctoral … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Society
Tagged Alcor, Cryonics, David Croft, Interview, Universal Immortalism
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Less wrong
Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality: Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science’s picture of the way we think – the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, … Continue reading
Posted in Arts & Living, Science, Society
Tagged Eliezer Yudkowsky, Less Wrong, Overcoming Bias, Rationality, Robin Hanson
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Cryonics and transhumanism
The association of cryonics with “transhumanism” seems inevitable but is problematic. It seems inevitable because cryonics should be most attractive to people with a very positive perspective on the future capabilities of technology. Barring rapid advances in mitigating aging, cryonics … Continue reading
Posted in Cryonics, Science, Society
Tagged Anne Corwin, Cryonics, Mark Plus, Nanotechnology, Ray Kurzweil, Singularity, Transhumanism
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Avoiding Karl Popper
The philosopher Karl Popper has published on a wide variety of subjects but his most lasting contribution is his answer to the problem of induction by drawing attention to the asymmetry between verification and falsification. A theory can never be … Continue reading
Posted in Arts & Living, Society
Tagged Critical Rationalism, Karl Popper, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Nanotechnology: The message matters
A recently conducted study brings a warning to technophiles who think that the facts are all that matter when informing a group of people about a new technology. The fact of the matter is that the message matters more. In … Continue reading
Eric Drexler launches Metamodern blog
Molecular nanotechnology pioneer and cryonics advocate Eric Drexler has launched his own blog called Metamodern: The Trajectory of Technology. This is what we can expect: In this blog, I’ll discuss current progress in science and technology, often with a specific … Continue reading
Richard Dawkins on fashionable nonsense
The Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon once opined that philosophy has lost much of its relevance because it has lost touch with the (natural) sciences. Although philosophers associated with logical positivism and critical rationalism made great efforts to discipline the practice … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged Philosophy, Physics, Postmodernism, Richard Dawkins, Skepticism, Social Science
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Herbert Marcuse on the ideology of death
Although critical philosophers like Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) are not known for their contributions to economics or analytic philosophy, Marcuse’s essay “The Ideology of Death” (1952) should appeal to those who think that death is not a necessary part … Continue reading
Posted in Death, Society
Tagged Critical Theory, Death, Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse
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Serendipity and drug discovery
The blog Soft Machines writes about a new opinion piece in the Financial Times by David Shaywitz and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on biomedical science and drug discovery. The molecular revolution in biology was supposed to substitute rational design of drugs … Continue reading