Depressed Metabolism

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 virtual reality, even extending male life spans by removing the gonads. But they spend noticeably little [...]

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 unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets [...]

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 an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a [...]

Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, and one of the few futurist thinkers with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science, outlines his current views on the global warming controversy after being identified as a “denier” and “anti-science” by  some of his (transhumanist) critics:

We skeptics (okay, “planetary traitors” if you prefer) actually hold [...]

The 2008-3 issue of Alcor’s Cryonics Magazine contains a number of articles about the pitfalls of (excessive) scientific optimism and its potential adverse effects on the organizational and practical aspects of cryonics. My own contribution contrasts cryonics as medical conservatism with the kind of scientific meliorism that is often associated with movements such as transhumanism [...]

How seriously should we take William Warren  Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” [...]

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  offers the only credible option for transhumanists to become a part of that future. It [...]

At The Hoover Hog there is a fascinating interview with Alan Dawrst on utilitarianism and suffering:

In practice, the world really is a big pond with kids drowning all the time: There are billions of people suffering from preventable poverty, disease, and violence, billions of animals enduring dreadful lives on factory farms, and orders of magnitude [...]

In ‘Who is Against Evolution?’, David Friedman discusses the phenomenon that most people who are against teaching creationism tend to avoid and discourage discussing the human implications of evolution themselves:

People who say they are against teaching the theory of evolution are very likely to be Christian fundamentalists. But people who are against taking seriously the [...]

From: ExtroBritannia
Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it – with Mike Darwin
The next ExtroBritannia event is scheduled for Saturday August 2, 2008; 2:00pm – 4:00pm.
Location to be announced asap.
Lead Speaker: Mike Darwin, President of Alcor Life Extension 1983-1988, Research Director 1988-1992. Described by Wikipedia as “Second only to Robert Ettinger [...]

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher.
Of course, children are the future. Some children are planned, [...]

Over the next three days Shannon Vyff will be guest blogging for Depressed Metabolism. Shannon Vyff is a practicing caloric restrictionist, Alcor member, and Methuselah Foundation supporter. Shannon also volunteers for her local Unitarian Universalist Church and La Leche League group.  She lives with her three children Avianna, Avryn, and Avalyse, and husband Michael (all [...]

Few, if any, cryonicists today can retrace their personal interest in cryonics to Evan Cooper. Despite the broader recognition of Robert Ettinger’s book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” which was commercially published in 1964, Cooper’s privately published 1962 manuscript, “Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now,” is an important parallel effort in what would later become known as cryonics. [...]