Monthly Archives: April 2017

In the name of science, Rich Lee has done things to his body that most of us wouldn't dare imagine. He's implanted permanent earbudsin his ears that allow him to listen to music on the sly. He's implanted magnets in his finger and experimented with eyedrops that would allow him to see in the dark. Most recently, he installed tubes of armorunder the skin of his leg toact as a sort of built-in shin guard.

Lee is what's known as a grinder, part of a community of biohackers that use their own bodies as laboratories to push the limits of the human form. The human body, theyreason, is a machine that can be "hacked" forimprovement in the same way you might add features to a computer or a car. Lee sees himself as a mad scientist, tinkering with his own physicality in search of perfection.

But to Lee's ex-wife, his biohacking isn't just an odd hobbyit's a disturbing and potentially dangerous one that makes him a worse parent. She's arguing in court that it poses such a hazard to their kids that Lee shouldn't get custody of them.

When Lee divorced from his wife last November, they split the custody of their 9-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son. Then last month, after Lee's shin surgery,his wife filed a motionto give her full custody, citing Lee's biohacking as the primary reason.

"I stopped sharing joint physical custody," the motion says, "because Rich has chosen to expose our children to his disturbing behavior of do-it-yourself surgeries and bio-hacking."

His ex-wife did not respond to a request for comment through her attorney, but her court filings lay her position out clearly."I am disturbed by Richs self-destructive behavior," the motionreads, "and believe it has a negative impact on our children."

Lee's tinkering, in other words, isn't self-improvementit's self-mutilation. Lee counts himself among the camp of hackers and scientists who don't necessarily view the human body in its natural form as better. Their growing contingency, though, faces a stiff opposition from a majority of people who feel messing with nature is aslippery slope.

When he's not playing mad scientist, Lee manages a warehouse for a packaging sales firm in southwestern Utah. He got into biohacking back in 2008. He was flipping through old magazines left behind by his recently deceased grandmother, and found himself upset by headlines from decades past promising things like the end of disease andeternal life.

"I was upset at futurism," he told me. "All these predictions just never came true."

If Lee wanted to live in a transhumanist utopia, he decided he was going to have to make it for himself.

He started smalla magnet in his finger,an RFID chip in his hand. Over the years, Lee's experiments playing Frankenstein with his own body became increasingly extreme. He documented them on YouTube,turninghim into a fixture of the grinder community.His latest project in development is the Lovetron9000, an implant he hopes will turn his man parts into a bionic, vibrating penis.

"Making implants and other kinds of mad science ismy passion in life," Lee told me. "And my kids have always been really proud of it."

According to her legal filing, Lee's ex-wife had always been disturbed by her husband's surgeries, but she says they became more extreme recently.

"He has gotten several implants this past year and they are increasingly more invasive and dangerous," his ex-wife's motion reads. "It also concerns me that he is dismissive of the impact his self-surgeries have on the children. He posts them on social media and YouTube; our kids can easily access either."

Lee's ex-wife argues that exposing their kids to the sometimes gruesome world of DIY implants is not good for the kids.

In addition to restricting custodyto just visitation rights, her motion asks the court to bar Lee from "involving the children in or exposing the children to his bio-hacking/trans-human/grinder lifestyle and activities."

But Lee argues that his kids have always been curious and enthusiastic about his strange hobby. He doesn't let his kids see the grizzly stuff. And his kids, he said, love bragging to friends about their "cyborg dad."

Horrified at the thought of losing custody of his kids, Lee started a GoFund me campaign to raise money for a lawyer, asking people to "help cyborg Dad regain custody."

"I strongly believe that one's body is theirs to do what they want with. I choose to customize mine through various technological interventions.," he wrote on his GoFund me campaign page. "That does not make me an unfit parent and shouldn't make my kids love me less. I fear that the courts system in my small conservative town will not understand that parents being into body modification and biohacking ARE NOT FORMS OF CHILD ABUSE."

So far, he's raised more than $6,000 and sparked outrage among the biohacker community. In a time when technophobia is in the zeitgeistwhen Americans are wary of the effects of genetic engineering and other sci-fi sounding advancementsit's easy to view Lee's case as a referendum on biohacking itself. Implanting armor into your shins doesn't just make you audacious and perhaps a little wackyit could makeyou unfit to be a parent to your kids.

"I believe in a person's right to augment their body however they want," Lee told me. "If one parent is trans or gets a tattoo or whatever, it doesn't change their ability to love a kid."

Excerpt from:
This dad is a genius biohacker. But he could lose his kids because of it. - Fusion

The idea that neuroscience is rediscovering the soul is, to most scientists and philosophers, nothing short of outrageous. Of course it is not.

But the widespread, adverse, knee-jerk attitude presupposes the old-fashioned definition of the soul the ethereal, immaterial entity that somehow encapsulates your essence. Surely, this kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo has no place in modern science. And I agree. The Cartesian separation of body and soul, the res extensa (matter stuff) vs. res cogitans (mind stuff) has long been discarded as untenable in a strictly materialistic description of natural phenomena.

After all, how would something immaterial interact with something material without any exchange of energy? And how would something immaterial whatever that means somehow maintain the essence of who you are beyond your bodily existence?

So, this kind of immaterial soul really presents problems for science, although, as pointed out here recently by Adam Frank, the scientific understanding of matter is not without its challenges.

But what if we revisit the definition of soul, abandoning its canonical meaning as the "spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal" for something more modern? What if we consider your soul as the sum total of your neurocognitive essence, your very specific brain signature, the unique neuronal connections, synapses, and flow of neurotransmitters that makes you you?

Just as we have unique fingerprints, our brains, their "connectome," are also unique. Surely, all brains are made of the same stuff, but wired in very individual ways. Recall that our brains are plastic, and mold themselves according to environmental and emotional inputs the stories of our lives. To this, we must add our bodies and their relation to our brains. For the mind is embodied, the self not an isolated property of what's inside your cranium but an emergent property of your whole mind-body integration as mapped through the complex highways of nerves interlocking all of you.

Consider, then, the modern soul as the unique neuronal-synaptic signature integrating brain and body through a complex electrochemical flow of neurotransmitters. Each person has one, and they are all different. That is, or can be considered, your essence from a materialist perspective.

Once we have this definition of the soul, the next question is inevitable. Can all this be reduced to information, such as to be replicated or uploaded into other-than-you substrates? That is, can we obtain sufficient information about this brain-body map so as to replicate it in other devices, be they machines or cloned biological replicas of your body? This would be, if technologically possible, the scientific equivalent of reincarnation, or of the long-sought redemption from the flesh an idea that is at least as old as organized religions in the East and West (as Mark O'Donnell remarked in his book To Be a Machine, reviewed here).

Well, depending on who you talk to, this final transcendence of human into information is either around the corner a logical step in our evolution or an impossibility a mad dream of people who can't accept the inevitability of death, the transhumanist crowd.

Silicon Valley is taking very seriously the possibility that aging is a technological problem that can be hacked. For example, the website of Google's company Calico states right upfront that its mission is to tackle "aging, one of life's greatest mysteries." The company's approach is more one of prolonging life than of uploading yourself somewhere else, but in the end the key word that unites the different approaches is information. If life is a code written genetically, it can be dealt with, including the instructions for aging. Another Google company, DeepMind, is bent on cracking AI: "Solve intelligence to make the world a better place." Google is approaching the problem of death from both a genetic and a computational perspective. They clearly complement one another. Google is not alone, of course. There are many other companies working on similar projects and research. The race is on.

What to make of this? It's inevitable that science will be at the forefront of the quest to prolong or upload life. This is not a bad thing, per se, given that the knowledge this research will surely produce will open new pathways to healthier, longer lives. Accepting death is a hard pill to swallow, the hardest. As I wrote elsewhere, referring to my family in this context: "Every day I have to love them is one less day I have to love them."

However, the possibility of extending life indefinitely also raises all sorts of moral and social questions, and possibly a lot of pain and loss. The curse of the immortal is to lose everyone he loves. Unless everyone jumps in. But how reasonable is this assumption? Who will benefit from these technologies? The very wealthy? The select few that have access to them? What of the rest of society? Would we end up creating a dual species of beings, humans and transhuman demi-gods? Would there be mutual tolerance and respect? I can imagine all sorts of sci-fi scenarios unfolding, utopic and dystopic.

Meanwhile, while the quest for immortality continues, what we can do is eat well, exercise, and try to live a life of meaning, leaving the world a better place than how we found it. Or, perhaps, for some in the future, never leaving it at all.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

Continued here:
Is Neuroscience Rediscovering The Soul? - WBAA

Did you know that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was inspired by the typical European comic book sci-fi aesthetic? While you wait for Luc Bessons visual treat to come to the big screen, here are the comics you can read to get the hype train rolling!

This Franco-Belgian sci-fi adventure is the brainchild of some of the biggest names of visual arts. The adventures of John Difool, a low-class detective in a degenerate dystopian world, were penned by none other than the mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky, and drawn by Jean Giraud (Moebius), Zoran Janjetov, and Jos Ladrnn.

It provides an offbeat comical social commentary that dabbles with the spiritual evolution of an Everyman, and the visual world-building is spectacular after all, the world of Incal was created on the abandoned designs of Moebius cinematic project, the Dune movie that never was.

This is a new dystopian space opera devised as an ongoing comic book series that will awaken the European comic book art style from its slumber. Combined with the novel The Uncommoners Gene and an upcoming video game, it forms an expansive narrative that tells the tale of a strange and colorful world where the entire lifespan of the underprivileged lasts as much as a single day in the life of the mighty. Join an exile and a space pirate as they unravel the mystery of an eerily prophetic 1930s radio program. Lightstep Chronicles is currently available through its Kickstarter page.

Today, The Nikopol Trilogy is best known as the source material behind the dystopian classic Immortel. This Franco-Belgian series of three graphic novels is the one man show of Yugoslavian-born author Enki Bilal. The cyberpunk story is set in a trans-human, fascist future and represents a colder, more psychological and introverted counterweight to the sci-fi favorite The Fifth Element.

Don Lawrences sci-fi/fantasy crossover comic book series was a bumpy ride. He was originally hired to do a comic strip for a weekly publication, but after that failed, he pushed forth his own idea for Storm. There are many set pieces and storylines that create the world of Storm, but essentially they can be grouped into two parts: The Chronicles of the Deep World and The Chronicles of Pandarve. What really makes Storm stand out is the organic way the epic fantasy elements blend in with the sci-fi elements.

Last but not least comes the source material itself. Valrian: Spatio-Temporal Agent is a sci-fi comic book franchise created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mzires. This beloved European bestseller was the simple Franco-Belgian answer to the grandiose American superhero comic book genre, then prevalent even in France. The visual art style of The Fifth Element was greatly inspired by Valrian, which shouldnt come as a surprise Mzires was the art director of both.

What do you think of this list? Did I miss something? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

More:
5 Comics You Need To Read Before Seeing The 'Valerian' Movie - moviepilot.com