Monthly Archives: September 2019

If the election of Donald Trump has proven anything, its that anything is possible. Could a Milwaukee candidate, part of a fringe party thats main interest is prolonging human life expectancy, be our next President of the United States? Absolutely not, but the U.S. Transhumanist Party, a mix of ideas that include libertarianism and sci-fi sounding future tech, hopes their campaign will draw attention to their platform.

The U.S. Transhumanism Party was founded in 2014 by Zoltan Istvan, who ran as the partys first candidate in the 2016 election. Zoltans vision was a party that would advocate for significant life extension achieved through the process of science and technology so people could live for hundreds and thousands of years, eventually making a breakthrough where we would be able to live to the age of forrrrrevvvvvvver years old. Imagine limbs being replaced with robotic parts, cloned organs being swapped out like an oil change, and an external hard drive for your brain.

Milwaukees Kristan T. Harris is one of the nine candidates competing to be the partys nominee for presidential candidate. Harris says that besides eternal life, Transhumanists are also interested in genome biohacking, cryptocurrency, weather modification, and creating designer babies.

All of these issues will bring up questions of ethics, which Harris hopes will lead to a healthy debate amongst Transhumanists in discussions about who will have access to eternal life, and how far we will go with artificial intelligence.

What the U.S. Transhumanist Party does is bring awareness of a very autonomous and robotic future thats on its way, Harris says. Its trying to develop ideas about what were going to do about those scenarios before we get there.

Harris works for a tech company by day and bartends at The Salty Dog, a tavern in Cudahy (and his sort of unofficial headquarters), where hes known by regulars for his passion in creating the perfect Bloody Mary with infused vodkas. In his spare time, Harris has developed an online following as the passionate co-host of talk radio show The Rundown Live, and his own program American Intelligence Report. Hes covered everything from ancient aliens to secret societies and government corruption. Milwaukee Record reported how hed found alleged occult symbolism in Veterans Park. All this has led Harris to be labelled as a conspiracy theorist, a term he shrugs off.

I always thought the term conspiracy theorist was a thought-terminating clich. It prevents people from recognizing their own cognitive dissonance or recognizing logical fallacies and its been shown in history that the term has been used mostly to cover up things they dont want people to look into, Harris argues. If someone calls you a conspiracy theorist, then nothing you say should be considered relevant.

Before Harris hits the road to the White House to challenge Trump and whoever the Dems push through, he will have to outlive his eight USTP opponents, including San Franciscan cyberpunk Rachel Haywire, St. Louiss Jon Schattke (owner of Schattke Advanced Nuclear Engineering), and an extraterrestrial-human hybrid from Los Angeles named Vrillon. Not quite as crowded and eclectic as the Democratic lineup, but close.

Harris says hes gotten along well with his fellow Transhumanists for the most part, but in the past week he has developed a rivalry with Arizonas Johannon Ben Zion, who has an institute that focuses largely on left-libertarian and techno-optimist market solutions to contemporary problems. Harris says he got along with Candidate Zion until he decided to call me a technophobe cause I wanted to question ethics of Transhumanism and he says Ill ruin the party. The two candidates clashed on the ethics of designer babies and Harriss talk of naturally extending life. Thats the key word, I said naturally, then he said I was a technophobe, that I wasnt a Transhumanist. Harris challenged Zion to a one-on-one debate, which Zion declined.

Harris held his own in an online virtual debate on September 14 between five of the partys candidates, and is spending the rest of the week campaigning in preparation for September 21, when the USTP Electronic Presidential Primary opens online. Card-carrying (or e-mail-confirmed in this caseit takes about 10 seconds to join the party by filling out a simple form on their website) members who sign up by the 21st will have a week to vote for their representative for president.

If Harris doesnt seal his partys nomination, hell be able to try again in 2024. And if the Transhumanist agenda moves forward, hell also have a chance to run again in 3024, 4024whatever millennium seems like the right fit.

You can find Kristan T. Harriss Official U.S. Transhumanist Party candidate bio page HERE.

Link:

Long live candidate Harris, Milwaukee's US Transhumanist Party presidential hopeful - Milwaukee Record

Irish author Mark OConnell has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2019 at Trinity College Dublin this evening. He was presented with the prize for his debut To Be a Machine, an exploration of transhumanism. This is the first time the 10,000 award has been made for a work of nonfiction.

Announcing the 2019 winner, member of the prize jury Prof Michael Cronin said: In his book which takes a personal look at the transhumanist movement a movement which hopes through technology to enhance human capacities and eventually overcome human mortality Mark OConnell shows himself to be a writer of the first rank. His faultless characterisation, his deep interest in the humanity of his transhumanists, his engagingly precise but poetic style, his richly insightful observations on questions which are literally life and death issues, marked out him as a writer of unquestionable promise.

The prize is awarded for a body of work by emerging Irish writers that shows exceptional promise. The author joins the auspicious ranks of former winners such as Colin Barrett, Sara Baume, Anne Enright and Frank McGuinness among many others.

Being presented with the award in Trinity had a particular relevance for the Kilkenny-born author, who is a graduate of Trinity from where he obtained an undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy and a PhD in English.

OConnell said: Its a delight, and a real surprise, to be chosen as the winner of this years Rooney Prize for Irish literature. Its especially thrilling to be the first writer of non-fiction to be awarded the prize. Im deeply grateful to the prize committee and to the Rooney family for this wonderful honour.

OConnells book, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, was published by Granta in 2017. The Irish Times review called it brilliant A terrifying, fascinating and often funny insight into a brave new world.

OConnell, a books columnist for Slate and a staff writer at The Millions, won the prestigious 30,000 Wellcome Book Prize last year. It celebrates exceptional works that illuminate how health and medicine touch our lives. His next book, Notes from an Apocalypse: a personal journey to the end of the world and back, will be published by Granta next April. OConnell set out to meet the men and women preparing for the end of the world. In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small groups of determined men and women are getting ready. They are environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate change; billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars; and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilization as we know it.

The prize benefactor, Dr Peter Rooney, said: I am delighted to see the award go to a writer of such original and fresh writing. The vision for it has always been to reward new talent and Mark is most deserving of this years award.

The prize was set up by his uncle, the former US ambassador to Ireland and President Emeritus of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dan Rooney who died two years ago. The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature is administered by the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at the School of English at Trinity.

Mark OConnell interview with Patrick Freyne

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand

Speech by Prof Michael Cronin on behalf of the prize juryAscending Errisbeg Hill in Co Galway, the cartographer and essayist Tim Robinson reflects on the dual perspectives of climbing: Any hill suggests a progression from close-up observations of what is immediately under the climbers hands and feet, through rests for breath-catching and retrospection and glances ahead at intermediate delusive skylines that hide the ultimate goal, to the triumphal horizon-sweeping outlook from the summit.

Judges of literary prizes often feel like Robinsons hill climbers. Gazing intently at the book currently under review and then moving swiftly on to the next, always hoping for that moment when they can finally reach the the triumphal horizon-sweeping outlook from the summit and decide on a winner.

This was my first year on the prize jury and I was deeply impressed by the thoroughness, the scrupulousness, the openness of my fellow judges as they gave equal consideration to the works submitted for consideration. From the slimmest volume of poetry to the door-stopping brick of prose, all of the books were objects of the same generous, free-ranging spirit of enquiry and sympathetic analysis.

What became quickly apparent as we hauled our bulging plastic bags and overstuffed tote bags to the Oscar Wilde Centre in Westland Row was the extraordinary vitality of the contemporary writing scene in Ireland. We found writers who were deeply committed to their craft, constantly alert to the news from elsewhere and who were not afraid to experiment with new forms or ideas.

What makes the Rooney Prize such a valuable and distinctive prize in the Irish literary landscape is its commitment to recognise emergence and promise. It is a prize which does not have to labour under the shadow of established reputation but can reward originality, freshness and distinctness. As even the most cursory look at the list of previous prizewinners will show, the writers have again and again delivered on this promise.

What is exciting for the prize jury is that each time you have a blank slate, complete freedom to recognise promise, whatever its source, whatever its form. But you do eventually have to get to the top of that hill and when we did we were unanimous in our choice. Surveying that rich landscape of writing there was one book that stood out for its boldness, its vivacity and its craft. The winner of the 2019 Rooney Prize for Literature is Mark OConnell for To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (Granta, 2017).

In awarding the prize to Mark OConnell the jury was mindful of the need to extend the concept of literature to take in all forms of writing that pay particular attention to the quality and reach of language.

In his book which takes a personal look at the transhumanist movement a movement which hopes through technology to enhance human capacities and eventually overcome human mortality Mark OConnell shows himself to be a writer of the first rank. His faultless characterisation, his deep interest in the humanity of his transhumanists, his engagingly precise but poetic style, his richly insightful observations on questions which are literally life and death issues, marked out him as a writer of unquestionable promise.

He is also corrosively funny. Never mocking or disrespectful of his subjects, he has a dry, teasing wit which makes irony the subtlest of devices in his repertoire as when he describes a futurist at a meeting in London, fumbling and dropping a pistachio nut down the neck of his shirt open to the ideally entrepreneurial three-to-four buttons or how one transhumanist, went by the name T.O. Morrow, but since the late 1990s he has reverted to the less hurtlingly dynamic Tom W. Bell.

Towards the end of the book, he gives an account of a journey on board the Immortality Bus with a transhumanist and American Presidential hopeful Zoltan Istvan. There is a comic brilliance in his evocation of the mechanically challenged Zoltan accompanied by his acolyte Roen who believed that dying was so mainstream as they make their way across Texas in a forty-three foot recreational vehicle in the shape of a giant coffin.

In awarding the prize to Mark OConnell, the jury is also mindful of the richness of emerging forms of writing in Ireland that blend the personal, the factual and the reflective. Emilie Pine, Ian Maleney, Kevin Breathnach, Sinad Gleeson are just some of the names that could be mentioned in this context. They demonstrate a continued desire to explore the varied potentials of writing and see how emerging voices can offer new perspectives on questions, both contemporary and ancient.

There is no theme, of course, more central to human engagement with art than the human attempt to come to terms with mortality, which is one of the main preoccupations of To Be a Machine.

We would like to thank all the publishers who submitted works for consideration and to the School of English in Trinity College Dublin and the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing for their administrative support. On behalf of my fellow judges I would also like to thank Jonathan Williams who was such a capable and supportive organising presence throughout the judging process. Once again, we would like to commend Mark OConnell on his exemplary commitment to the art of writing and we feel that his promise as an emerging literary talent makes him a most worthy winner of the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Congratulations.Members of the prize jury are: Jonathan Williams, Dr Rosie Lavan, Carlo Gebler, Riana ODwyer, Eilan N Chuileanin and Professor Michael Cronin, Professor of French & Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation at Trinity College Dublin

See more here:

Author Mark OConnell awarded 10,000 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2019 - The Irish Times

Author Mark O'Connell has been announced as the winner of this year'sRooney Prize for Irish Literature, for his book To Be a Machine -the first time the 10,000 award has been made for a work of nonfiction.

Announcing the 2019 winner at Trinity College, Dublin, on Monday night, prize jury member Prof Michael Cronin said: "In his book which takes a personal look at the transhumanist movement a movement which hopes through technology to enhance human capacities and eventually overcome human mortality Mark O'Connell shows himself to be a writer of the first rank. His faultless characterisation, his deep interest in the humanity of his transhumanists, his engagingly precise but poetic style, his richly insightful observations on questions which are literally life and death issues, marked out him as a writer of unquestionable promise."

Mark O'Connell, winner of the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, talks to RT Arena

Subtitled Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death,To Be a Machinewas published by Granta in 2017. The bookexplores the philosophical and scientific roots of transhumanism; a movement that believes we can and should use technology to control the future evolution of our species. The book won the prestigious 30,000 Wellcome Book Prize in 2018.

"It's a delight, and a real surprise, to be chosen as the winner of this years Rooney Prize for Irish literature," says Mark O'Connell."Its especially thrilling to be the first writer of non-fiction to be awarded the prize. Im deeply grateful to the prize committee and to the Rooney family for this wonderful honour."

The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature was established by former US ambassador to Ireland and President Emeritus of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the late Dan Rooney, andis administered by the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at the School of English at Trinity. The prize is awarded for a body of work by an emerging Irish writer that shows exceptional promise - previous winners include Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett,Doireann N Ghrofa, Sara Baume and Anne Enright, among many others.

Link:

Mark O'Connell wins Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Books - RTE.ie

Yale computer scientist David Gelernters recent confession in theClaremont Review of Books, rejecting Darwinism, continues to pick up notices from the most interesting writers out there. The economist and philosopher David Goldman, aka Spengler, notes it in an essay, Pseudo-science, the Bible and human freedom.

Goldman points out that even as the popularity of scientific determinism has jumped, the limits of scientific arguments for a purely material basis to reality have become ever clearer. Materialists assume that physics and biology make their case for them, yet physics has lost its ability to make grand statements about the nature of reality, and biology hasnt fared any better.

The evidence for unguided evolution, a central pillar for any materialist ethos, doesnt add up:

The new science of DNA proves mathematically that the odds of a random mutation leading to an improvement in the adaptability of a living organism are effectively zero, Gelernter shows. Even a small protein molecule has a chain of 150 amino acids. If we rearrange them at random we mostly obtain gibberish. In fact, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 1074 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 1074 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. Its not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller, Gelernter explains. That is Establishment science, not the murmurings of the Creationist fringe.

In short, the evolutionary biologists cant explain how animal life made the great leap from protozoans to arthropods in the Cambrian Explosion, let alone how natural selection through random mutation might have shaped the human mind. Biologists do brilliant and important research, to be sure, and the profession should not be blamed for the exaggerated claims made by a few publicists like [Yuval] Harari or Harvards Steven Pinker.

So then, against the backdrop of materialist sciences failure, what accounts for the rise of modern determinist mythologies, led by astrology and transhumanism, that have captured the imagination of Generation X and Silicon Valley? Read Goldmans article, but Ill try to summarize: Behind the phenomenon is a resurgent paganism, with its shamans like Yuval Harari, this strange little vegan who spends two hours a day in meditation, exciting the tech elite because he visualizes them as a new class of demigods, and with its repellant, narcissistic moral perspective: The New Atheism turns out to be the old idolatry packaged into a smartphone app.

The choices before modern man are not so different from the choices that faced ancient man. In fact, underneath the wrappings of contemporary life, theyre almost exactly the same. Goldman dismisses nave proofs for God. The theist today makes a boldcommitment just as the atheist does in his own way: the premise of biblical religion requires a leap of faith no greater than that of the atheists. Its consequence is the birth of human freedom, by making human beings free moral agents. The consequences of the old idolatry as well as the new paganism, by contrast, are repugnant.

The book of Psalms advises, taste and see that the Lord is good. That the new paganism is not good, but twisted and terrible, is also a matter to be tasted and seen. See Michael Egnors powerful reflections from earlier today, Jeffrey Epstein and the Silence of the Scientists. Can anyone who experiences our world, and follows its news, really doubt this?

Photo: David P. Goldman, by Elekes Andor [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

See the original post:

David Goldman on Gelernter's Darwin Apostasy - Discovery Institute