Daily Archives: December 5, 2019

In order to do science, weve had to dismiss the mind. This was, in any case, the bargain that was made in the seventeenth century, when Descartes and Galileo deemed consciousness a subjective phenomenon unfit for empirical study. If the world was to be reducible to physical causation, then all mental experiencesintention, agency, purpose, meaningmust be secondary qualities, inexplicable within the framework of materialism. And so the world was divided in two: mind and matter. This dualistic solution helped to pave the way for the Enlightenment and the technological and scientific advances of the coming centuries. But an uneasiness has always hovered over the bargain, a suspicion that the problem was less solved than shelved. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Leibniz struggled to accept that perception could be explained through mechanical causeshe proposed that if there were a machine that could produce thought and feeling, and if it were large enough that a person could walk inside of it, as he could walk inside a mill, the observer would find nothing but inert gears and levers. He would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception, he wrote.

Today we tend to regard the mind not as a mill but as a computer, but, otherwise, the problem exists in much the same way that Leibniz formulated it three hundred years ago. In 1995, David Chalmers, a shaggy-haired Australian philosopher who has been called a rock star of the field, famously dubbed consciousness the hard problem, as a way of distinguishing it from comparatively easy problems, such as how the brain integrates information, focusses attention, and stores memories. Neuroscientists have made significant progress on the easier problems, using fMRIs and other devices. Engineers, meanwhile, have created impressive simulations of the brain in artificial neural networksthough the abilities of these machines have only made the difference between intelligence and consciousness more stark. Artificial intelligence can now beat us in chess and Go; it can predict the onset of cancer as well as human oncologists and recognize financial fraud more accurately than professional auditors. But, if intelligence and reason can be performed without subjective awareness, then what is responsible for consciousness? Answering this question, Chalmers argued, was not simply a matter of locating a process in the brain that is responsible for producing consciousness or correlated with it. Such a discovery still would fail to explain why such correlations exist or why they lead to one kind of experience rather than anotheror to nothing at all.

One line of reductionist thinking insists that the hard problem is not really so hardor that it is, perhaps, simply unnecessary. In his new book, Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, the neuroscientist and psychologist Michael Graziano writes that consciousness is simply a mental illusion, a simplified interface that humans evolved as a survival strategy in order to model the processes of the brain. He calls this the attention schema. According to Grazianos theory, the attention schema is an attribute of the brain that allows us to monitor mental activitytracking where our focus is directed and helping us predict where it might be drawn in the futuremuch the way that other mental models oversee, for instance, the position of our arms and legs in space. Because the attention schema streamlines the complex noise of calculations and electrochemical signals of our brains into a caricature of mental activity, we falsely believe that our minds are amorphous and nonphysical. The body schema can delude a woman who has lost an arm into thinking that its still there, and Graziano argues that the mind is like a phantom limb: One is the ghost in the body and the other is the ghost in the head.

I suspect that most people would find this proposition alarming. On the other hand, many of us already, on some level, distrust the reality of our own minds. The recent vogue for mindfulness implies that we are passive observers of an essentially mechanistic existencethat consciousness can only be summoned fleetingly, through great effort. Plagued by a midday funk, we are often quicker to attribute it to bad gut flora or having consumed gluten than to the theatre of beliefs and ideas.

And what, really, are the alternatives for someone who wants to explain consciousness in strictly physical terms? Another option, perhaps the only other option, is to conclude that mind is one with the material worldthat everything, in other words, is conscious. This may sound like New Age bunk, but a version of this concept, called integrated information theory, or I.I.T., is widely considered one of the fields most promising theories in recent years. One of its pioneers, the neuroscientist Christof Koch, has a new book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Cant Be Computed, in which he argues that consciousness is not unique to humans but exists throughout the animal kingdom and the insect world, and even at the microphysical level. Koch, an outspoken vegetarian, has long argued that animals share consciousness with humans; this new book extends consciousness further down the chain of being. Central to I.I.T. is the notion that consciousness is not an either/or state but a continuumsome systems, in other words, are more conscious than others. Koch proposes that all sorts of things we have long thought of as inert might have a tiny glow of experience, including honeybees, jellyfish, and cerebral organoids grown from stem cells. Even atoms and quarks may be forms of enminded matter.

Another term for this is panpsychismthe belief that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature. In the final chapters of the book, Koch commits himself to this philosophy, claiming his place among a lineage of thinkersincluding Leibniz, William James, and Alfred North Whiteheadwho similarly believed that matter and soul were one substance. This solution avoids the ungainliness of dualism: panpsychism, Koch argues, elegantly eliminates the need to explain how the mental emerges out of the physical and vice versa. Both coexist. One might feel that aesthetic considerations, such as elegance, do not necessarily make for good science; more concerning, perhaps, is the fact that Koch, at times, appears motivated by something even more elementala longing to renchant the world. In the books last chapter, he confesses to finding spiritual sustenance in the possibility that humans are not the lone form of consciousness in an otherwise dead cosmos. I now know that I live in a universe in which the inner light of experience is far, far more widespread than assumed within standard Western canon, he writes. Koch admits that when he speaks publicly on these ideas, he often gets youve-got-to-be-kidding-stares.

It is an irony of materialist theories that such efforts to sidestep ghostly or supernatural accounts of the mind often veer into surreal, metaphysical territory. Graziano, in a similarly transcendent passage in his book, proposes that the attention-schema theory allows for the possibility of uploading ones mind to a computer and living, digitally, forever; in the future, brain scans will digitally simulate the individual patterns and synapses of a persons brain, which Graziano believes will amount to subjective awareness. Like Koch, Graziano, when entertaining such seemingly fanciful ideas, shifts into a mode that oddly mixes lyricism and technical rigor. The mind is a trillion-stranded sculpture made of information, constantly changing and beautifully complicated, he writes. But nothing in it is so mysterious that it cant in principle be copied to a different information-processing device, like a file copied from one computer to another.

The strangeness of all this does not mean that such speculations are invalid, or that they undermine the theories themselves. While reading Koch and Graziano, I recalled that the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, in 2013, coined the term crazyism to describe the postulate that any theory of consciousness, even if correct, will inevitably strike us as completely insane.

If the current science of consciousness frequently strikes us as counterintuitive, if not outright crazy, its because even the most promising theories often fail to account for how we actually experience our interior lives. The result, Tim Parks writes in his new book, Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, is that we regularly find ourselves signing up to explanations of reality that seem a million miles from our experience. In 2015, Parks, a British novelist and essayist, participated in a project funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation which put writers in conversation with scientists. The initiative led Parks to meet with a number of neuroscientists and observe their research on consciousness. Parks finds that most of the reigning theories upend his intuitive understanding of his own mind. Truth, these experts tell him, lies not in our fallible senses but in the bewildering decrees of science. Our minds, after all, are unreliable gauges of the objective world.

Parks takes a different approach: mental experience lies at the core of Out of My Head, not only as subject but as method. For Parks, our subjective understanding of our minds is trustworthy, at least to a degree; he admonishes the reader to weigh every scientific theory against their knowledge of what its really like being alive. Throughout his account of his travels, he dramatizes his inner life: he notices how time seems to slow down at certain moments and accelerate at others, and how the world disappears entirely when he practices meditation; he describes his fears about his girlfriends health and his doubts about whether he can write the book that we are reading.

Most of the neuroscientists whom Parks meets believe that consciousness can be reduced to neuronal activity, but Parks begins to doubt this consensus view. As a novelist, attentive to the nuances of language, he notices that these theories rely a great deal on metaphor: the literature of consciousness often refers to the brain as a computer, chemical activity as information, and neuronal firing as computation. Parks finds it puzzling that our brains are made up of thingscomputersthat we ourselves only recently invented. He asks one neuroscientist how electrical impulses amount to information, and she insists that this is just figurative language, understood as such by everyone in the field. But Parks is unconvinced: these metaphors entail certain theoretical assumptionsthat, for instance, consciousness is produced by, or is dependent upon, the brain, like software running on hardware. How are these metaphors coloring the parameters of the debate, and what other hypotheses do they prevent us from considering?

Parkss skepticism stems in part from his friendship with an Italian neuroscientist named Riccardo Manzotti, with whom he has been having, as he puts it, one of the most intense and extended conversations of my life. Manzotti, who has become famous for appearing in panels and lecture halls with his favorite prop, an apple, counts himself among the externalists, a group of thinkers that includes David Chalmers and the English philosopher and neuroscientist Andy Clark. The externalists believe that consciousness does not exist solely in the brain or in the nervous system but depends, to various degrees, on objects outside the bodysuch as an apple. According to Manzottis version of externalism, spread-mind theory, which Parks is rather taken with, consciousness resides in the interaction between the body of the perceiver and what that perceiver is perceiving: when we look at an apple, we do not merely experience a representation of the apple inside our mind; we are, in some sense, identical with the apple. As Parks puts it, Simply, the world is what you see. That is conscious experience. Like Kochs panpsychism, spread-mind theory attempts to recuperate the centrality of consciousness within the restrictions of materialism. Manzotti contends that we got off to a bad start, scientifically, back in the seventeenth century, when all mental phenomena were relegated to the subjective realm. This introduced the false dichotomy of subject and object and imagined humans as the sole perceiving agents in a universe of inert matter.

Manzottis brand of externalism is still a minority position in the world of consciousness studies. But there is a faction of contemporary thinkers who go even furtherwho argue that, if we wish to truly understand the mind, materialism must be discarded altogether. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has proposed that the mind is not an inexplicable accident of evolution but a basic aspect of nature. Such theories are bolstered, in part, by quantum physics, which has shown that perception does in some cases appear to have real causal power. Particles have no properties independent of how you measure themin other words, they require a conscious observer. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that these experimental observations prove that consciousness is fundamental to reality. In his recent book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, he argues that we must restart science on an entirely different footing, beginning with the brute fact that our minds exist, and determining, from there, what we can recover from evolutionary theory, quantum physics, and the rest. Theories such as Hoffmans amount to a return of idealismthe notion that physical reality cannot be strictly separated from the minda philosophy that has been out of fashion since the rise of analytic philosophy, in the early twentieth century. But if idealism keeps resurfacing in Western thought, it may be because we find Descartes and Galileos original dismissal of the mind deeply unsatisfying. Consciousness, after all, is the sole apparatus that connects us to the external worldthe only way we know anything about what we have agreed to call reality.

A few years before Parks embarked on his neuro-philosophical tour, he and his wife divorced, and many of his friends insisted that he was having a midlife crisis. This led him to doubt the reality of his own intuitions. It seems to me that these various life events might have predisposed me to be interested in a theory of consciousness and perception that tends to give credit to the senses, or rather to experience, he writes.

By the end of the book, its difficult to see how spread mind offers a more intuitive understanding of reality than other theories do. In fact, Parks himself frequently struggles to accept the implications of Manzottis ideas, particularly the notion that there is no objective world uncolored by consciousness. But perhaps the virtue of a book like Parkss is that it raises a meta-question that often goes unacknowledged in these debates: What leads us, as conscious agents, to prefer certain theories over others? Just as Parks was drawn to spread mind for personal reasons, he invites us to consider the human motivations that undergird consensus views. Does the mind-as-computer metaphor appeal to us because it allows for the possibility of mind-uploading, fulfilling an ancient, religious desire for transcendence and eternal life? Is the turn toward panpsychism a kind of neo-Romanticism born of our yearning to renchant the world that materialism has rendered mute? If nothing else, these new and sometimes baffling theories of consciousness suggest that science, so long as it is performed by human subjects, will bear the fingerprints of our needs, our longings, and our hopesfalse or otherwise.

See the original post here:

Do We Have Minds of Our Own? - The New Yorker

by Jens Zimmermann, Project Director, Human Flourishing; Canada Research Professor for Interpretation, Religion, and Culture at Trinity Western University; Visiting Professor for Philosophy, Literature, and Theology at Regent College; Visiting Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Oxford; Research Associate at the Center for Theology and Modern European Thought in Oxford. Read more about Dr. Zimmermann.

One of the most important contemporary issues is our relation to technology. To be sure, technology is nothing new but has always been integral to human evolution; never before, however, has technology suffused every area of life or shaped human self-understanding to the extent it does today. Consequently, debates about the benefits and possible drawbacks of technology currently dominate all crucial, formative arenas of human existence: work, education, healthcare, social development, and even religion. Critical voices are not lacking in these discussions but, on the whole, we increasingly place our future hopes for society in technological enhancements. Transhumanism, in its pursuit of a humanly engineered evolution that will eventually leave the body behind by uploading our digitized brains to computing platforms, a vision that includes merging human with artificial machine intelligence, is merely the extreme edge of a techno-reasoning that increasingly forms our collective social imaginary.

How is one to assess this development? I suggest that the most effective assessment of techno-reasoning is to probe the range of its imagination. After all, how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves is principally a matter of the imagination. As the well-known Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye put it in The Educated Imagination:

we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we are asleep. Consequently we only have the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.[1]

Fryes reference to poetry indicates his view that literature best exemplifies the language of the imagination, of how we perceive the world in all its semantic complexity: our use of metaphors and choice of words in everyday speech reveals the vision of society, and indeed of reality that underlies our thoughts and actions. Equally important, the fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce out of the society we have to live in, a society we want to live in.[2] We need fiction to envision reality differently. We often use the word fiction to refer to what is untrue or false, but the word actually means creative invention and describes our capacity for understanding and shaping reality meaningfully through narrative. Hence reimagining society differently depends in turn on the sources that train our imagination to produce narratives for our self-understanding.

What should concern us is that Transhumanisms imagination runs only along engineering and computational lines. Transhumanists like to call themselves critical rationalists,[3] but the fact is that this critical aspect is limited to a techno-reasoning that produces a narrative of techno-fiction. When we examine the current techno-reasoning of transhumanism, we will find a strongly diminished view of human identity that reduces consciousness to the activity of neuronal networks we can detach from the body and transferable to a computing platform.[4]

It is generally known that transhumanism denigrates the human body as rather primitive biological form of existence that requires perfection through nano- and computing technologies. Ultimately, as Ray Kurzweil argued in his book How to Build a Human Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012), the brain is a complex biological machine in which human ideas, feelings, and intentions are ultimately tied to neuronal functions of the brain. Kurzweil imagines that the imminent completion of mapping this biological machine anatomically will allow us to digitize its functions and thus transpose human thinking into computational format, permitting in turn the uploading of ones mind (of consciousness, self, or personality) to a data cloud storage. This transhumanist vision indicates a breathtaking ignorance of human cognition and its dependence on biology for a human consciousness. For one, aside from being technologically unfeasible, the computational model of the brain and its possible detachment from the body is flatly contradicted by recent neuroscience and its insistence on embodied cognition.

For example, the well-known neuroscientist Antonio-Damasio breaks with the traditional cognitivist view of human beings as rational minds inhabiting insentient bodies.[5] In his book The Self Comes to Mind (2010), Damasio reintroduces the body as essential for structuring the brain, albeit still based on a representational view of cognition: Because of this curious arrangement, the representation of the world external to the body can come into the brain only via the body itself, namely via its surface. The body and the surrounding environment interact with each other, and the changes caused in the body by that interaction are mapped in the brain. It is certainly true that the mind learns of the world outside via the brain, but it is equally true that the brain can be informed only via the body.[6] You may not consider this concession very great, but eight years later, Damasio rejects the Cartesian mind-body dualism behind traditional neuroscience, arguing that a new, biologically integrated position is now required.[7]

This new position leaves behind a computational model of the mind, rejecting the dried-up mathematical description of the activity of the neurons because it disengaged neurons from the thermodynamics of life.[8] New brain science acknowledges, according to Damasio, that the body as organism, for example through our nervous and immune systems, possesses a kind of perception conveyed through feelings that are registered in turn as complex mental experiences that help us navigate life. Damasio concludes that neural and non-neural structures and processes are not just contiguous [i.e. adjacent, sharing a common boarder] but continuous partners, interactively. They are not aloof entities, signaling each other like chips in a cell phone. In plain talk, brains and bodies are in the same mind-enabling soup.[9] On the basis of this new insight (new to brain scientists at any rate), Damasio rejects the reductive, but sweepingly common notion in the worlds of artificial intelligence, biology, and even neuroscience, that natural organisms would somehow be reducible to algorithms.[10]

Damasios new insights from Neuroscience are a welcome antidote to the severely stunted imagination of the Transhumanists. Even so, neuroscience in general, and transhumanism in particular, suffer from a striking lack of philosophical reflection on the historical origins of the naturalist and functionalist view of organic life that still forms the imaginative framework of cognitive science. Natural scientists, along with all those who pursue their research into human perception in the investigative mode of the natural sciences, still have a hard time with admitting that metaphysics is always at play when imagining what it means to be human. How many scientists (and indeed philosophers) are fully conscious of the historical developments that made possible a purely materialist view of reality?

The philosopher Hans Jonas offers a superb philosophical analysis of this development and its effects on the study of human nature in The Phenomenon of Life: Approaches to a Biological Philosophy (1994). He describes how the duality of mind and spirit of the ancient world was reified into a mind-body dualism by Descartess division of reality into the two spheres of timeless mental ideas on the one hand, and spatio-temporal mechanisms of material stuff on the other hand. Leaving the side of mental ideas to religion and philosophy, he reduced nature (including animals and the human body) to an inert machine running on functional, mathematical principles, wholly explorable through quantifiable data. The legacy of Cartesian dualism was the modern conception of nature without soul or spirit.[11] Encouraged by the enormous success of the scientific method, it was only a matter of time until a secularist science, eager to do away with Descartes God, also claimed the mental sphere for its mechanistic understanding of reality.

This mechanistic monism was further aided by Darwins theory of evolution. Naturalistic evolution exploded Cartesian dualism or a separate mental realm by integrating human beings into a general developmental process. Jonas argues that even though evolution raised once again the problem of how the transcendent freedom and intentionality of consciousness could arise from such a process, the functionalist bias of naturalism closed the door to any arguments that may have led out of the reductionist dead-end of materialist monism. Early evolutionary theory dogmatically adhered to a mechanistic view of causality that tried to explain organic life analogously to complex machines, declaring consciousness to an epiphenomenon, a random side-effect of an essentially material process. This view, argues Jonas, inverts how organic life forms, and in particular human beings, actually function. Human thought and action originate from an intentional center and exercise volitional freedom in their striving to accomplish goals. While we are certainly able to automate strategies for accomplishing goals, this ability does not warrant reducing our humanity to the workings of a complex machine.

Jonas work himself has helped inspire profound changes in evolutionary theory, including the growing conviction among evolutionary psychology that an embodied intentionality or consciousness is intrinsic to organic life itself. The phenomenon of organic life is impossible to describe, let alone understand, without recognizing that a minimal form of intentionality, individuation, and indeed freedom is evident in even the most primitive living organisms striving to survive.

Neither transhumanism, however, nor the AI research that fuels transhumanists hopes for melding human and machine intelligence, have followed this trend of evolutionary biology. Instead, the transhumanists and AI researchers remain beholden to the basic premise of cybernetics that human life and thought boil down to mechanisms controlled by the exchange of information and are therefore amenable to transposition into algorithms so that the essence of human thought and emotion can be digitized and replicated on computational platforms.

This brief historical sketch shows us that transhumanisms abandoning of the earth by leaving behind the body constitutes not a neutral fact based on scientific progress but is indeed a historically conditioned choice. This choice takes one particular aspect of human perception, namely our ability to abstract material from the rich flow of experience to objectify and quantify it for better understanding, and the re-imagines all of reality in these terms. This reductionist ontology ignores the organic and especially the personal aspects characteristic of human life.

It is worth reiterating that the materialist, functionalist premise of transhumanism (and much AI research) is neither empirically convincing nor in any way morally neutral. From a historical point of view, it is actually astonishing how beholden the field of techno-science still is to scientistic attitudes originating in the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment.

For example, the well-known AI researcher Marvin Minsky (d. 2016), equated belief in consciousness with the kind of religious mumbo jumbo science is supposed to combat.[13] For Minsky, there is no such thing as consciousness, there is no such thing as understanding.[14] Those who believe in such silly superstitions ignorantly hold to this religious idea that there is magic understanding: there is a magic substance that is responsible for understanding and for consciousness, and that there is a deep secret here.[15] For Minsky, the problem of consciousness and understanding with regard to AI simply doesnt exist because he has a thoroughly mechanical, functionalist view of the human mind. For this reason, he looks to Freud as an important figure because hes the first one to consider that the mind is a big complicated kludge of different types of machinery which are specialized for different functions.[16] While most of psychology and other sciences have moved on from Freuds nave mechanical view of the psyche, transhumanism and much popular opinion has not.

One cannot blame transhumanists for wanting to improve human life, but a sober, historical-philosophical analysis of transhumanism exposes it as delusive and naive. The whole idea of engineering a post-human existence by abandoning the organic body is based on an untenable materialist metaphysics. As Hans Jonas perceptively put it, materialistic biology (its armory recently strengthened by cybernetics) is the attempt to understand life by eliminating what actually enables this attempt in the first place: the authentic nature of consciousness and purpose.[17] Only because they suppress the basic structure of organic life and reduce consciousness to an epiphenomenon of materialist functions can transhumanists propose their futuristic vision. Only because they have already reduced life to a machine, however complex, can they imagine a post-humanist future of immortality through technology. The transhumanist imagination concerning our humanity is deceived by the strange proclivity of human reason to interpret human functions by the categories of the artifacts created to replace them, and to interpret artifacts by the categories of the human mind that created them.[18]

Given that transhumanism is driven by this historically conditioned reductionist view of human life, I am less worried about the question whether transhumanism functions as Ersatzreligion, though the growing number of Christian transhumanists is somewhat alarming. Their belief in technology as providential means for procuring god-likeness and immortality makes one wonder about the efficacy of the incarnation. Why did God bother to become a human being rather than a cyborg? Only an imagination already hooked on techno-fiction could suggest that the divine transformation of biological matter is inferior to, or even akin to a man-made metamorphosis through technology.

From a traditional Christian perspective at least, techno-fiction that deems the body to be optional ranks among gnostic heresies. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained, from an incarnational point of view, we dont have bodies but we are our bodies, and are thus rooted in the earth. Abandoning the earth, he declared, therefore means also to lose touch with our fellow human beings and with God who created us as embodied souls. Bonhoeffer concluded that the man who would leave the earth, who would depart from the present distress, loses the power which still holds him by eternal, mysterious forces. The earth remains our mother, just as God remains our Father, and our mother will only lay in the Fathers arms him who remains true to her.[19]

However, what is of greater concern than grouping transhumanism among gnostic heresies is that the movement perpetuates the pervasive techno-reasoning in our culture by glorifying the functionalist image of human existence that continues to enthral the public social imaginary by means of social media and AI research. Transhumanism is just one example, perhaps the most glamorous one, of our current collective culture delusion that the human mind, human language, and human relations boil down to functions that computers will eventually master in far better ways.

We would do well to listen to critical voices of those well familiar with the computing industry like Jaron Lanier. Lanier, credited with inventing virtual reality, exposes the false and dangerous presuppositions of techno-fictions. For example, he debunks the delusion that AI has anything to do with computers gaining intelligence, let alone sentience. AI, he reminds us, is nothing but a story we tell about our code.[20] This story, he confesses, was originally invented by tech engineers to procure funding from government agencies. AI, in short, does not exist if one implies that machines actually think or feel with even the lowest form of consciousness we know from organic life.

Lanier warns that current techno-fiction and our use of technology are deeply dehumanizing. Social media apps are designed to manipulate users into addiction to exploit their consumer habits. Moreover, the whole gamut of computing technology erodes our self-understanding of what it means to be truly human. Lanier worries that if you design a society to suppress belief in consciousness and experienceto reject any exceptional nature to personhoodthen maybe people can become like machines. The greatest danger, he concludes, is the loss of what sets us apart from all other entities, the loss our personhood. His warning echoes the prophetic voices of other critics like the former software coder Steve Talbot, or the late philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who also worried that instead of adapting technology to human intelligence we slowly conform human consciousness to the functional logic of machines.

These thinkers show us that one does not have to be a luddite or religious zealot to reject transhumanism or entertain a critical attitude towards the nave embracing of current technologies. What is at stake in the discussion about technology and transhumanism is nothing less than our true humanity. Now, it is certainly the case, in my view, that the more holistic approach to human existence offered by religions, and in particular the Christian teaching that God became a human being, provide better anthropological frameworks for approaching technology than secularist or naturalist approaches; however, the time may be ripe for all those concerned about losing our true humanity to come together in exposing the dehumanizing misconceptions put forward by transhumanists, no matter how much these are presented in the radiant, Luciferian promises of divinity. Sicut eritis deus . . . .

[1] 134-135.

[2] 140.

[3] Max More, The Philosophy of Transhumanism in Transhumanist Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 1-17), 6.

[4] Martin Rothblatt, Mind is Deeper than Matter, in Transhumanist Reader, (317-326).

[5] Economist John Greys endorsement of Damasios recent book The Strange Order of Things (2018).

[6] The Self Comes to Mind, 97.

[7] The Strange Order of Things, 240.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 200. Damasion recognizes that the worlds of artificial intelligence, biology, and even neuroscience are inebriated with this notion. It is acceptable to say, without qualification, that organisms are algorithms and that bodies and brains are algorithms. This is part of an alleged singularity enabled by the fact that we can write algorithms artificially and connect them with the natural variety, and mix them, so to speak. In this telling, the singularity is not just near: it is here. For Damasio, these common notions are not scientifically sound because they discount the essential role of the biological, organic substrate from which feelings arise through the multidimensional and interactive imaging of our life operations with their chemical and visceral components (201).

[11] Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, 140.

[12] Das Prinzip Leben, 219.

[13] Why Freud was the First good AI Theorist in Transhumanist Reader, 169.

[14] Ibid., 172.

[15] Ibid., 170.

[16] Ibid., 169.

[17] Das Prinzip Leben, 230.

[18] Prinzip Leben, 199.

[19] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English, 10, 244-45.

[20] Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

More:

Abandoning Earth: Personhood and the Techno-Fiction of Transhumanism - Patheos

As many people prepare for the holiday season, they stop to reflect on their goals for the year. Would you like a new job in the new year? Landing a new job is often desirable for many life sciences professionals who are interested in making more money, working on innovative projects and/or finding a better company culture. With that in mind, it can be difficult to focus on a job search because there can be a variety of competing priorities including working to reach your end of the year goals and planning for the holidays. Here are four ways to amplify your job search at the end of the year!

Tweak your social media profiles

Most professionals create their social media profiles one time, and rarely update or edit them. Often the information you see on social media for individuals is outdated and incomplete. While youre going through the job search and interviewing process, the majority of recruiters and hiring managers will search for you on social media to find additional information. You want to make sure that youre putting your best foot forward based on your current situation. Tweaking and reviewing all of your profiles can help you see the image youre projecting and ensure that it lines up with the positions youre targeting.

Update your resume

The majority of job seekers do not have an updated resume that they feel confident with. They tend to think that content should be added, highlighted, and/or removed. Submitting yourself for positions with a subpar resume can do more harm than good. Prior to applying, read over the job posting youre interested in, and then immediately read your resume. Do you sound like a good fit for the role? Are the words and phrases in your resume speaking directly to what the job posting is asking for? If you dont see a clear correlation with relevant contributions and accomplishments, then updating your resume is vital.

Create profiles on different job sites

There are countless job sites online. Some are specific to a certain industry, while others are more general and feature positions in all industries and levels. Many of these job boards will allow you to create a profile that is hidden from public search. These profiles are exclusively for recruiters and hiring managers that utilize that job site. Uploading your resume to the profiles on specific job boards is another way to get more visibility and speed up your search. The key is to find the job sites that are most relevant to the positions you are looking for. You dont want to waste time, trying to show up everywhere.

Network at professional end of the year / holiday events

Despite all of the technology we have today, networking in person is still highly effective. In fact, meeting the right person and cultivating a relationship can help you by pass the traditional application process. Attending professional conferences, meetings and association events can be instrumental in positioning you as a serious candidate for a job. Towards the end of the year, many groups have holiday events or other celebrations. These gatherings can be great for meeting new people who could potentially help with your job search.

If youre trying to find a new job, you dont have to put the process on hold during the holidays. These are a few ways to amplify your job search that can help you make significant progress. What could you do towards the end of the year to stay active in your job search?

Porschia Parker is a Certified Coach, Professional Resume Writer, and Founder of Fly High Coaching. (https://www.fly-highcoaching.com) She empowers ambitious professionals and motivated executives to add $10K on average to their salaries.

Excerpt from:

4 Ways to Amplify Your Job Search at the End of the Year - BioSpace

words Al Woods

Choosing a broadband package is a great responsibility. There are so many variables to consider. While most people will focus on price, data allowance limits, connection speeds and uptimes, very few take the time to match their package to their usage style.

Matching your package to your usage style ensure that you get the best value for your money. You will neither pay for more than you need or end up with a slow connection that irritates you every time you fire up your computer to browse or try to watch some videos on your smart TV.

The first time getting the match right is understanding what type of user you are.

Very few people can describe their internet use. This makes it hard to categorize themselves and estimate the right package for their home. Here are the main categories users fall into.

A light user will spend most of their online time reading news, corresponding on email, catching up on social media and occasionally watching videos.

If you are not heavy on the videos, you can make do with a data capped package, which is cheaper. However, if you will need an unlimited plan if you stream online videos more often or host other people often as this could easily max a capped plan.

As for speeds, you can make do with 5 Mbps or less.

Moderate users are either single or multiple occupancy homes that channel their entertainment over the internet in addition to social media, general browsing and mail corresponding.

Medium users will be more comfortable with a plan that gives them between 15 and 100 Mbps depending on how many people use the connections simultaneously.

Heavy users download and upload huge chunks of data. You could be working from home, uploading videos to YouTube, watching entire TV series on Netflix and so forth.

Complete families with all parents and a couple of kids are also classified as heavy user homes. You will find it impossible to keep within the limits of a capped plan while a lower bandwidth will render your network painfully slow when different devices connect simultaneously.

In this case, you will need Fibre connections that give you speeds of 40/10 Mbps and above. The faster the connection the better your streaming quality and lesser the time your household will spend uploading or downloading huge chunks of data.

This is an emergent breed of users whose needs are almost similar to those of small businesses. You belong here if you work from home and are not a writer. If you run a YouTube or Twitch and similar channels, are a designer who uploads bulky concepts, a professional or hobbyist gamer or a person who deploys peer-to-peer software often, then you will need a very fast connection.

Go for fibre plans that give you up to 200 Mbps download and at least 100 Mbps upload speeds. You cannot survive with anything slower than that.

Once you understand your user classification, it will be easier to find the perfect broadband type for you. The good thing is you rarely have to worry about connection types like Fibre, VDSL and ADSL since most providers will give away their delivery technology on the possible speeds for its package. The only time you should care is when you are a gamer and are worried about ping times and TTLs.

Ensure that you get the right download and upload bandwidth. Dont forget to audit the companys uptimes and customer service to guarantee your peace of mind.

Visit link:

Match your broadband usage with the perfect broadband type - Flux Magazine

Uploading snaps of our kids on social media is commonplace in our society. We frequently find parents sharenting photos as well as personal data on their children on Facebook without making any effort to learn what may be the consequences of such sharing on the lives of their loved ones. There is an ongoing debate as to how parents can balance their right to share with their childs interest in privacy.

Pediatricians have now started to consider how sharenting affects childhood well-being and family life. It is commonly observed that in extreme forms, parental sharing of their childrens information has led to a phenomenon labeled digital kidnapping, whereby childrens photos and details have been appropriated by others who promote such kids as being their own children. Research has shown that millions of innocent photographs end up on pedophilic and hebephilic websites.

This piece is exclusively aimed at highlighting the hazards of reckless sharenting on our kids safety and security.

Sharenting is a term that denotes the overuse of social media by parents to share content, based on their children, such as baby pictures or details of their childrens activities.

The Wall Street Journal pertaining to the perils attached to sharenting quoted psychiatry professor Elias Aboujaoude, who said that sharenting can turn parenthood into a competition for attention. The practice has also been linked to online predators, who could use the information for child grooming. Childrens self-esteem can also be affected by negative online reactions and they may have trouble forming their self-identity- separate from the online persona created by parents.

Inter alia, there are myriad perils attached to sharenting which every parent must be cautious of before sharing the images and personal information of their loved ones on internet. Some of these are highlighted hereunder.

Bullying: sharing your child photos on social media can be used for bullying your children. You must be concerned about how others would react to the stuff that you share about your kids. Whether your child cares about old photos and stories about them on social media, others may be able to use that information to make fun of, insult, and even bully your child as he or she grows older.

Whats to stop a peer from sharing a photo that your child finds embarrassing with his or her own networks? What if that share catches on? It doesnt take much for a photo to go from an inside family joke to gossip fodder for an entire school. Moreover, while posting embarrassing photos of your children on Facebook might seem like harmless fun, it can expose them to bullying and intimidation. If someone distributes these photos to online forums and websites as a joke it can cause a lot of emotional trauma for your child. In some severe cases, teens have committed suicide after threats and bullying online.

Digital kidnapping: Digital kidnapping is a type of identity theft. It occurs when someone takes photos of a child from social media and repurposes them with new names and identities, often claiming the child as their own. There have been numerous examples of this in recent years, including a 2015 incident in which a stranger took a photo of an 18-month old baby from a mommy bloggers Facebook page and posted it on her own Facebook profile, acting like he was her son.

Sharenting is a term that denotes the overuse of social media by parents to share content, based on their children, such as baby pictures or details of their childrens activities

Your childs photos can also be kidnapped for baby role-playing. If youre unfamiliar with baby role-playing, search for #BabyRP, #AdoptionRP, and #KidRP on social media sites. Baby role players create accounts on social media sites to post stolen photos along with captions that give false details about the child in the photos. Sometimes the stranger impersonates the child by responding to comments as the child or from the childs point-of-view. These comments can be disturbing, though not all are malicious. Baby role-playing accounts appear to be created by people who appear to want to be a parent or a child. They are, however, another example of how you can easily lose control over your childs identity when you publish information about them online.

Sets a bad example: Young children should be taught from an early age about the dangers of revealing too much information to strangers. With smartphones and other electronic devices making it easy to post photos online, but it also is important that children understand the dangers of uploading the wrong kind of pictures. If you upload lots of photos of your children to Facebook, they may draw the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with sharing images online. For example, many parents post photos of their children in the bath or in their swimwear. Unless children are taught boundaries about sharing personal photos such as these, it can have a negative effect on them later in life.

Real Life Stalking: Sexual predators can use social media sites to physically stalk their intended victims. When users post information about themselves and their activities, stalkers can take that information to learn about their targets interests and schedules. Predators can then use this information to locate and stalk their victims in the real world, not just online. According to an article in the Journal of Adolescent Health quoted by enough is enough, 65 percent of online sex offenders used social media sites to collect home and school information about their victims. Social posts that specify a users precise location make it particularly easy for online predators to locate and stalk victims.

Sextortion: Sexual predators dont have to find users in real life to victimize them. If a predator hacks into a victims account and finds intimate or compromising pictures or other sensitive information, he can use that material to blackmail the user. For example, in 2010, the FBI arrested a man on charges of hacking and blackmailing over 200 victims. After stealing private pictures to use as blackmail material, he coerced his victims into providing him with inappropriate pictures and videos of themselves. This practice of stealing material to blackmail victims into providing the predator with such material is known as sextortion.

Impact on a childs future: Its difficult, if not impossible, to control information once its posted online. You cant prevent anyone from taking a screenshot of your post and disseminating it beyond your reach. Your deleted posts, while apparently gone from your social media profile, may still live on in Internet archive websites and on the social media servers themselves. With that in mind, you should consider how your photos and stories may impact your child when hes much older, even an adult.

The reality is that the data shared by parents could be revealed by Google search algorithms for years to come. And we dont know what our childrens goals might be when they get older.

To cape it all, sharenting should be a matter of great deliberation for parents for it may jeopardize the safety and security of their kids. They must ask their children what theyre comfortable with and take some precautions. They also must pay close attention to privacy settings on their social media pages. They should choose photos carefully and watermark the ones that they post publicly. They should also ask friends and family to refrain from posting photos or videos of their children. They should also start involving their children in deciding what is appropriate to share with others. Such conversation can help ward off bad feelings in the future and are useful for preparing children for living in a digital age.

Writer is legal practitioner-cum columnist based in Quetta

Originally posted here:

Hazards of sharenting - Daily Times