Category Archives: Transhuman

Transhuman- A Short Film
A short film I made for my project in my second year at uni to accompany my images about Transhumanism. It derives from the concept that animal and human DNA could be mixed to give humans adaptatio...

By: Aby- Joanne

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Transhuman- A Short Film - Video

University Hospital, Boston

IT OUGHT TO be raining, thought Luke Abramson. It ought to be gray and miserable, with a lousy cold rain pelting down.

Instead, the hospital room was bright, with mid-December sunshine slanting through the windows. In the bed lay eight-year-old Angela, Lukes granddaughter, frail and wasting, her eyes closed, her thinned blond hair spread across the pillow. Angelas parents, Lukes only daughter and his son-in-law, stood on the other side of the bed, together with Angelas attending physician. Luke stood alone.

Hed been playing tennis in the universitys indoor court when the phone call from the hospital came. Or, rather, doggedly going through the motions of playing tennis. Nearly seventy-five, even doubles was getting beyond him. Although the younger men tried to take it easy on him, more than once Luke had gloomily suggested they start playing triples.

And then came the phone call. Angie was terminal. He had rushed to the hospital, bundling his bulky parka over his tennis shorts and T-shirt.

Then theres nothing? Lukes daughter, Lenore, couldnt finish the sentence. Her voice choked in sobs.

Norrie, Luke called to her silently, dont cry. Ill help you. I can cure Angie, I know I can. But he couldnt speak the words aloud. He watched Lenore sobbing quietly, her heart breaking.

And Luke remembered all the other times when his daughter had come to him in tears, her deep brown eyes brimming, her dear little form racked with sobs. Ill fix it, Norrie, he had always told her. Ill make it all better for you. Even when his wife died after all those painful years of battling cancer, Lenore came to her father for comfort, for protection against the terrible wrongs that life had thrown at them.

Now Lenore stood with her husband, who wrapped an arm protectively around her slim, trembling shoulders. Del towered over little Lenore, a tall, athletic figure standing firmly beside his diminutive, grief-stricken wife. Hes being strong for her, Luke knew. But he could see the agony, the bitterness in his clenched jaw and bleak eyes.

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Transhuman by Ben Bova | 9780765332936 | Hardcover ...

Editor's note: Following is the response of Barbara Marx Hubbard to the comments on conscious evolution made by Cardinal Gerhard Mller during a meeting of officials of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) on April 30.

I am grateful to Cardinal Gerhard Mller for raising concerns about conscious evolution and its relationship to Catholic teaching. I hope his focus on this issue will stimulate many, both within the Catholic church and outside it, to deepen human understanding of conscious evolution and how we might advance our own evolutionary action for the good of the whole of Earth life.

I am not a Catholic nor a theologian, yet I have been deeply inspired to help develop the meaning of conscious evolution through my studies of Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio, John Haught, Beatrice Bruteau, Fr. Thomas Berry, David Richo, Diarmuid O'Murchu, and others. And of course, from the New Testament itself.

Now, meeting with so many women religious through LCWR, I see conscious evolution in action. They have been evolving the church and the world for hundreds of years through deep gospel living, a mystical presencing, faithfulness in serving unmet needs, solidarity with Earth, building community as "whole-makers," risk-taking for the sake of the mission, genius for cooperative self-governance and decision making, and above all bringing love and hope for the future into the lives of millions.

For me, the most vital source of meaning of conscious evolution is the Catholic understanding of God and Christ as the source of evolution, as its driving force as well as its direction. As Ilia Delio puts it, we experience in evolution the Emergent Christ and God Ahead.

Through science, research, technology communications and virtually every other area of human activity, we are weaving a delicate membrane of consciousness, what Teilhard called the "noosphere" or the thinking layer of Earth that is embracing and drawing into itself the entire planet. It will infuse the whole of humanity with a feeling of relationship and resonance. He called this potential experience "the Christification of the Earth."

Many of us are becoming what Teilhard called "Homo progressivus," those attracted to the future of the world moving toward the unknown, toward ever higher consciousness, freedom, order, and love.

In this view, evolution itself becomes a spiritually motivated labor of love toward a Christ-inspired world, leading toward life ever-evolving beyond this current stage of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Of course the scientific basis for conscious evolution is coming from many fields, most importantly from an understanding of the new cosmology, of the 13.8 billion year "The Universe Story," as written by Brian Swimme and Fr. Thomas Berry, and from "Big Bang Cosmology," as Ilia Delio calls it. Recently, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present by David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown and Craig Benjamin is changing the view of history itself to begin at the origin of creation.

Meanwhile, new technologies are giving us vast new powers we used to attribute to gods, to destroy this world or create new worlds on this Earth and in space, as described in Dr. Ted Chu's new book, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution.

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Marx Hubbard response to Cardinal Mller

Transhuman Visions part 4

By: Church of Perpetual Life

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Transhuman Visions part 4 - Video

Transhuman Visions Part 2

By: Church of Perpetual Life

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Transhuman Visions Part 2 - Video

Transhuman Visions Part 5

By: Church of Perpetual Life

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Transhuman Visions Part 5 - Video

Transhuman Visions Part 3

By: Church of Perpetual Life

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Transhuman Visions Part 3 - Video

Transhuman Visions Part 6

By: Church of Perpetual Life

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Transhuman Visions Part 6 - Video

A Transhuman or trans-human is an intermediary form between the human and the hypothetical posthuman.

The etymology of the term "transhuman" goes back to French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wrote in his 1949 book The Future of Mankind: Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of 'trans-humanizing' himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent.

And in a 1951 unpublished revision of the same book: In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things.

In 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine, English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote: The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. One of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the Human" at The New School of New York City in the 1960s, used "transhuman" as shorthand for "transitional human". Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings", FM argued that signs of transhumans included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values.

FM-2030 used the concept of transhuman, as an evolutionary transition, outside the confines of academia in his contributing final chapter to the 1972 anthology Woman, Year 2000. In the same year, American cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger contributed to conceptualization of "transhumanity" in his book Man into Superman. In 1982, American artist Natasha Vita-More authored the Transhuman Manifesto 1982: Transhumanist Arts Statement and outlined what she perceived as an emerging transhuman culture.

Many thinkers today do not consider FM-2030's characteristics to be essential attributes of a transhuman. However, analyzing the possible transitional nature of the human species has been and continues to be of primary interest to anthropologists and philosophers within and outside the intellectual movement of transhumanism.

In March 2007, American physicist Gregory Cochran and paleoanthropologist John Hawks published a study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, which amounts to a radical reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an evolutionary endpoint. Physical anthropologist Jeffrey McKee argued the new findings of accelerated evolution bear out predictions he made in a 2000 book The Riddled Chain. Based on computer models, he argued that evolution should speed up as a population grows because population growth creates more opportunities for new mutations; and the expanded population occupies new environmental niches, which would drive evolution in new directions. Whatever the implications of the recent findings, McKee concludes that they highlight a ubiquitous point about evolution: "every species is a transitional species."

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Transhuman - Snafu Comics Wiki

MJDK - Transhuman Posthuman
Recorded by Mateusz Jdrzejczak in April/May 2014.

By: Mateusz Jdrzejczak

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MJDK - Transhuman Posthuman - Video