Category Archives: Transhuman

You Are Here: Home Kickstarter Transhuman Eclipse Phase Players Guide Kickstarter

Posthuman Studios has launched a Kickstarter campaign to print their upcoming Eclipse Phase players guide Transhuman.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/507486226/transhuman-the-eclipse-phase-players-guide

Transhuman is a players handbook for Eclipse Phase, full of optional and additional rules and advice. Most importantly, It features two new alternative and simplified character generation systems for Eclipse Phase. One of these uses pre-created packages to build characters, and the other builds off that system but uses random elements to add twists. These systems are designed to make it quick and easy to create a new character or for gamemasters to whip up NPCs as needed.

Transhuman covers different types of Eclipse Phase characters in detail: AGIs, asyncs, infomorphs, uplifts, infugees, and indentures. In addition to roleplaying advice and optional rules for these specific character types, other elements of the game that affect characters such as insanity, death and memory loss, psychosurgery, nanofabrication, and reputation are explored.

The final section goes in depth on morphs. It starts with rules for creating your own morphs and then goes on to cover some brand new morphs to Eclipse Phase. It closes with a section on exotic and specialized morphs, such as flexbots, swarmanoids, aquatic morphs, and using bots, vehicles, habitats, and other non-traditional constructs as morphs.

Transhuman will be 176-200 pages and available as a full-color hardcover book through fine gaming stores. Like our previous Eclipse Phase titles, it will be published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. We estimate thatTranshuman,once available in stores, will cost $45 in print and $10 for the PDF.

Read More

Support the website by grabbing some Roleplayers Chronicle swag Pick-up the latest Roleplayers Chronicle Magazine Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

Read the original here:
Roleplayers Chronicle » Transhuman Eclipse Phase Player's Guide ...

Posted by m1k3y on April 24th, 2013 in identity, posthumanism, religion

Venetia Robertson, shown below practicing catching cyborg flies, is seeking Grinders for a survey as part of her thesis. She says:

Hi all, I am looking for people who would like to answer a brief survey regarding the intersection of transhumanism and identity, with a focus on notions of the spiritual, religious, sacred etc. I am a PhD student from the University of Sydney, Australia, and my thesis explores ideas of identity, particularly identity that is beyond that which is purely human. Any data I can get from people who are interested in or actively engaging with grinding, body-hacking, wet-ware, transhumanism and/or becoming cyborgs would be greatly appreciated! Hit me up atvenetia.robertson@sydney.edu.auto be sent the survey and a participant information statement detailing my ethics clearance, or if you simply have questions.You can also check out my academic profile page athttp://sydney.academia.edu/VenetiaRobertson.Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

I took it myself on the weekend, and am keen to see what she comes up with.

You may leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Read the original post:
Grinders wanted for Transhuman Religion Study - Grinding

By: Lee Coburn

Humanity is now entering the fourth economic paradigm. First we were hunter gathers, second farmers, third the industrial revolution. Now the fourth paradigm, where transhuman entrepreneurs, utilizing both neurological and machine augmented intelligence, are replacing capital as the economic driving force in free market economies.

In the last 40 years computers and robots have replaced humans in more than 9 million traditional jobs. This trend is accelerating as Intelligent Self-Educating Computer Systems (ISECS) like WATSON, WolframAlpha, Quora and others are moving from the lab into the cloud.

Humanities golden age? Possibly, but like the start of the industrial revolution it is the transition thats scary, creating unemployment, pain and suffering. Today transhuman entrepreneurs are pulling us into a new age where bioinformatics, nanotechnology, 3D printers, ISECS, and robot slaves will do our work, freeing us for love, play and fun.

For this document we define Transhumans to be free thinking, courageous doers, who, use augmented intelligence, to harness the frontiers of human knowledge and technology.

During the industrial revolution vast amounts of capital were needed to start and build railroads, steel mills, auto factories and giant retail businesses like Montgomery Wards. The world economies were driven by the need for capital, hence the name capitalism. Today most American steel mills have closed, General Motors has filed for bankruptcy, and Montgomery Wards is history.

The fourth economic paradigm is being created by transhuman entrepreneurs who use the internet and advance computer systems to augment their intelligence, enabling them to better utilize our growing scientific and technological knowledge. Look at the market value of companies started by transhumans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and thousands of others. Rather than needing capital, these companies are generating trillions of dollars of surplus capital.

Golden age of opportunity: Because scientific and technological knowledge is developing exponentially, there are more entrepreneurial opportunities today than at any other time in human history. Best of all. there are no formal educational requirements, school dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other entrepreneurs with even less education outnumber those with Ph. Ds..

Today 90% of all scientists and inventors that have ever lived are alive and working. They are producing more new opportunities every 15 years, then were produced in the last 100. And the last century was very inventive with TVs, computers, space travel, washing machines, airplanes, autos and much more! Check out the website http://www.kurzweilai.net/, where their daily newsletter documents five to twelve new scientific and technological advancements. Many of these discoveries point to new products and industries.

Entrepreneurs themselves are a major source of new opportunities. When the Wright brothers invented the airplane they created opportunities for airplane manufacturers like Boeing. They also created thousands of second tier opportunities. These, for the most part are low tech, like food services, airport support, travel agents and manufacturers of airplane seats, etc.. It is in this second tier where historically businesses have earned the most money and created many new jobs. So, the more entrepreneurs there are, the more new opportunities there will be.

More here:
Capitalism is Dead. Long Live Transhumanism. - H+ Magazine

What does it mean to be human? Biology has a simple answer: If your DNA is consistent with Homo sapiens, you are human but we all know that humanity is a lot more complex and nuanced than that. Other schools of science might classify humans by their sociological or psychological behavior, but again we know that actually being human is more than just the sum of our thoughts and actions.You can also look at being human as a sliding scale. If you were to build a human from scratch, from the bottom up, at some point you cross the threshold into humanity if you believe in evolution, at some point we ceased being a great ape and became human. Likewise, if you slowly remove parts from a human, you cross the threshold into inhumanity. Again, though, we run into the same problem: How do we codify, classify, and ratify what actually makes us human?

Does adding empathy make us human? Does removing the desire to procreate make us inhuman? If I physically alter my brain to behave in a different, non-standard way, am I still human? If I have all my limbs removed and my head spliced onto a robot, am I still human? (See: Upgrade your ears: Elective auditory implants give you cyborg hearing.)At first glance these questions might sound inflammatory and hyperbolic, or perhaps surreal and sci-fi, but dont be fooled: In the next decade, given the continued acceleration of computer technology and biomedicine, we will be forced to confront these questions and attempt to find some answers.

Transhumanism is a cultural and intellectual movement that believes we can, and should, improve the human condition through the use of advanced technologies. One of the core concepts in transhumanist thinking is life extension: Through genetic engineering, nanotech, cloning, and other emerging technologies, eternal life may soon be possible. Likewise, transhumanists are interested in the ever-increasing number of technologies that can boost our physical, intellectual, and psychological capabilities beyond what humans are naturally capable of (thus the term transhuman). Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), for example, which speeds up reaction times and learning speed by running a very weak electric current through your brain, has already been used by the US military to train snipers. On the more extreme side, transhumanism deals with the concepts of mind uploading (to a computer), and what happens when we finally craft a computer with greater-than-human intelligence (the technological singularity). (See: How to create a mind, or die trying.)

Beyond the obvious benefits of eternal life or superhuman strength, transhumanism also investigates the potential dangers and ethical pitfalls of human enhancement. In the case of life extension, if every human on Earth suddenly stopped dying, overpopulation would trigger a very rapid and very dramatic socioeconomic disaster. Unless we stopped giving birth to babies, of course, but that merely rips open another can of worms: Without birth and death, would society and humanity continue to grow and evolve, or would it stagnate, suffocated by the accumulated ego of intellectuals and demagogues who just will not die? Likewise, if only the rich have access to intelligence- and strength-boosting drugs and technologies, what would happen to society? Should everyone have the right to boost their intellect? Would society still operate smoothly if everyone had an IQ of 300 and five doctorate degrees?

As you can see, things get complicated quickly when discussing transhumanist ideas and life extension and augmented intelligence and strength are just the tip of the iceberg! This philosophical and ethical complexity stems from the fact that transhumanism is all about fusing humans with technology and technology is advancing, improving, and breaking new ground very, very quickly. Humans have always used technology, of course our ability to use tools and grasp concepts such as science and physics are what set us apart from other animals but never has society been so intrinsically linked and underpinned by it. As we have seen in just the last few years, with the advent of the smartphone and ubiquitous high-speed mobile networks, just a handful of new technologies now have the power to completely change how we interact with the the world and people around us.

Humans, on the other hand, and the civilizations that they build, move relatively slowly. It took us millions of years to discover language, and thousands more to discover medicine and the scientific method. In the few thousand years since, up until the last century or so, we doubled the human life span, but neurology and physiology were impenetrable black boxes.In just the last 100 years, weve doubled our life span again, created bionic eyes and powered exoskeletons, begun to understand how the human brain actually works, and started to make serious headway with boosting intellectual and physical prowess. Weve already mentioned how tDCS is being used to boost cranial capacity, and as weve seen in recent years, sportspeople have definitely shown the efficacy of physical doping.

It is due to this jarring juxtaposition the historical slowness of human and societal evolution vs. the breakneck pace of modern technology that many find transhumanism to be unpalatable. After all, as Ive described it here, transhumanism is almost the very definition of unnatural. Youre quite within your rights to find transhumanism a bit, well, weird. And it is weird, dont get me wrong but so are most emerging technologies. Do you think that your great grandparents werent wigged out by the first television sets? Before it garnered the name television, one of its inventors gave it the rather spooky name of distant electric vision. Can you imagine the wariness in which passengers approached the first steam trains? Vast mechanical beasts that could pull hundreds of tons and moved far faster than the humble but state-of-the-art horse and carriage.

The uneasiness that surround new, paradigm-shifting technologies isnt new, and it has only been amplified by the exponential acceleration of technology that has occurred during our lifetime. If you were born 500 years ago, odds are that you wouldnt experience a single societal-shifting technology in your lifetime today, a 40 year old will have lived through the creation of the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and brain implants, to name just a few life-changing technologies. It is unsettling, to say the least, to have the rug repeatedly pulled out from under you, especially when its your livelihood at stake. Just think about how many industries and jobs have been obliterated or subsumed by the arrival of the digital computer, and its easy to see why were wary of transhumanist technologies that will change the very fabric of human civilization.

The good news, though, is that humans are almost infinitely adaptable. While you or I might balk at the idea of a brain-computer interface that allows us to download our memories to a PC, and perhaps upload new memories a la The Matrix, our children who can use smartphones at the age of 24 months, and communicate chiefly through digital means will probably think nothing of it. For the children of tomorrow, living through a series of disruptive technologies that completely change their lives will be the norm. There might still be some resistance when I opt to have my head spliced onto a robotic exoskeleton, but within a generation children will be used to seeing Iron Seb saving people from car crashes and flying alongside airplanes.

Read the rest here:
What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human ...

Art by Thao Do.

Less than two decades ago, few could have envisaged a future where direct functional interfaces between brains and machines were commonplace. Today, there is a league of futurists, the transhumanists, that foresees an incredible expansion of human potential with the emergence of radical technologies that may one day enable our minds to be uploaded from biological brains and run on computers. As the borders between neuroscience, computer science and bioengineering fade, some of these predictions have already been realized. In fact, only a few years ago, Cathy Hutchinson, paralysed but mentally agile, became one of the first people to have her brain wired directly to a computer, allowing her to move a cursor, a wheelchair, and later a robotic arm with nothing but her mind.

This breakthrough in translational neural interfacing came with the founding of BrainGate (Cyberkinetics, Inc.), a neuromotor prosthetic system developed by Professors Donoghue and Hochberg in Duke University, who described Cathys control of the robotic arm as a magic moment. While it does indeed seem like magic that a mere imagination of action can result in the action itself, its actually quite straightforward. A sensor is chronically implanted into the part of the primary motor cortex that controls arm movements. The sensor detects electrophysiological activity arising from motor imagery in the brain, and transmits these signals to a decoder, which converts neuronal firing rates from simple reflections of brain activity into its intended outputs. Then, instead of controlling the muscles, which in patients like Cathy are usually damaged, the output is directed at controlling a computer, a robotic limb or a wheelchair, which puts into action the movement that was being imagined.

The leap from when the idea of neural interfacing was first conceived to its establishment as a field of neuroscience and engineering has been an enormous but impressively rapid one. The interest in this technology stems from its considerable potential to restore motor function, communication and even confer a certain degree of independence to patients suffering from severe neuromuscular disabilities. As the theoretical distinction between human and machine is gradually blurring, the untapped potential of interfacing looms large. It is likely that these systems will receive considerable attention in the future, but it is difficult to predict their various applications.

Indeed, there is an entire intellectual movement, transhumanism (abbr: H+) that is devoted to challenging the notion that the human condition cannot and should not be subjected to radical enhancements. Under this way of thinking, people with pacemakers, cochlear implants, prosthetics, or even artificial valves can be thought of as cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs a blend of humans and mechanical parts. However, it is not so much this amalgam than the resultant interference with ones behavior and personality that is worrisome. Take the example of a Parkinsons patient treated with deep-brain stimulation, an invasive neural interface that aims to correct motor impairments through electrical stimulations to the subthalamic nucleus. Three years after the electrodes were implanted, this patient began to experience stimulation-related bouts of euphoria and unrestrained manic behavior. He bought houses he could not afford, incurred severe financial debts, and indulged in inappropriate sexual behavior towards nurses, all the while unaware of his deviant conduct. When the stimulation parameters were adjusted in an attempt to improve his manic condition, he returned to his usual state of competence, and regained his original capacity to judge moral behavior, although at the cost of deleterious effects on his motor abilities, thus leaving him bedridden. In this non-manic state, doctors considered him mentally proficient, and when given a choice, he opted to have the stimulator switched on again, and be admitted to a chronic ward in a psychiatric hospital.

Technological advancements are inevitable, and deep-brain stimulation is undoubtedly one that has had widespread success and improved the lives of over 30,000 people worldwide. However, in the wake of these exciting cutting-edge interfaces, we must consider the legal and moral implications of their effects on personality, most of which are still a matter of much debate within the scientific community. Who is to blame for seemingly involuntary acts by individuals whose brains appear to have been changed by machines? Is it the fault of the patient, of the doctor, or perhaps even of the computer? Can the behaviour even be considered involuntary if the patient, in a state of competence, chose to continue with the treatment that was itself the underlying cause of the behavior? Lastly, if this technology can be used to restore functions in those with disabilities, can it also be used to enhance or augment the existing capabilities of healthy people? And if yes, to what extent?

See original here:
H+: The Transhuman | Bang! Science Magazine

Transhumanism, Overpopulation and Eugenics with Aaron Franz - Smells Like Human Spirit - Episode 50
Aaron Franz #39;s website - http://www.theageoftransitions.com/ mp3 - http://ec.libsyn.com/p/3/6/2/3628a1c23c059a29/Smells_Like_Human_Spirit_Episode_50_-_Transhu...

By: 1stageofawareness

Link:
Transhumanism, Overpopulation and Eugenics with Aaron Franz - Smells Like Human Spirit - Episode 50 - Video

The Hidden Redcoat - [Warframe] Look at the Amphis and Transhuman Tenno
Starring Gilesteli! A quick look at the Amphis staff, also a run through of the new types of defense mission as well as a bit of explanation about how I think the Tenno are transhumanist. Link to the full discussion: forums.warframe.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music: Future Gladiator - Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By: TheHiddenRedcoat

See original here:
The Hidden Redcoat - [Warframe] Look at the Amphis and Transhuman Tenno - Video

A TRANSHUMAN SOCIETY THE ULTIMATE NWO ALIEN AGENDA

By: XDVU RELOADED

Read more from the original source:
A TRANSHUMAN SOCIETY THE ULTIMATE NWO ALIEN AGENDA - Video

As time passes, pieces of us will be replaced by artificial elements. Insulin pumps, pacemakers, artificial joints and limbs, exoskeletons, and cochlear implants. Neurochemical enhancement represents another way that we transform ourselves. Technology has made ustranshuman.

This is from The Techno-Human Condition by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz:

Until now, some are saying, our application of technology to enhancing our capabilities was largely external: we constructed tools that we could wield to increase our capacity to do things, but as wielders we were essentially fixed in our capabilities. We controlled our external environment, not our internal selves. Even when we did things to enhance our inner capabilities, we did them with external interventionseyeglasses, education, and the like. Now, we are told, with powerful new genetic technologies on the horizon, with the increasing fusion of human and machine intelligence, and with neuropharmaceuticals, artificial body parts, and stem cell therapies, we are beginning the business of transforming ourselves from the inside out, of exerting explicit and conscious control over our existing selves and our evolving selves in ways that create new opportunities, new challenges, and new ways of thinking about who we are and where we are going. The very notion of what it means to be human seems to be in play. For some people this is a thrilling and wonderful prospect indeed, while others are filled with dread and despair.

Let us differentiate between two separate dialogs about transhumanism. One involves the ways in which living humans use technologies to change themselves, for example through replacement of worn-out knees and hips, or enhancement of cognitive function through pharmaceuticals.The second dialog positions transhumanism as a cultural construct that considers the relations between humanness and social and technological change. Many people are excitedly talking and writing about the prospects for the technological enhancement of human brains and bodies and a transition to new versions of humanness. The most avid and optimistic of these people call themselves transhumanists. The meaning of transhumanism sounds obviousbetween states of humannessyet is remarkably difficult to specify. A significant part of the ambiguity arises from ones notions about what it means to be human. This, of course, is contentious cultural territory; after all, without agreement on the meaning of humanness one cannot specify when the technology-enabled leap to transhumanism occurs.

We dont like the concept of thetranshuman. Im not sure if its the term or the concept. I suspect its both. Either way, we need to get over the idea that machines will do bits of us better than we can or in ways that our bodies no longer can.We have a hard time seeing assistive technology beyond the shallow context of 20th century science fiction. Ultimately our repulsion of the man-machine reflects a level of hypocrisy and arrogance. We celebrate the purity of our humanness but cling desperately to the technology that keeps us going.

Of course if a machine can replace something that we do, perhaps what we did was never that human to begin with.

Amazon links are affiliate links.

Tagged as: human, machine, transhuman

Read more from the original source:
Embracing Our Transhuman Future

Transhuman guitar jam
Rough jam of a new song for my band transhuman. (I didn #39;t have an 8 string)

By: Adam Chinner

Continued here:
Transhuman guitar jam - Video