E.O.WIlson

E.O. Wilson reinvents Evolution

The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson brought us the science of Sociobiology in the 1970′s, which helped explain altruism in animals. Why would ants sacrifice themselves as workers when they don’t reproduce? Because “eusocial kin selection” has helped them get shared genes into the next generation.

His new theory of social evolution expands that idea beyond the individual to the colony level, which then becomes the fundamental evolutionary unit. You sink or swim as a function of your culture, a relatively rare model adopted by an estimated 2 to 3% of species. OK, so far so good.

What does this imply about our own species? It means we must discover Humanism or perish, and we can’t wait for Dr. Wilson to explain for us what a guy in an atomic submarine is doing for us, or what the corrupt politician’s rationale might be. We’ll have to codify human behavior within international law and live with that, and assemble a species culture that offers more than cyclical war and hard poverty.

Recently it became apparent in evolutionary genetics that races within the human species do not exist. Skin color is an adaptation to northern sun, as a lean body is to a hot climate. All variations occur on a sliding scale, and the concept of race just isn’t useful – we’re all African and, like a sheaf of wheat, are born of the same seeds.

Finally, can we consider hybrid Humanism, wherein you maintain your own religious beliefs, in your SuperEgo if you will, but otherwise everyone is seen to be born with Humanism in their sub-brains, their Id and Ego, that are common to all of us. A core of species heritage that is ours alone, and is invariably decent.

This sets up a three cornered hat, wherein Humanism is made up of Humanists (responsible ants), a Just Society (colony), and our Institutions (Law, Science, Net). This tricorne philosophy (nice attire for Tea Party convention infiltrators) sets out in simple terms what our covenant is as homo sapiens on this planet. Be ours to hold it high.

So there we have it – as a species we lose races but gain a colony. Works for me, this big blue ball of mutualism(Wilson may discover Gaia at any moment..) and if I ever get accused of racism I can rightfully answer – Who dat??  That would so disappoint the finger-pointers, the banshees of acrimony.

NATO laughs in our faces (annually)…

NATO has 14 agencies, 6,000 employees, an annual budget of nearly $7 billion, and NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, commented at this year’s annual barbeque in Estonia  that “Our headquarters is a paradise for people who love committees.”

This organization traffics in human distrust, keeps our war wounds bleeding, and derides our efforts to rationalize our species and  planet. Above all, it wants to remain a nuclear club that can club down any serious threats to its hegemony on a moment’s notice. In my bookThe Humanist I foresee the war in Afghanistan being resolved by granting every adult in that country a war pension, as partial compensation for what the western world has done to them for centuries – and I think $7 Billion might cover that annually.

NATO and its evil twin, the UN Security Council, block the UN gaining authority at all costs. Until the western press loses its grip on the castrati and dumbshit masses, who will require at least a generation to leaven their claims to entitlements and privilege, we’re stuck with them, it seems. Or maybe not – in this quarter at least – the defence never rests…

US is from Mars, Japan and Europe from Venus…

Meanwhile Obama sought to explain (in the NYT) why he aborted President Bush’s return-to-the moon plan in favor of a complicated system of public-and-private flights that would go elsewhere in space, with details still to be worked out.

”We’ve been there before,” Obama said of the nation’s moon landings decades ago. ”There’s a lot more of space to explore.” He said his administration would support continued manned exploration of space ”not just with dollars, but with clear aims and a larger purpose.”

The real target has moved off Mars, which is too cold and lacks an atmosphere. Venus will become the tropical sister of Earth and its terraforming will occupy our species for 1000 summers, and become what we’re really doing, in space and as a species.

The Universe is wallpaper because it’s too far away – see my article on Humanism as a Starship on why Venus is the real prize – mainly because its upper atmosphere is easily habitable and shirt-sleeve comfortable at 1 atm pressure right now.

Don’t believe me?  The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched May 20, 2010. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe, is already in orbit around Venus.  Both are studying its atmosphere, because it can support small human cities now.  From there we have to ‘digest’ that atmosphere and convert it to duplicate ours- very feasible. The winner of this game scores one planet, and I’m for entering our youth as one contestant…

Hitler’s Illegal Smile…

Adolf's last laugh

One salubrious evening we crossed the street from the Swiss Hut bistro to continue at a party hosted by the daughter of the Lord Mayor of London (another student). I had my first taste of the fabled weed that night and sat down to watch a guy play bad guitar but with hilarious, ribald lyrics that broke us all up.

After my third request to repeat the same song, he shooed me away in no uncertain terms… Two years later on that campus some neo-nazis in the surrounding Bohemia introduced 420 as the code for pot, and it caught on. It is of course the Fuhrer’s birthday, lest we forget…

In the 1990s, following the fall of the Soviet Empire and the privatization of communist China, commercial trade opened up on a worldwide basis. Exporters in America and Europe (the West) cheered at the promise of vast numbers of potential consumers in these new markets. What few realized was that these markets were populated by people who had been denied upward mobility for decades and were ready and eager to work hard for small gains in prosperity.

In the battle between the developed and the emerging, the first round went to the West, as our major companies exported heavy equipment, including aircraft and construction equipment, mostly to emerging governments.

In the second round, entrepreneurs from the emerging markets, many educated in Western universities, imported technologies and imitated management techniques from the West. With access to cheap, hard-working labor, some start-ups achieved spectacular results and grew rapidly. Of those, some became giants and competed on the open markets of the West. In China’s case, exporters were aided by a currency manipulated downward (at the expense of domestic savers and consumers).

In the third round, the balance of trade changed for the first time in centuries as countries in the West accumulated vast trade deficits. At the same time, many Western exporters found their overseas markets captured by the new ‘Tigers’ from the developing world. Soon, even their domestic markets were overrun with inexpensive foreign goods. With bloated welfare systems, high levels of regulation, and aging infrastructure, Western economies were unable to compete on price or quality.

In the fourth round, emerging economies, particularly China, began an unprecedented scheme of consumer financing for the West. Pieces of this policy include the yuan/dollar peg, the stockpiling of US and European government bonds, and the subsidization of export-oriented national champions. The results are neatly summarized by the tale of the new bullet train to be installed in California: it will be paid for with stimulus money that America borrowed from the Chinese government and then produced by a Chinese firm.

The West’s debts have now become so great that the credit ratings of major Western sovereigns are now in question and endemic default threatens the fabric of Western economies and social life.

Meanwhile, the Tigers’ accumulating real wealth has allowed them to invest in new capital goods and infrastructure. As a consequence, a large middle class is developing, estimated at some 500 million people in China alone. Many of these people, given the first taste of economic possibilities, are keen to acquire luxuries, such as refrigerators, automobiles, and houses, which once were seen as the preserve of Western consumers. Given the spectacular rate of development over recent years, it is highly likely that even high-tech products will increasingly be designed, marketed, and sold locally within Tiger economies.

Many now argue that it will take time for the middle classes of the Tiger nations to accumulate the wealth of those in the West. However, it must be realized that while currently poorer than their Western counterparts, their potential is virtually unlimited. The Tigers have vast savings and capital resources, whereas the West has exhausted much of its capital through consumption. They have access to the oil resources of the Middle East and North Africa, while the United States has made an enemy of itself there. They have billions of people hungry for access to food, shelter, and clean water, whereas we have a declining population unimpressed with a year-old iPod. Finally, the people of the Tiger nations are still self-reliant and untainted by the corrosive effects of socialist entitlements, while Westerners will take to the streets at even a mention of cuts.

The United States has gone from hegemony to decline in a relatively short time-frame. It seems, as history marches forward, that each empire’s collapse is quicker than the previous. That may be the case this time, yet again. Since the dawn of the 21st century, it has been clear to me that, if current trends continue, this era belongs to the developing world. The US may have had its day, but the sun is now rising across the Pacific.

By John Browne http://seekingalpha.com/author/john-browne

Kurtz has been the leading intellectual and organizational figure in the atheist/freethought/humanist movement for over 40 years. Throughout his long career Kurtz has sought to develop a positive alternative to the reigning theological orthodoxies of the day. While Kurtz has spent much of his life critically examining religion, he believes that secular humanists need to emphasize and build positive alternatives to religion. For Kurtz, it is not enough to reject God. He has always maintained that secular humanism and atheism are not identical. Throughout the years this put Kurtz at odds with atheist firebrand Madalyn Murray O’Hair. For many years both Kurtz and O’Hair were the leading foes of leaders of the religious right such as Pat Robinson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, David Noebel and others. Now with the emergence of “the new atheism” Kurtz finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being the elder statesman and founder of a movement tempted by tactics he has warned against before.

“I hope this statement will help reorient the humanist movement in a positive and constructive direction by emphasizing what we are for rather than against,” said Kurtz, who founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980 and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. He now serves as chair emeritus for both organizations.

Among the signers of this new statement, coming ten years after Humanist Manifesto 2000, are heavyweights Rebecca Goldstein, Colin McGinn, Steven Pinker, Lionel Tiger, Patricia Schroeder, Phillip Kitcher, Owen Flanagan, and Ann Druyan (the widow of Carl Sagan). Also included are movement insiders such as R Joseph Hoffmann, Joe Nickell, James Randi, DJ Grothe, Carleton Coon, Edd Doerr, Terry O’Neill, Dale McGowan, Anthony B. Pinn, along with many others.

Writing in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Free Inquiry, the magazine he founded, Kurtz declared “militant atheism is often truncated and narrow-minded…it is not concerned with the humanist values that ought to accompany the rejection of theism. The New Atheists, in my view, have made an important contribution to the contemporary cultural scene because they have opened religious claims to public examination…What I object to are the militant atheists who are narrow-minded about religious persons and will have nothing to do with agnostics, skeptics, or those who are indifferent to religion, dismissing them as cowardly.”

“While I certainly don’t believe that we ought to abandon our criticism of religious fanaticism or allow religious doctrine to dictate public policy, the future of the secular humanist and scientific rationalist movements depends upon appealing to a wider base of support,” continued Kurtz. Some 16 percent of the American population is not affiliated with any church, temple, or mosque–approximately 50 million Americans–whereas only 2 to 3 percent are estimated to be out-and-out atheists. Hence, Neo-Humanism wishes to address its message to a broader public who we believe should be sympathetic.”

Kurtz says that his new manifesto advances a new form of humanism that is not antireligious per se, nor avowedly atheist. “There are various forms of religious and non-religious beliefs in the world. On the one end of the spectrum are traditional religious beliefs; on the other ‘the new atheism.’ Not enough attention is paid to humanism as an alternative,” declares the statement.

“This statement aims to be more inclusive by appealing to both non-religious and religious humanists and to moderate religious believers who share common goals. It seeks to foster moderation rather than divisiveness and to spark a genuine conversation about meaning and value and the common problems that confront us all as a nation and inhabitants of planet Earth,” added Kurtz.

The “Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Values and Principles” is available online atwww.paulkurtz.us.

Article Unattributed in the Huffington Post

As a Humanist philosopher I sometimes feel that I am revisiting his conundrum of that day. I have all the firepower of our powerful species at my disposal – knowledge, science, the Internet – but there are infantry among the guns here too – atheist Klingers wearing our uniforms.

If Humanists look for other free thinking colleagues on the Net, they are likely to come acrossfreeratio.org, ostensibly an oasis of fellow intellectuals and a safe haven from the holy rollers. But not so fast – if I am going to discuss Humanism at their site, I shall be attempting to distill Grand Marnier from bunker oil.

The opposition to evangelical America among these infidels is so dug in and intractable (understandable after the religious orgies of the Bush era) that I had to eventually opt for an orderly retreat and wash my mouth out with soap. It isn’t supposed to be that way, but these guys are tar babies and it’s not for me to lead them out of the wilderness. There’s just too many of them, Sarge, and they all claim to be Humanists, oh yes!

What a treat then to come across an outfit like ieet.org, which operates on a higher plane. Nobody’s wasting time here rehashing the British analytic parlor game of ‘what’s in a word?’ and claiming it’s the only real philosophy. A case in point immediately jumps out at me – a superb article on the realities of space travel by Charlie Stross, entitled the Myth of the Starship.

Charlie has no trouble lowering his formidable scientific gun barrels and laying waste to the idea of travel among the stars, and it is a great pleasure to see a techie use his gift of the gab destructively – I mean creatively – to demolish star tourism.

He discounts our current space ventures as understandably primitive, and cites the root problem thus:
“Rather, what intrigues me is the possibility that the entire conceptual framework of the starship is a dangerously misleading dead-end, and that what we need is a new framework for thinking about interstellar travel.”

As a lifetime boater I adore ships, but Chas will have none of it:

“Such an interstellar capability isn’t going to look much like a “ship”. It’s going to look more like a DVD balanced on a microwave beam, or a can of beans hanging below a light sail energized by lasers powered by huge orbiting solar power stations. There won’t be any biological agencies aboard: just AGIs or something equivalent ported out of a fleshbody’s cranium. No hands, only nanotech assemblers. And after a voyage of decades or centuries it’s going to have to stop — somehow braking at the other end — then spend more decades farming rocks, slush and sunlight to build ever-bigger physical structures until it can build the equipment with which to phone home.”

I love it when a science pro talks dirty like that, but I agree that this is one elevator pitch a Harvard MBA is not going to see an immediate ROI in… Charlie remains an optimist that some day we can reach out into space – the mind is willing, but the starship idea has no legs.

He concludes: “If we succeed in doing it, it’s going to look nothing like the Starship Enterprise. Or even New Horizons. The whole reference frame we instinctively assume when we hear the word “ship” is just so wrong it’s beyond wrong-ness: it’s on a par with Baron Munchausen’s lunar exploits as seen in light of the Apollo Program. We need a new handle for discussing and analyzing such a venture. And the sooner we consign the “-ship” suffix to the dustbin of failed ideas, the better.”

So we take a lesson from Charlie Stross, the renowned SF writer, to the effect that travel to the stars is just too far out, and we must agree with him there, body and figure.

To be fair, Charlie was debunking starships as a means of transportation, citing the ridiculous amounts of energy and time required to transit unimaginable distances, just to the nearest star. He didn’t touch on the science fiction device of using black holes etc. as doors to other universes, which can negatively impact your lifetime, now and there. Let’s take what we learned from his summary and discard travel to the stars within the foreseeable future – period.

There is a cuter plan.

We’ll accept the Universe as our neighbor, as cool wallpaper, and not get too exercised about its existence – this remoteness buffers us from intruders. As a busy little species, our activities during the coming millennium will likely be conducted in complete privacy – there’s some comfort in that knowledge.

Our destination will be Venus, not the stars, for a number of great reasons. An obscure paper by NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis on the Colonization of Venus has this abstract:

“Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.”
It gets better, as Landis elaborates:

“At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet. At an altitude slightly above fifty km above the surface, the atmospheric pressure is equal to the Earth surface atmospheric pressure of 1 Bar. At this level, the environment of Venus is benign.
• above the clouds, there is abundant solar energy
• temperature is in the habitable “liquid water” range of 0-50C
• atmosphere contains the primary volatile elements required for life (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Sulphur)
• Gravity is 90% of the gravity at the surface of Earth.”

The fact that Venus is almost the size of the earth with 0.9 of its gravity means that I will immediately lose 20 pounds, and humans will not require an exoskeleton to support them when returning to Earth, as Mars colonists would. A challenge even for my Hong Kong tailor.

We can’t find so much as yellow snow on Mars, while Venus has been our tropical paradise-in-waiting – go figure. Who hired these space cowboys?

In the ebook “The Humanist” (Smashwords.com, use free coupon RJ93x) this opportunity on Venus is not lost on the Japanese. Next year they do launch a probe to investigate the Venusian atmosphere. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

What might we do on Venus? Our breathable air (nitrogen and oxygen) is a lifting gas in CO2, so any dirigibles we build can carry great weight. In perpetual sunlight and shielded laterally from cosmic rays, we’d build a nanocarbon frame and wrap a light plastic film around the city, which needs no pressurization, to shield us from the sulphuric acid droplets in Venus’ atmosphere. No space suits are required, because it really is shirtsleeve weather at 1 atm – truly miraculous.

Cities, countries and the UN on Earth could sponsor such colonies, there’s lots of room – the area of the cloud surface is three times that of earth. Solar planes can readily navigate from one city to another. Over time Venus would begin to cool as its cloud cover was converted, and the super-hot temperature on its surface drops toward Earth’s.

If we can configure an atmosphere like Earth’s, our species gains one virgin planet. One thing is for sure – if we build on the Japanese program there will be continuing interest and support from all humanity.
So starships, no. But planetship beacons for our youth, calling them to a future on Earth’s twin sister – oh yes.

Charlie Stross convinced us that star travel was a non-starter, so we accept the Cosmos as little more than scenery – works for me; I had not yet made any plans. Heaven can wait.

Looking around, we found an obscure NASA paper inviting us to colonize Venus, so as surely as the Caribbean attracts snowbirds – tropical paradise, here we come.
But really, why would we do this? Obviously the Earth is crowded and we could use some lebensraum, with more natural resources – no question. But there are deeper reasons, ones that make up the core of positive Humanism.

Our species suffers from two main cancers – militarism and corruption, and together they impoverish us. The only lasting solution to either of these diseases is world government, through the United Nations.

Next, if we define Humanism as an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives then our species’ governance is its proper study. Humanists must become trusted critics and arbiters of the human condition.

That’s our baseline.

In “The Humanist” the ascendancy of the UN allows us to “lift up our eyes unto the hills”, the higher salients that humanity alone can contemplate. The cooperative process of colonizing Venus over 1000 years beckons, and could achieve the following:

1) End our long night of war, nationalism and racism.
2) Inspire youth to respect and trust in science, and to participate in terraforming our new planet.
3) Instill a consensus period and rationale for stabilizing and enjoying Earth for 1000 years.
4) Allow Homo sapiens a suitable time interval to deal with the Singularity, which is the dangerous inflection point wherein our native intelligence is surpassed.

All well and good, but what’s in it for us personally? Everything, if the truth be known.

Again from my book, I propose that Humanists partner up with the Jesuits, or ex-Jesuits as the case may be. (Fear not, I am neither Catholic, Christian, nor Jesuit – agnostic at best; just looking for a trained and proven crew to place in our ship’s wheelhouse).

When it comes to elaborating a catechism around the study and support of Man, the Jesuits are nonpareil. Their ranks are thinning fast, their churches are standing near-empty, and there is an opportunity at hand to simply change the books in the pews and continue – as Humanists. We must be mature enough to recognize the worth of our own traditions, and responsible enough to morph and manage them properly on our watch.

Our movement then gains fellowship, ritual and tradition by recycling churches, not by mocking or abandoning them. This process can occur within Islam and Hinduism as well as Christianity -modernizing their metaphysics while keeping their ethics.

Someday I hope to participate in a ceremony in a centuries-old church, whereby I place my genetic records – DNA, genome, tissue samples and life data – into the hands of Jesuit-like stewardship. Then, with my grandkids downstairs in Sunday school learning about Darwin and Venus, I’ll stand up and out-holler the choir on one or all of Pete Seeger’s Humanist hymns.

I won’t have to be rich or famous in my short lifespan, I’ll have more of them coming here, or on Venus. If “men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them” (Thoreau), I’ll die contented, knowing that I have entrusted all to my human family and our institutions.

This aspiration then will be our Humanist starship. We shall navigate to the one part of the Universe that matters to us – the other side of death; to the future. Death is a feature of biology; it is not our eternal albatross. Work with me on this.

Support the UN and starve out the military – we’re going to need some big money for knocking the new planet into shape.

**Submitted and approved as an “Idea” at Google Moderator http://moderator.appspot.com/ **

(By James Hughes, ieet.org)

What are the current unresolved issues in transhumanist thought? Which of these issues are peculiar to transhumanist philosophy and the transhumanist movement, and which are more actually general problems of Enlightenment thought? Which of these are simply inevitable differences of opinion among the more or less like-minded, and which need decisive resolution to avoid tragic errors of the past?
Now that Mike Treder and I have both decided to step back after eight years of serving on the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association (presently known as Humanity+), we want to take some time this Spring to reflect on the current state of transhumanist thought and determine what questions the transhumanist movement needs to answer to move forward.

I will be structuring my reflections around two general questions. The first is an attempt to parse out which unresolved problems transhumanism has inherited from the Enlightenment. By Enlightenment, I refer to a wide variety of thinkers and movements beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing through the early nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was centered in Britain, France, and Germany, but as recent scholarship has increasingly documented, it had a global dimension with significant contributions from thinkers and movements across Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These thinkers and movements broadly emphasized the capacity of individuals to achieve social and technological progress through the use of critical reason to investigate nature, establish new forms of governance, and transcend superstition and authoritarianism.

However, this framework of ideas was only understood as the core of the Enlightenment in hindsight. Specific thinkers and movements shared only part of what are now thought of as Enlightenment values and clashed over radically different interpretations of these core ideas on questions of faith, the state, epistemology, and ethics.

My position here is that transhumanism—the belief that technology can transcend the limitations of the human body and brain—and techno-utopianism—the idea that humans can create a progressively better future through the rational mastery of nature—are part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. Transhumanism and techno-utopianism can be traced back to the original Enlightenment thinkers 300 years ago, and transhumanists need to understand how the ideological conflicts within transhumanism today are the product of these 300 year-old conflicts within the Enlightenment.

This exercise is also an attempt to make clear which criticisms of transhumanism are internal contradictions, and which start from external, non-Enlightenment predicates. In other words, saying that transhumanism is bad because it threatens the human soul is a criticism from a non-Enlightenment position. Arguing that transhumanists are being anthropocentric or “human-racist” when they preference particular kinds of intelligence and feeling as the basis for moral standing is an intra-Enlightenment argument.

A few of those problems and conflicts are addressed by technoprogressivism, that is by adding egalitarianism and democracy to the transhumanist meme-set and articulating a clearer picture of the good society. But other questions, such as the problematic nature of “Reason” within Enlightenment thought, are not answered by the technoprogressive project and perhaps shouldn’t be. Some of these conflicts are simply matters of philosophical taste, inevitable disagreements of interpretation which can be accepted as part of the welcome diversity within a shared framework of values. Other conflicts, such as between liberalism and totalitarianism, are fundamental.

The second question I want to address in these essays is how transhumanist technological utopianism has both inspired and retarded scientific and political progress over the last 300 years. I want to challenge the prevailing anti-utopian sentiment and highlight the way that dynamic optimism about transcendent possibilities motivated scientific innovation and democratic reform through the work of people like the Marquis de Condorcet, Joseph Priestley, and J.B.S. Haldane.

At the same time I want to seriously examine how, at different points in history, scientific innovators and political reformers have been threatened by the radicalism of the techno-utopians, and how the failure of techno-utopian hype has sometimes produced an anti-scientific backlash. I want to take seriously the idea that “superlative technocentricity” performs an anti-democratic ideological function, that promising techno-fixes for social problems can be used to distract from immediate social needs and injustices. More darkly yet, I want to discuss how the techno-utopians’ association with eugenics and totalitarianism set back both democratic and scientific progress in the 20th century.

Starting with the “contradictions of the Enlightenment” I will be presenting seven arguments over the next couple of weeks:

• First, that the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to confront the repeated implosions of the religion of Reason into romanticism and mysticism, and develop more sophisticated and nuanced defenses of rationality.
• Second, while most transhumanists are atheists, their Enlightenment belief in the transcendent power of intelligence generates new theologies. These theologies can follow from consistently naturalist predicates and therefore call into question the presumption that transhumanists must be New Atheists.
• Third, while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.
• Fourth, transhumanists are divided on the balance between democracy and the market because anarcho-capitalism and radical democracy are the two most popular interpretations of the Enlightenment’s vision of a society of equal, self-governing citizens.
• Fifth, transhumanists are in contradiction over the inevitability of progress because the Enlightenment tradition is conflicted between teleological expectations of unstoppable progress, on the one hand, and rational scientific awareness of the indeterminacy of the future on the other. We may even have inherited this problem from pre-Enlightenment millennialism, which simultaneously argued that God’s kingdom of heaven on Earth was inevitable, but that we nonetheless needed to devote ourselves to ensuring the defeat of Satan.
• Sixth, transhumanists are divided between advocates of ethical universalism and ethical relativism because both are products of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, transhumanists advocate for a universal, non-anthropocentric standard of ethics and citizenship that would treat humans, animals, aliens, and robots alike based on their sentience and personhood. On the other hand, our decisions about which qualities to use as the basis of moral standing are profoundly and (so far) inescapably neurotypical and human-centric. It is not clear yet how we maintain a commitment to both moral equality and normative diversity.
• Seventh, the center of the Enlightenment project is the individual self, seeking happiness, long healthy life, and free and equal exchange with other individuals. But the Enlightenment’s rational, materialist neuroscience reveals that there are no discrete, persistent selves, no “real me” homunculi in the brain. Transhumanism has therefore inherited, in the most acute form yet, the Enlightenment’s need to develop post-individualist values, to reinterpret liberty, equality, and fraternity for a world in which we no longer pretend that there are authentic selves.

I’m looking forward to working through all these heady ideas with you.

Author: Dr. James J. Hughes Jan 19.2010

See also Dr. Hughes’ other related essays in this series. – Ed.

Most users have learned the hard way that they must choose their calling plans carefully, to always be wary of exorbitant roaming and texting charges, and to generally stay on a war footing with their provider for good reason – billing crammers have made the extraction of money from customers a black art.

The FCC warns consumers that “Cramming is the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill. Crammers rely on confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe.”

As the cell phone evolves to deliver an ever more complicated suite of services, a device such as Apple’s iPhone can become a user’s main Internet access point. The devilish opportunities for cramming are then limited only by the billers’ occult vocabulary.

The Net was Mickey-Moused

it is true that there is little that can be done beyond vigilance, for the moment. Taking away your teenager’s cell phone carries a strong risk of personal injury. Limiting your own calls to the evening hours could complicate your day job (hello?). What can you do to control corrosive phone and cable bills? A little patience may be required for a while yet – but their day of reckoning is coming soon.

It helps to first understand where these glorified billing organizations came from. The Internet’s architecture is first-generation, ad hoc, and optimized for expediency. It was cobbled together from flimsy telephone lines and haphazard cable networks, because those were in place twenty years ago; when the Web suddenly arrived into the laps of cable and TV executives like an unwanted pregnancy.

These firms had no choice but to dance with the wires that brung them, perhaps buy up small ISP’s, until wireless took command a decade ago. The cable companies had the fatter coax cables and scooped up the lion’s share of the Internet accounts, while the voice networks scrambled to morph into cell phone empires.

The Internet, however, is an 800-lb gorilla that won’t be caged in by ersatz technologies, and maturing Wi-Fi standards will force its restructuring, from the “edge” back into its delivery backbone.

Smart electrical panels will service all devices

The architecture of the Internet will eventually look like this:

• It will be delivered via fiber optics over the electric utilities’ right-of-way, which hold forth around the world. Big bandwidth will be available in every building, just as electricity is now, with today’s outmoded telephone poles retired.
• Our electrical panel will become a panel computer that manages our power usage, providing Internet access, TV, voice calls, security and Wi-Fi connectivity over a range of secure channels.

It is the FCC’s policy that power must be delivered over the planned Smart Grid, to intelligently manage energy use and possible blackouts, and allow the recharging of electric cars. There will be excess bandwidth available for communications and entertainment services.

The promise of Wi-Fi

Like FSBO to a real estate agent, Wi-Fi is the dirtiest word in the communications lexicon. It signals the eventual demise of dedicated cable and cell phone services, which the public just won’t have to pay for anymore. A Wi-Fi device that can “see” a smart building can wirelessly connect to the Internet at high speed, as is now common at cafes, airports and other hot spots. Once the public network is built out, broadband will become as commonplace as 115 volts is today.

A new protocol called Wi-Fi Direct unveiled at Las Vegas’ CES show this month allows just about any electronic device to exchange data with others, and consumers will come to expect a Wi-Fi phone to enable ordinary voice calling far below the rates endured today..

Edgar Figueroa of the Wi-Fi Alliance noted at CES that “The more you delve into the Wi-Fi protocol, the more you appreciate the 10 years of innovation that have gone behind what Wi-Fi is today.” This a technology whose time has come.

The legacy communications carriers can be expected retreat to web services that offer enhanced messaging and online content, or to reinvent themselves. Consumers will continue to pay for Internet service, of course, as a utility – but the cold hands of the billing crammers will be off their throats.

Internet content publishers and broadcast digital TV promise a rich mix of ad-driven programming, and Wi-Fi phones will retain most of the features that carry a premium price today.

With the number and variety of free services coming, communications will again be affordable, captured by the bunny ears and simpler phones of yore.

Dwight Gilbert Jones is a former Internet Service Provider and software developer.

(Examiner)  Longtime readers of venerable pubs such as Time mag must worry about whether their fragile online ad offerings will sustain their rollover from print to pixels. We do fear for the health of our free reads, when it seems that they are being over-run with vermin of the seediest sort.

Internet advertising is a rough-and-tumble game, and the amount of money at stake is fundamental to all of the players involved. PPC or “Pay Per Click” ads are the engine of publishing right now, and like any font of cash flow they are attracting the heavyweights and sleazy insiders we used to associate with pool halls, chewed cigars and bad boxing movies.

Despite its august reputation, you can probably find an ad for whiter teeth! or a flatter belly! in any recent issue of Time, and in a hundred other respected publications, each identical and all working on the same principle. They offer an attractive and inexpensive deal or service, with the intent of signing you up for unwanted other products, memberships, assessing you fees, and never, ever answering their phone when the magic unravels. Not to mention that they have tarnished much of your privacy with your signup.

These are classical “bait and click” ads that will always be with us, are semi-legal and disreputable, yes, but most adults see right through them and are not harmed by them, anymore than a hawker or carnie at the state fair is anything more than a colorful, if lamentable figure.

Is this a Private Scam, or..?

What is at issue with these advertisements is just who is profiting from them, and who might be hurt by their presence. We all know that there are dangers in dealing with hucksters, and we avoid them, but what is more interesting with PPC is who’s zooming who.

Google has been accused of being complicit in this chicanery because it gets paid regardless, for presenting these ads, be they good or evil. The scammers must be making a profit from the more impressionable among us–we do know that, or the ads would soon be gone. Clearly the website owners or publishers are doing OK by this game. As in Vegas, the suckers will always be with us too.

There is one more party involved, however, and that is the visitor to these websites. Should he or she care that such practices threaten to raise Net advertising costs to untenable heights? Need they cringe before, or show any interest in the spy-vs-spy contest going on behind the scenes, to stamp out fraudulent ads and bogus click counts? Not at all.

Always Leave a Tip

The patrons and visitors to these websites can participate gladly in this carnival through simply clicking on the offensive ads. By looking for particularly slimy offers and scams, and then banging through the link, they can air once more these adulatory orations that sing the praises of ripped abs in two weeks, and the babes that must follow.

And just as abruptly the reader can then move on to the next site, unscathed, as intended. Thanks for providing us with a tip jar, Google!

Stepping on the scam artists, while supporting good publications and writers, is a most fitting finale to a page well taken. No doubt they’ll figure it out someday– in the meantime enjoy the issue!

(NY Times Dec 10/09)

To the Editor:

As a former elected head of the American Humanist Association for 14 years, I am embarrassed by the A.H.A.’s “good without God” campaign of signs on transit vehicles. Humanists are philosophical naturalists, but more important than advertising, one item of the humanist worldview is emphasizing the many positive positions we hold in common with a wide range of religious believers.

I refer to such matters as peace, civil liberties, religious freedom, the environment, social justice, democracy, women’s rights and so on.

Our planetary society does not have the luxury of engaging in angry debates about philosophy. We, all of us, are faced with immediate problems like global warming, endless wars, environmental degradation, denial of civil liberties, widespread economic turndown, misogynistic patriarchalism, the triumph of greed and selfishness over empathy, unemployment and the need for health care reform.

Progressive and mainstream humanists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others of good will need to concentrate on what unites us, not on what divides us. Divisive ad campaigns invite blowback and stimulate both ends of the religious spectrum to engage in fruitless bouts of name-calling and invective.

Edd Doerr
Silver Spring, Md., Dec. 2, 2009

(WSJ, W. McGurn) When the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” the thought was that scientific inquiry had forever undermined claims to certitude. In hindsight we see Arnold was only half right. In place of Genesis we now have scientism—the idea that science alone can speak truth about man and his world.

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today’s advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view “outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

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Associated Press

NIH Director Francis Collins

The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris’s aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning—whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins—went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. “Humanity’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.” They concluded “it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning.”

Here’s the problem: Almost no one really believes this. Not, at least, when it comes to how we behave. And the dichotomy between scientific theory and human action may itself have something to tell us about truth.

That’s not to deny electrochemical brain processes and the like. It is to say that much as we may assent to the idea that we are but matter in motion, seldom do we act that way. We love. We fight. We distinguish between the good and noble and the bad and base. More than just religion, our literature and our politics and our music resonate precisely because they speak to these things.

Remember Peter Singer? Mr. Singer is the Princeton utilitarian who accepts scientism’s view that human beings are not fundamentally different from animals, just more complex. In his thinking, those who cannot reason for themselves or have lost their self-awareness have no real claim to life. Yet when Alzheimer’s struck his mother, he paid for care to prolong and sustain her life. The irony is that an act that does him credit as a son must discredit him among those whose principles about life he claims to share.

To put it another way, while we talk about the clash between God and science, in practice it often comes down to disagreements about man and morals. The boundaries are not always neat. Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had. The result may not be a return to religion but a healthy agnosticism about agnosticism itself.

I once had the opportunity to interview one of my heroes, Sidney Hook. This was a man whose commitment to his atheism and secular humanism was beyond question. One example: A doctor saved Mr. Hook’s life by going ahead with an operation against Mr. Hook’s wishes. Mr. Hook recovered—and promptly published an op-ed taking his doc to task.

It is possible, of course, to imagine a good society in the absence of a belief that man’s dignity comes from his being fashioned in God’s image. Something of the sort would have been Mr. Hook’s ideal. Yet in his writings, the Almighty in whom Mr. Hook did not believe makes an extraordinary, one might say miraculous, number of appearances. When I asked him why he was not more dismissive, Mr. Hook replied that he was never comfortable with the dogmatism of the village atheist.

Perhaps he thought it “a mild form of dementia.” – William McGurn,  Wall Street Journal

Your Editor Comments:

The missing link between God and Science is Humanism.

If the religionists decry the lack of moral standards among nonbelievers, they need  look no further than to the traditions of Humanists. When atheists bring up evolution for no other purpose than to bait the fundamentalists, they are a pale shadow of true Humanists, which they often claim to be.

Humanism requires two pieces of ID, and simple atheists can at best muster one.