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Greg’s Egan Zendegi has been the second book that I have bought in Kindle format (the first was David Eagleman’s Sum). I bought it a few minutes after midnight on January 1: I had decided to begin the new decade by reading this e-book. Some explanations and thoughts before starting with the review:

Supposing a technological Singularity or something like it does occur later in this century – what’s likely to be the main technology pushing it forward?

Like Ray Kurzweil and many others, I believe the answer is: Artificial General Intelligence.  Other technologies will surely play large roles, but what will really push us over the threshold and radically transform our world, will be the emergence of engineered minds with general intelligence significantly greater than our own.

Cryonics – the use of low temperature to preserve bodies no longer maintainable by contemporary medicine, with the hope of later resuscitation – is far from a new idea.  The practice goes back at least to 1967, when James Bedford was cryo-preserved by the Cryonics Society of California.  But the technology has progressed tremendously since then, with organizations like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute making use of advanced techniques for preserving cryonics patients with less and less damage, increasing the odds of eventual successful resuscitation.

Computer scientist and futurist thinker J. Storrs Hall has been one of the leading lights of nanotech for some time now.  Via developing concepts like utility fog (see the figure below) and weather machines, he has expanded our understanding of what nanotech may enable.  Furthermore, together with nanotech icon Eric Drexler he pioneered the field of nano-CAD (nano-scale Computer Aided Design), during his service as founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex.

The nearly universal human desire to preserve youth can often motivate people to make major lifestyle changes or try the latest wonder supplement.  But is it really possible to slow the rate of aging with current knowledge and technology?  I argue herein that aging can be dramatically slowed by fine-tuning your longevity genes.  Indeed, scientific research carried out in the last 20 years has shown that lifespan can be readily modulated by a variety of genetic or dietary strategies.

History holds many thinkers who have dabbled in transhumanist ideas.  One such thinker was the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a philosopher who lived in the part of the world we now know as Germany.  He lived from 1788 to 1860, and spent most of the latter part of his life in the city of Frankfurt am Main.

Although conservative in his political views and personal habits, Schopenhauer’s philosophy appeals to me as a transhumanist.  This is because it emphasises the negative aspects of the human condition, and suggests how we might escape these, and achieve a higher state of being.

I was first exposed to transhumanist hopes while parading half-naked past Singularity Point tent at Burning Man 2000.  Tossing back my chestnut curls, I sauntered my Adonis-like body into the tent and listened rapt as I learned that some scientists were convinced that the Seven Causes of Aging were not eternal principles but technical problems had been identified and were tractable.  Leaping spryly to my feet, I cried out in a sprightly voice that through the rigorous application of scientific techniques, I would achieve "negligible senescence."

Starting with his seminal book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, Kevin Kelly has been showing us how biological evolution and technological evolution follow similar, intersecting patterns.

His current book, What Technology Wants, more closely explores his concept of “the technium” which Kelly describes as “…a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology – one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.  In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind.  It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well.  I see this extended face of technology as a whole system with its own dynamics.”

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.

You can’t understand your brain unless you break it.  Without brain damage, you are incapable of acquiring any insight into how your mind works, because your brain is sublimely designed to trick you into thinking you have a clue.

Your memories are fiction.