Does anyone else see Michael Jackson as a transhumanist artist?

by Style Captain

Everything is amazing and nobody is happy…



Via Long Now Blog
Via KK
And via, and via, and...

Mind uploading
(also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind transfer, whole brain emulation, or whole body emulation) refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind to a substrate different from a biological brain, such as a detailed computer simulation of an individual human brain.

This morning I was reading Michael Anissimov's article "What are the Benefits of Mind Uploading?" and was only thinking that sometimes I feel tired, bored, ... So I read this, which made me feel hopeful:

"Greater subjective well-being. Like most other human traits, our happiness set points fall on a bell curve. No matter what happens to us, be it losing our home or winning the lottery, there is a tendency for our innate happiness level to revert back to our natural set point. Some lucky people are innately really happy. Some unlucky people have chronic depression. With uploading, we will be able to see exactly which neural features (”happiness centers”) correspond to high happiness set points and which don’t, by combining prior knowledge with direct experimentation and investigation. This will make it possible for people to reprogram their own brains to raise their happiness set points in a way that biotechnological intervention might find difficult or dangerous. Experimental data and simple observation has shown that high happiness set-point people today don’t have any mysterious handicaps, like inability to recognize when their body is in pain, or inappropriate social behavior. They still experience sadness, it’s just that their happiness returns to a higher level after the sad experience is over. Perennial tropes justifying the value of suffering will lose their appeal when anyone can be happier without any negative side effects."

Would be perfect today...

Radical Strategies for a Conected World

The net is our future.

"Of all the endeavors we humans are now engaged in, perhaps the grandest of them all is the steady weaving together of our lives, minds, and artifacts into a global scale network. This great work has been going on for decades, but recently our ability to connect has accelerated. Two brand-new technological achievements—the silicon chip and the silicate glass fiber—have rammed together with incredible speed. Like nuclear particles crashing together in a cyclotron, the intersection of these two innovations has unleashed a never-before-seen force: the power of a pervasive net. As this grand net spreads, an animated swarm is reticulating the surface of the planet. We are clothing the globe with a network society.

The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works."

Via KK
"This is a blog version of a book of Kevin Kelly first published in 1998."

This is such wonderful pearl catalog and I've never heard about before!
See what Kevin Kelly explain about and enjoy checking out the website.

"Lifehacking, the Whole Earth Catalog Archive

The Whole Earth Catalogs preached the hacker/designer approach to life starting in 1968, decades before this lifehacking became the norm. The Catalogs were a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.

... The Whole Earth Catalogs and CoEvolutions were idea-based journalism, rather than event-based. Instead of reporting on top of things, they liked to get to the bottom of things. These issues zagged while the rest of the culture zigged, only to zag later.

... The good news is that all this goodness is now online.

... The entire 35-year archive of Whole Earth Catalogs, Supplements, Reviews and CoEvolutions are all up and ready to be studied. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. Go here.

... There are some very are early Whole Earth Catalog Supplements that in all my time at Whole Earth I never saw or read. They are here online now. For those unfamiliar with the wisdom of the Catalog, this archive will serve as a wonderful start. There are more than 100 issues of CoEvolution Quarterly (later called Whole Earth Review) and dozens of Whole Earth Catalogs to keep you up for years."

Via Kevin Kelly

"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives"
Joseph Beuys

I Like America and America Likes Me - 1974*

Joseph Beuys 1921 | 1986 - Germany's most influential post-war artist. An early interest in natural history, country lore and mythology left evident traces in his visionary and extremly diverse work: he was a Performance artist, a sculptor, lecturer, assembler of installations of gigantic scale and founder of Organization for Direct Democracy (1972), after becoming involved in the political arenna. Beuys also made video art and drawings.

Social Sculpture: 'Another world is possible'
Our territory and practices are wide and varied because social sculpture has to do with exploring new values, new forms of thinking and new ways of being in the world.

... During the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. This translated into Beuys’s formulation of the concept of Social Sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art to which each person can contribute creatively.
...
In 1973, Beuys wrote:
“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Beuys manifested these ideas most notoriously in abolishing entry requirements to his Düsseldorf class. Throughout the late 1960s this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, which came to a head in October 1972, when Beuys was eventually dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys would not accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics. Although now bereft of an institutional position, Beuys continued a voracious schedule of public lectures and discussions, as well as becoming increasingly active in German politics. Amongst other things, Beuys founded (or co-founded) the following political organisations: German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), and Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974). Beuys became a pacifist, was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and campaigned strenuously for environmental causes (indeed, he was elected a Green Party candidate for the European Parliament). Beuys also continued to make sculptures, installations, drawings and performances until his death in 1986.

Beuys, Transdisciplinarity and a Sustainable Future
The SSRU | Social Sculpture Research Unit | encourages and explores transdisciplinary creativity and vision towards the shaping of a humane and ecologically viable society. It engages with Beuys thinking and work, as well as those before and after him - making available some of the insights, inquiries and explorations in this multidimensional field.

Beuys understands our society in all its facets as a reality which has to be formed artistically. This formative attempt for a sculpture for the future Beuys calls social plastic.

F.I.U. FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

* I Like America and America Likes Me - 1974
Beuys’s most famous Action took place in May 1974, when he spent three days in a room with a coyote. After flying into New York, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the Action took place, without having once touched American soil. As Beuys later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’ The title of the work is filled with irony. Beuys opposed American military actions in Vietnam, and his work as an artist was a challenge to the hegemony of American art.

The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of
Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an
Enhanced Future.



"Abstract: Transhumanism – the proposition that human beings should use technology to transcend the limitations of the body and brain – is a product of the Enlightenment humanist tradition. As a consequence most avowed transhumanists are secular, and many religious are skeptical or hostile towards the transhumanist project. However there are also many religious transhumanists who find the project of human enhancement at least consistent with, and sometimes a fulfillment of, their metaphysics, soteriologies and eschatologies. Transhumanism appears to be especially compatible with religious traditions that emphasize human agency and evolution to a transcendent state, such as Buddhism, or that have incorporated Enlightenment values, such as liberal Christianity. But elements of the transhumanist worldview and enhancement technologies are compatible with one element or another of most world faiths, even the most fundamentalist. We can thus expect that human enhancement technologies will be adopted creatively into the theologies of groups within all the world’s faiths, producing many flavors of “trans-spirituality.”

And you can also download the PDF slides talk.

Via Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

"I gave a talk yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit. It's a short talk, only 10 minutes long, so I decided to skip Web 3 - Web 9 and just speak about the upcoming Web 10.0 and what I think will happen in the next 6,500 days."

Kevin Kelly

Via BoingBoing

... and Earth!

I just read about the Flag of Earth and flew so far...
Via Conceptual Trends

The Flag of Earth was created by James Cadle inspired by the debate before the first astronauts landed on the Moon about the flag to be planted as a symbol of the accomplishment. The American flag, which doesn't represent all inhabitants of Earth but a nation that complete the mission, was planted, as we know.

That's OK. There are loads of opportunities to use the Flag of Earth!



"The Flag of Earth is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life's work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere."
...
"The Flag of Earth could be flown if you are conducting a project or event which benefits the Earth as a whole ... not just your community or country."
...
"The Flag of Earth symbolizes the Earth (the center blue disk), the Sun (the yellow disk on the left), and the Moon (the white disk on the right). The Earth and its most important celestial neighbors - the Sun and Moon - are overlaid on a backdrop of the darkness of space."
...
"As you read this, that job is underway. The Flag of Earth is now beginning to understand its purpose, its power, its goal and its place in this Universe."

Read more North American AstroPhysical Observatory | NAAPO