Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
“The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’ An M. I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments […]
“The mind’s a weird piece of business.” ––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 308 “If you can accept that a person without a penis can peaceably live life as they please (including as a man), then you should be able to accept that a person without a physical form can peaceably live life as […]
“It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We […]
“‘How long do you think this place is going to stay the way it is now? Ten years? Twenty? Can’t you see how much this place has to alter…in just the next century? We’re so used to things staying much the same, to society and technology––at least immediately available technology––hardly changing over our lifetimes that…I […]
“This is our birthplace though, this is what we deserted long ago. This is where we used to live, on balls of dust and rock like this. This is our home town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust, the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from home, the cradle where we were […]
“‘I want to go on being a student,’ I told him. ‘I want to be a teacher. I’m just a reader,’ I said. ‘DON’T SOUND SO ASHAMED,’ he said. ‘READING IS A GIFT.’ ‘I learned it from you,’ I told him. ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT––IT’S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, […]
I’ve flirted with the idea of taking up meditation for a few years now, and thought this book would be a good introduction given my interest in neuroscience. James H. Austin’s Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen is a sincere but mediocre explication of Zen meditative practice as interpreted by modern brain science. Austin’s treatment is highly […]
“‘When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, […]
“‘You’re growing up. Maybe that’s it,’ he said softly. ‘Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that’s not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white. Aron, it will be over. […]