Words&Dirt

“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 infected with the crazy breath of the place’s vastness like a metal wind inside our love-struck heads; just stumbled on the scale of what’s around and tripped out drunk on starlike possibilities…”

––The State of the Art, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 50

“Enhancement of human abilities can be accomplished in several ways, and need not require modification of the person’s biological body. Avatars in virtual worlds are a contemporary example, and in future teleoperation of personal robots or entirely fresh alternatives may become popular. Avatars point out to us that enhancement is not merely a matter of increasing the effectiveness of a person in taking action, but also can mean an altered form of consciousness that expands opportunities for experiences, and escape from the conventional system of moral constraints. Especially noteworthy is the fact that one individual may have many different avatars, thereby becoming a multiplex or protean personality. Decades ago, psychiatrists described this as multiple personality neurosis or some form of split personality, but in future we may decide that the most effective mode of being is pluralism. Buckminster Fuller (1970) used to to, ‘I seem to be a verb.’ Perhaps today we should say, ‘I am a plural verb in future tense.'”

–– “Transavatars,” by William Sims Bainbridge, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 91