I recently encountered the following proclamations: "Transhumanism is science-based, everyone should leave any ideas which are non scientific at the door while going to a meeting" and "It is only through science that a transhuman state may be realised."

I can't be the only one to find such declarations to be suffocatingly short sighted and unambitious.

Fundamentally Transhumanism is a story about Being.

It is a story about the process of Becoming. To be Transhuman is to be a voyager travelling to an unknown destination.

To be Transhuman is to be a pioneer, an eXistential eXplorer.

Transhumanism is a daring tale of transformation, boundaries transgressed and uncharted existential terrains. Self direction and self ownership demands that our chosen evolutionary paths will be wildly diverse and will therefore draw upon wildly diverse ideas.

Seriously, science just ain't enough.

Transhumanism needs the ideas of people with experience in forging their own paths. Transhumanism needs to engage with the psychonauts, the absurdists, the pranksters, the poets, the actors, the posers, the dancers, the dreamers, the differently able, the outsiders, the freaks, the disobedient, and anyone else experienced in swimming against mainstream currents.

In conclusion: Simone de Beauvoir believed it to be the height of irresponsibility for any serious thinker to attempt to make the world seem less ambiguous. While Theodor W. Adorno said “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”

If Transhumanists believe that only science and evidence based ideas are necessary to lead them to the promised land, then Transhumanists are little more than deluded dinosaurs whistling "tomorrow belongs to me."

A man named Algernon Black once said: "Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication."

Earlier I was asked for a definition of Transhuman Automorphism.

I replied, Transhuman Automorphism is an exploratory commitment to various definitions of the word "PLAY".

This morning I was asked about my creative online projects and what I have to say on Transhumanism. And I was asked to suggest a selection of my links that are perhaps the best introduction to my H+ criteria.

Reflecting upon my overall work to date I highlighted some of the recurring concepts that are of prime importance to me:

- A culture's power structure depends largely on how we look and how we are looked at.
- Transhuman Theonarcissism.
- Ontological Anarchy.
- Cognitive Liberty.
- Transhuman Automorphism - Living as Art.

(I later thought I should also have included, Equiveillance - Deep Transparency)

and I offered the following selection of links:

http://www.transhumanism.org/gallery/rh.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russell-higgs/75587844/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2001/jan/05/guardianletters1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russell-higgs/53700518/

http://russellhiggs.shutterchance.com/archive.php

 In addition I also wrote in my reply:

My creative work and life experience to date is also strongly flavoured by Financial Poverty (relative to western living), which I believe is a topic of considerable importance in the context of mainstream H+ fantasies and idealisation. In particular with regard to Self Direction and Self Ownership. My financial poverty is primarily a consequence of personal priorities and choices that I have made and those that I continue to make. My emphasis being that Self Direction and Self Ownership are not always going to take us down the most sensible routes. And it's important to underline that that's OK. Which also leads me to one more thing that comes to mind: the importance of imperfection.

And finally I was asked "Is life treating you well? Are you treating it well?" To which I replied:

Generally existence and the world intrigues me, I like being alive very much, and most of the time I am something like contented, and frequently happy even.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

(said Charles R. Swindoll)

synthetic happiness video - dan gilbert

part of a series of video mini lectures,
over on T.E.D.

http://www.gcarlson.com

"Gary strives to bring a level of artfulness to medical illustration that makes it exciting as well as informative"

4 pages from THE INSURGENT
(an ongoing online foto-graphic novel and self help manual)



















anarcho-transhumanism



Political Freedom: Against the tyranny of government.

Economic Freedom: Against the tyranny of capitalism.

Biological Freedom: Against the tyranny of genes.

It is my belief there is no reason why clothing should be compulsory. It is simply my ordinary human body that is visible. We are criminalised because of prejudice against our appearance. Religious concepts of bodily sin and shame continue to inform our contemporary self-perceptions, while advertising exploits both our fascination with the body as well as our low self-esteem, through limited representations of ideal bodies. This campaign of public nakedness is a simple action that simultaneously invigorates numerous complex issues.

I am not a naturist, a nudist, a streaker, nor an exhibitionist. Labels are for clothes. My unclothed appearance is also not motivated sexually nor out of any gratuitous need to seek attention. I believe that while society continues to have a fundamentally negative relationship with the human body and appearance, we can never be a free or mature society. It's the 21st century. Time to evolve.

(Russell Higgs, Brixton prison, december 2000, from a letter to the guardian)

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

full size 140k

In the beginning was the word and from that moment on there was no turning back. We are no longer apes, yet not quite gods. We are more like frightened children, trapped in a story about the world that we recite aloud to ourselves, over and over in the darkness. We want to go back to the garden. We want to go back to the womb. We want to go back. But our ambiguous future keeps calling to us and its time to grow up. Homo-technicus is waiting.

Simone de Beauvoir believed it to be the height of irresponsibility for any serious thinker to attempt to make the world seem less ambiguous. Our most precious gift is our freedom of choice. But choice entails commitment and responsibility and because individuals are free to choose their own path, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment through to wherever it leads. Therefore as Donna Haraway has similarly pointed out, commitment and ambiguity are intertwined. That is what grown-up thinking and commitment is all about, recognising the ambiguities of the world and of our positions within the world. There is no natural. There is no purity. There is no separateness. There is no turning back.

For many of us our concerns regarding either genetically modified food or the molecularly engineered machinery of nanotech or most of all the fusion of our own organic bodies with our own technologies, is "that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But..." as Haraway reminds us in her 'Cyborg Manifesto' "...illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential".

"This is an argument.." she says "for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction"

(originally published in dogmanet july 2004)