Monday, September 13, 2010

Ben Goertzel on The Cosmist Manifesto in Teleplace, September 12

Ben Goertzel gave a talk in Teleplace on his recent book “A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age” on Sunday September 12, 2010.


This talk was somewhat different from previous talks, and centered on a high level philosophical vision rather than on specific emerging technologies. But these are two sides of the same coin and, as it is well known, cultural and philosophical trends have a deep influence on technology development and vice versa. Thanks Ben for the great talk and thanks to the (about 25) participants who contributed to the discussion with very interesting questions and comments. For those who could not attend we have recorded everything (talk, Q/A and discussion) on video.

A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age, by Ben Goertzel, has been published by Humanity+ Press and is available on Amazon. See the review “A Cosmist Manifesto, an Advocacy“ on H+ Magazine. See also the online version of the Cosmist Manifesto.

The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel’s “Cosmist Manifesto” gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.

Ben Goertzel, Chair of Humanity+, is founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, and of the non-profit AGIRI (Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute). He has served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. He is author of two books focused on the future of technology and society Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum, 2001) and The Path to Posthumanity (Academica, 2006). He serves as Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for AI.

Teleplace is one of the best 3D applications for telework, online meetings, group collaboration, and e-learning in a virtual 3D environment (v-learning).

2 comments:

  1. Hello, The talk given by Mr. Goertzel, would never been possible without all the work done by you, mostly, I want to thank you all the help bringed with the invitations, the same gratitude goes for your patience and reasonability when I (honestly) did not act as I ought (even if the issue of the invitations, was not directly my fault, I was not allowed to do such a thing, so again sorry, I will keep following the coming conferences.

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  2. My pleasure SWM, and I hope to see you in Teleplace at the next conferences.

    The incident SWM refers to is: I saw that he was inviting others (non-admin members are not supposed to be able to do this), I thought he was a hacker who had gained admin rights, and booted him. But the current server settings allowed that, so it was no fault of SWM and of course I restored his account and the accounts he had created.

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