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POPSI am a transhumanist, thanks I say, fear not. If you have clearly transhumanist beliefs, like the notion that human enhancement is coming in the next few decades and will be a big deal, then don’t be afraid to call yourself one. As Dr. Wittgenstein, one of my favorite philosophers ever, used to argue, words are just labels we fill with our own content. To think that a word has any inherent meaning aside from its use in language is absurd.
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POPSThe Pharmacy of the Future and You Solox, the emotional independence pill, enables patients to have a wide and emotionally satisfying circle of friends but liberates them from the tedium of having only one intimate partner. Owens then posits that the price of Credon is about as much as for a candy bar, while Libermine and Solox costs as much as good bottle of wine. So on what grounds do you choose among these options? Owens suggests that one response might be that it's "normal" to want to be in relationship. The pharmacist reminds you that people born with extra Solox in their brains are just as "natural" as people without it. Surely you would agree that such free spirits should not be regarded as somehow inadequate. Another response is that taking Libermine would so change you that you wouldn't be you anymore. Of course, the whole point of taking Credon is to change you so that you, in some respects, aren't you anymore.
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POPSWestern Water Supplies Already Altered by Global Warming Currently water resources are allocated based on the idea that water flow in the future will be just like it was in the past, with some natural fluctuations. But the observations over the past 50 years and the predictions for the future now require a shift in the way water management is done.
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POPSThe Terrifying Future of Computing Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr -- Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.
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POPSBlended Realities, Blended Lives As part of our continued research on human-futures interaction, we will take a people-centric approach. We will start with the human experience and ask questions about how we'll navigate a future where we have multiple personas, play games to solve serious problems, and how the interaction between individuals, groups, and machines is creating new kind of knowledge.
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POPSFoundational Questions Institute (FQXi) Mission To catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
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