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Taking a blogging break

Sentient Developments is currently on hiatus as I plug away at a personal project (details TBA). In the meantime, should you miss my ramblings, you can follow me on twitter and add me as a Facebook friend.

The best of Sentient Developments: 2009

Here are my favorite Sentient Developments articles from the past year:

• Transhumanism and the 'Intelligence Principle'
• The top 10 existential movies of all time
• The perils of nuclear disarmament: How relinquishment could result in disaster
• The 'Rare Earth' delusion
• Ranking the most powerful forces in the Universe
• Let’s get metaphysical: How our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd
  
• The 'end of science' my ass
  
• Improve your performance with energy drinks
• Cognitive liberty and right to one's mind
• Limits to the biolibertarian impulse
  
• When eight is more than enough: It's time for some meaningful regulation
• When superheros run amok: Exploring posthuman and technological themes in Watchmen
• Exploring transhumanist themes in Battlestar Galactica: Caprica
  
• Natural selection: Darwin's God killer
• Postgendered athletes in sports: Should intersexed persons be allowed to compete?
  
• What is a person?
• Welcome to the Machine, Parts I, II, III IV and V [essays on the Simulation Argument]
• The girl who doesn't age: How a bizarre genetic disorder may help in the struggle against aging
  
• Cuba: Photo essay
• Remembering Mac Tonnies
  

The best of the guests

A hearty thank you goes out to all the guest bloggers who contributed to Sentient Developments in 2009. Here are my favorite of their articles from the past year:

• Russell Blackford: On the baggage of transhumanism & Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry
  
• David Eagleman: Will you perceive the event that kills you?
• David Brin: Will we "uplift" animals to sapiency & How Americans spent themselves into ruin... but saved the world
• David Pearce: The Abolitionist Project: Using biotechnology to abolish suffering in all sentient life & A world without suffering
  
• Milan M. Cirkovic: Assessing solipsist solutions to the Fermi Paradox
  
• Athena Andreadis: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!
• Michael Anissimov: Dismiss Gaianism & Eliminating all pain, forever
• Natasha Vita-More: Interpretive dance of the transhumanist future
• Edward Miller: How to redesign our communities for the internet age
• Casey Rae-Hunter: The bright side of nuclear armament & Neurodiversity vs. Cognitive Liberty I & II
• Linda MacDonald Glenn: Call 1-800-New-Organ, by 2020?
  

Summer's over, back to blogging

Now that summer is over I plan to get back on track with the blogging. I'd like to keep the posts a bit more focused over the coming months and narrow in on some key areas, namely human enhancement, bioethics, animal welfare (including uplift issues), gender biopolitics and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

I'll also keep working to bring in guest bloggers, so keep an eye out for that.

And as always, I'll keep on speculating about the future of intelligent life.

New look and tagline

Doing a bit of housekeeping around here. I've changed the header graphic, tagline and color scheme. Improvement, no?

Sentient Developments turns 6

This weeks marks the 6th anniversary of Sentient Developments.

Last year, for it's 5th birthday, I ran a 5-part retrospective:

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.

New URL for this blog

As some of you may have noticed, the URL for this blog has recently changed:

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com

Please change your bookmarks and links accordingly.

'Tis the season to be nominated for a science blogging award

How cool is this? My article, The Fermi Paradox: Back With a Vengeance, is being considered for entry into the Science Blogging Anthology, "Open Laboratory 2007." The annual contest, which is organized by Science Blogs, recognizes the best science writing of the year.

My Fermi post was adapted from the talk I gave at TransVision 2007 back in July. The article was subsequently Slashdotted on August 5.

Fellow IEET member Moheb Costandi also has a pair of articles in the contest, The rise and fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, and An Illustrated history of trepanation.

Here's a list of all the entries.

Comments moderation

Sorry, gang, but I have to start moderating comments again. Too many spammers and trolls are ruining it for everyone else.

Basically, your comment will get posted if you're on topic and have something interesting to say (btw, contradiction is not an argument unless you're backing it up; please take the time to make your case). I may not always respond to your comments, but I read every one.

My thanks go out to anyone who has ever contributed a comment to this site -- and I'm sorry that I have to start moderating again.

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part V

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. This will be the final day of my retrospective. Today's entry reviews the best of November 2006 through to the present.

The Ashley X story hit prime time in January 2007 and I found myself embroiled in the controversy. Back on November 6, 2006 I published the article, Helping Families Care for the Helpless, in which I defended the actions of Ashley's parents. They in turn cited the article to help explain their actions. Among the many interviews I did that week I appeared on the BBC.

Also in January I appeared on the CBC's 'The Hour' and discussed the future of humans.

I came up with 30 must-know terms for the 21st century intellectual. This article went completely viral and is undoubtedly my most popular post.

Beliefnet offered me the opportunity to respond to Nigel Cameron's bioconservative concerns. In the interview, titled "Nanotechnology Will Reshape Humanity," I discussed such things as security, privacy, nanotech and the ethics of enhancement.

The Blogisattva Awards were announced earlier this year and my blog was the winner of two awards: Best Achievement Blogging on Matters Philosophical or Scientific and Best Achievement in Wonderful, Remarkable, Elegant Design.

I wrote about cheating vs. enhancement in chess and the future of chess.

I railed against the prospect of giving up sleep.

I hated Aronofsky's pro-death 'Fountain', I declared that Star Trek's 'Prime Directive' was stupid (which pissed off a number of Trekkies -- just check out the comments), and wrote about 'Jesus Camp' and the art of brainwashing children.

I wondered if the world was ready for cyborg athletes and the New York Times quoted my 'sober' opinion.

I wanted to have nothing to do with mind controlling parasites.

I argued that there there should be an X Prize for an artificial biosphere.

I worried about our pending authoritarian neugenic nation.

I defended the right to be wrong and tolerated Holocaust deniers and global warming skeptics.

I discovered that Second Life was a dangerous place where perils abound and terrorists struggle for their digital rights. I also joined Facebook and paid witness to the the ongoing demise of anonymity.

I argued that British Columbia was right to seize Jehovah's Witnesses babies.

I struggled to manage my 50,000 daily thoughts. I wrote about synesthetic art and interpretation.

I felt that resistance was futile and that we should not even bother to prepare for an alien invasion.

I wondered if non-human animal uplift was imperialistic.

A heart-felt thanks goes out to all my regular readers! I deeply appreciate the support you've given me over the years!

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part IV

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next few days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years. Today's retrospective reviews the best of May to October 2006.

Last year I speculated about death and the brain and wondered if there can be awareness in the vegetative state.

I blogged about miraculous memory for mere mortals and protopanpsychism and consciousness uploading. I wondered if the brain taps into the future and if we could fight back against mind hacks.

I wrote about eating ethically and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on the welfare of apes in captivity.

We constructed the case for enhancement at Stanford. I argued that we are ethically obligated to uplift non-human animals. James Hughes interviewed me about this, and then the Church of the Subgenius remixed our conversation. I also argued that humans crave uplift.

I wrote about Peter Singer and the fear of genetic inequality.

I wrote film reviews for Avalon, Superman Returns, Minority Report, Code 46, Darren Aronofsky’s "π", Fight Club, and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I wondered if philanthrocapitalism was actually philanthrobabble.

I tried to figure out when intelligence first emerged in the universe. I also went on a rant about unidentified flying idiots.

I scrutinized SENS.

The Toronto Transhumanists attended the World Future Society Conference in Toronto.

I worried that global warming would put an end to human freedom.

I wondered if there was such a thing as universal phenotypes.

I argued that radical Islam could be considered fascistic, and that we had entered the Age of Weapons Containment. I worried about the ongoing threat of nuclear apocalypse and the the U.S. plan for a 21st century nuclear blitzkrieg.

I tried to protect our children from the god delusion.

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part III

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2005 and the first several months of 2006.

Early last year Spanish socialists wanted to give apes human rights prompting me to write about the myth of our exalted human place. I also proclaimed that cows are people, too and predicted the end of livestock.

I wondered if active SETI was imperiling humanity and if science fiction was bad for bioethics. I looked deep into my crystal ball and saw a very bald future.

I wondered if we live in a non-arbitrary universe.

I wrote about James Lovelock's Gaian despair and his thoughts about environmentalist sabotage.

I tolerated David Irving's bullshit.

The future of warfare was on my mind, including cyber warfare and the "blogger threat", neurohacking, and the perils of miniaturization on the battlefield. I also worried that the anthropic principle did not imply future gain.

I wrote about the end of gender.

Consciousness and brains: I wrote about how you could think faster by altering your perception of time, extreme 'natural' brains, and the phenomenon of blindsight.

And finally, I wrote about how pop art will gets proletarianized, or how technology will enable anyone to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part II

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2004.

In January 2004 I had an amazing 3-way conversation with John Smart & Milan Cirkovic where we discussed the Fermi Paradox, megascale engineering projects and the Singularity.

In March 2004 I co-developed the Panspermia Equation, an attempt to determine how many solar systems the Earth has 'infected' with its bio-ejecta.

Damien Broderick and I debated vegetarianism and personhood back in March 2004.

Peter Pasarro talked to me about AI, the Brain, and Techlepathy in April 2004.

In May 2004 I posted the first draft of my astrosociobiology concept. Compare that version to the one that now resides on Wikipedia.

In September 2004 I blogged about Nick Bostrom's rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama and the claim that transhumanism is the world's most dangerous idea.

Anders Sandberg and I talked about antimatter weapons and the possibility of deliberately engineering NEO impacts.

After watching Contact I felt that building a machine designed by ET was not a very good idea.

In November 2004 we launched the IEET.

I blogged about how we have a very special sun.

After the East Asia tsunami disaster in December 2004 I wrote about our extremely dangerous universe.

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part I

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether).

Quantum Consciousness and Telepathy?

Back in August of 2002 I began to dabble in quantum consciousness theory and the treacherous realms of parapsychology. It was during this time that I became fairly convinced that something like telepathy actually exists (a claim I now tend to be more wary of). I was fairly convinced that the interplay between consciousness and quantum effects had something to do with it. I wrote the following,

My consciousness is tied to both the physical and quantum realms. As I observe and measure the universe, it falls perfectly into place just for me (i.e. the observer forces the collapse of the wave function). The same thing happens to you, independent of my observations. We are all living in our own 'worlds,' and these 'worlds' are being revealed only to the specific observer; our personal-worlds are only as large as our observational field, and anything not observed is in a state of indeterminancy. For example, if we have a face to face conversation, everything behind me in my 'world' is in a state of unobserved indeterminancy, so it's not really there. But in your personal-universe, because you're looking at me and the world behind me, it has collapsed into a perceptually coherent world. Yet, I can interact with you. When we communicate, we are truly interfacing, but it only appears that we are in the same physical environment (or world). Thus, even though we can interact in the same room together, we are actually in our own physical worlds. So, the physical world is an illusion of sorts, or at the very least, it is one of our two environments. The other place we reside is the quantum dimension. Thus, by virtue of the fact that we can communicate and interact in the physical world (our interaction is not an illusion), our consciousness must be linked in the quantum environment...

...One way of looking at it is that a consciousness has tunneled through the quantum maze to get to another consciousness. It has tuned into the proper frequency.

I was so excited about this revelation that I contacted quantum mind theorist Stuart Hameroff and asked him about it. He responded by informing me that at the Quantum Mind Conference in 2003 there would be "compelling" evidence in favour of "telepathy."

These days, while I'm not so much interested in the parapsychological aspects of quantum consciousness, I am still very much intrigued by notions of consciousness and how it relates to reality, as well as such philosophical propositions as panprotopsychism.

The TTA rails against Kass, Raelians

In late 2002 the newly founded Toronto Transhumanist Association began to express itself as an activist organization. Leon Kass, chairman of the US President’s Council on Bioethics at the time, was scheduled to speak at the University of Toronto in December 2002.

Kass, a notorious bioconservative and so-called deathist, was bad news as far as we were concerned. We used his Toronto visit as an opportunity to declare that 'Bush Bioethicist Thinks Canadians Should Die.' We issued a statement to the press to this effect. Here's an excerpt,

What’s worse, while claiming to be a defender of human dignity, Kass has essentially declared that not all people are equal when it comes to the care they can come to expect. “Kass represents an affront to the rights of the elderly,” says TTA vice-president George Dvorsky. “The aging Baby Boomer population needs to take heed of this man and his stance against progressive health technologies, particularly as they apply to medical practices that can extend life and the treatment of suffering and aging itself. Kass is trying to convince all elderly people that they should complacently accept and deal with all aging-related diseases and simply shut up and die. As a result, he has not only revealed a discriminatory stance that targets the elderly and the kind of care they are legally entitled to, but he has also exposed his pro-death agenda.”

One month later the Raelian cult announced the birth of a human clone. This proved to be a hoax, but we didn't know it at the time. Concerned that the Raelians would give transhumanists a bad name, the TTA issued a statement in condemnation of the experiment. We stated that,

In their haste to produce the first human clone, the Raelians and their renegade Clonaid biologists exposed babies to these sorts of risks. Yes, critics should be directing their disgust at the Raelians and the maverick scientists who helped them clone a human before the procedure was safe. But they should be careful about saying that all scientists and ethicists are against reproductive cloning, or that the act itself is evil.

At the same time, we wanted to re-frame the prospect of human cloning in a positive light,

“Human cloning will someday be a good thing,” says TTA vice-president George Dvorsky. “For infertile couples who cannot make babies with sperm and eggs, cloning is a medical breakthrough that will provide them children of their own. Similarly, it will help gay and lesbian couples produce genetically related offspring. And for those individuals with inheritable genetic diseases, reproductive cloning will give them an increased chance of having a healthy child."

“Transhumanists believe that humans deserve the right to clone themselves should they choose, so long as the process isn’t harmful to others," says Dvorsky. "It is hard to imagine parents of clones being any less loving and caring than parents of regular children. Clones are nothing more than delayed twins, and are just as human and as deserving of rights and respect as anyone.”

Measuring Scientific Progress

When attending TransVision 2003 at Yale University I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Vassar. We immediately hit it off and have continued to correspond since that time.

One of the projects we embarked upon was to test the assertion that breakthroughs in science were continuing to happen at a steady, if not accelerating, pace. We both felt that major scientific progress was actually slowing down despite the rapid rate of technological progress.

To test the theory we created a list of humanity's most important scientific breakthroughs and noted how much time had elapsed since each development:

• Advent of religion as primitive metaphysics (100,000 to 45,000 years ago)
• Meditation Pantojoli, Forest Vedas (1000 BC)
• Advent of science in Ancient Greece (350 BC)
• Arabic Mathematics (800 AD)
• Revival of Ptolemaic Astronomy (early 1500s)
• Copernican Astronomy/Heliocentrism (1543)
• Advent of Mechanistic Dynamics (17th century)
• Statistics & Probability Bayes, Pascal, Fermat, etc. (17th century)
• Calculus Huygens, Newton & Leibniz (late 17th century)
• Newtonian Dynamics (1680s)
• Optics Newton, etc. (1680s)
• Idea of Progress/Enlightenment (18th century)
• Thermodynamics (early 19th century)
• Biochemistry (early 19th century)
• Non-Euclidean Geometry Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, Riemann, etc. (early 19th century)
• Electro-Magnetic Induction Faraday (1821)
• Natural Selection Darwin (1858)
• Geological Uniformitarianism (mid to late 19th century)
• Mendelian Inheritance (1866)
• Maxwell's Equations (1884)
• Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (mid to late 19th century)
• Microeconomics (mid to late 19th century)
• Germ Theory of Disease Pasteur (late 19th century)
• Advent of Speculative Science Fiction, Futurology (late 19th century)
• Unification of Chemistry and Physics (late 19th, early 20th century)
• Experimental Psychology (early 20th century)
• Undecidability (early 20th century)
• Einsteinian Relativity (1905)
• Quantum Physics (1909) Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger
• Universal Computing Turing, Gödel, Hilbert (1928)
• Advent of Cosmology (early to mid 20th century)
• Idea of force carrier Einstein, Bose, Higgs (mid 20th century)
• Standard Model of Particle Physics (mid to late 20th century)
• Neo-Darwinian synthesis with Mendelian Genetics Williams, Dawkins, etc. (mid to late 20th century)
• Chaos Theory or Complex Systems Theory (1960s)
• Memetics/Semiotics Dawkins, Eco (1970s)
• Sociobiology Wilson (1970s)

Based on this list we concluded that science had experienced a 'golden age' of sorts from the 17th through to the 19th century, and that major breakthroughs were becoming less and less frequent.

Conversation with John Smart

I had an excellent conversation with John Smart back in July 2003 where we discussed the developmental Singularity:

GD: "The system you describe cannot be a perfectly deterministic system - any evolved system needs at least some dynamism built in to it to guarantee a certain degree of mutatability. Therefore, nothing is "guaranteed" in this universe, nor any universe for that matter, especially if one wants to introduce the infinite spectra of variable quantum worlds and multiverses."

JS: "Certainly. An 'evolutionary developmental' system (see singularitywatch.com for more on that concept, or put this word into any biological textbook search) is not perfectly deterministic. It is developmentally (not evolutionarily), highly statistically determined however, in standard development environments. And I don't need to tell you this looks like a very standard development environment."

GD: "Obviously, if you're right, intelligences (like ourselves right now) become self-aware of their deterministic drive towards a developmental singularity. Thus, one could argue that the drive to the singularity may be a conscious one, or even a self-directed one."

JS: "Yes, yes. Rationality being the latest emergent tool for searching the evolutionary phase space, etc. Kind of an interesting and humbling realization, isn't it? Certainly keeps reductionist materialist and rationalist philosophers from sleeping too soundly at night, I'd bet."

GD: "Aren't you really applying the same kind of pre-Copernican human-centric arrogance to assume that we're special? How are we less epiphenomenon than ants or other cosmic phenomenon?"

JS: "This perspective isn't anthropomorphic, its infopomorphic, as you point out below. Either the universe is a very efficient massively parallel evolutionary developmental learning system, or there's something major wrong with the model."

More from this conversation here.

Sentient Developments 5th Anniversary

This week marks the 5th anniversary of my blog, Sentient Developments.

Back in 2002, as I immersed myself in all things transhumanist, I launched this blog as a way to help me think out loud and better articulate my thoughts and concerns. It was also a good way to vent some frustrations and do a bit of shouting (something I still do from time to time).

Soon after the creation of Sentient Developments I joined Simon Smith over at Betterhumans and became its deputy editor. Around the same time we co-founded the Toronto Transhumanist Association. Over the course of the next 5 years I joined the World Transhumanist Association, served on its board of directors from 2004-06, did some editing work for the Journal of Ethics and Technology, organized TransVision 04, and now sit on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

During this time Sentient Developments has served as my "home base." It's been a labour of love.

Starting tomorrow I will be revisiting some of my favourite blog posts from the past 5 years.

Sentient Developments nominated for Blogisattva awards

My blog has been nominated for several Blogisattva awards, honoring "excellence in English-language Buddhist blogging during calendar year 2006." There are 115 nominees in 21 categories. Sentient Developments is up for 4 awards including Best Blog of the Year.

Other awards that SentDev is up for include Best Achievement in Skilled Writing, Best Achievement Blogging on Matters Philosophical or Scientific, Best Achievement in Wonderful, Remarkable, Elegant Design.

The winners will be announced on February 15, 2007. Thanks to everyone for their ongoing support.