You are invited! Terasem Colloquium on Dec. 10
You are invited! Terasem Colloquium on Dec. 10
Susan Schneider, Randal Koene, Max More, Ken Hayworth, Gabriel Rothblatt, and Robert McIntyre will explore consciousness and how to preserve it.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
The Terasem Colloquium on December 10, 2021, 10am to 1pm ET via Zoom, will feature a stellar lineup of speakers: Susan Schneider, Randal Koene, Max More, Ken Hayworth, Gabriel Rothblatt, Robert McIntyre. The topic: What is consciousness, and how to preserve it beyond physical death?
You are invited! This post (and upcoming Turing Church newsletters) will be updated with the Zoom access coordinates. Stay tuned.
Since last year I've been co-organizing and running the biannual Terasem events, in July and December via Zoom. The last two have been focused on spaceflight: December 2020, July 2021. We will go back to spaceflight for at least one of the 2022 events, but for the December 2021 Colloquium we wanted to continue the exploration of consciousness and its preservation, which is another focus area for Terasem.
By that way, what is Terasem? Background material and my thoughts here. I’m a member of Terasem and the overall worldview of Terasem is very compatible with mine.
What can we expect to hear on December 10? Max is likely to talk about Alcor and cryonics, Randal about substrate-independent minds (aka whole brain emulation, or mind uploading). Ken and Robert will talk about emerging brain preservation technologies, or “cryonics for uploaders.” The discussion between these four speakers is likely to be a much needed update of the discussion that I organized back in 2018. Then, Gabriel will present Terasem’s point of view, and I look forward to hearing from Susan about the philosophical implications of it all.
For more background information, see my 2018 piece “I Want to Preserve My Brain So My Mind Can Be Uploaded to a Computer in the Future” and Chapter 1 of my book “Tales of the Turing Church.”
Reading list
The last book (2019) by Susan Schneider, keynote speaker at the upcoming Terasem Colloquium, is titled “Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind.” Susan’s book is one of the best current reference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the consciousness theories and consciousness preservation proposals to be explored at the Colloquium.
I’m reading again “The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention” by David Noble. I’ll have much more to say about Noble’s book in one of the next newsletters.
“Time, Life & Memory: Bergson and Contemporary Science” by Laurens Landeweerd revisits the philosophy of Henri Bergson and its relevance to contemporary physics, biology, and neuroscience. I’m also reading again “The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time” by Jimena Canales, and of course Bergson himself. Bergson is highly relevant to the book chapter that I’m currently writing.
My friend Stefano Vaj has published a book in Italian titled “I sentieri della tecnica: Spirito faustiano, transumanismo, futurismo.” Highly recommended to those who speak or at least read Italian. I contributed a foreword to Stefano’s book.
Cover picture from Pxhere.