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A suggestion for Nick (his book review series):
About Transhumanism (including solving the problem of death by use of technology), just awarded the Wellcome Book Prize, “To Be a Machine” by Mark O’Connell. I have started to read the Kindle version this evening.
It begins thus:
ALL STORIES BEGIN in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other than the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a friend and unwilling to accept that the same fate lies in store for him, travels to the far edge of the world in search of a cure for mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles’ mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulnerable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus, improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. We exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It was not supposed to be this way: we weren’t supposed to be weak, to be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notions of ourselves. The whole setup— garden, serpent, fruit, banishment— was a fatal error, a system crash. We came to be what we are by way of a Fall, a retribution. This, at least, is one version of the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to account for why it’s such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of ours.
O'Connell, Mark. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (Kindle Locations 37-46). Granta Publications. Kindle Edition.
About Transhumanism (including solving the problem of death by use of technology), just awarded the Wellcome Book Prize, “To Be a Machine” by Mark O’Connell. I have started to read the Kindle version this evening.
It begins thus:
ALL STORIES BEGIN in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies, to become something other than the animals we are. In our oldest written narrative, we find the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who, distraught by the death of a friend and unwilling to accept that the same fate lies in store for him, travels to the far edge of the world in search of a cure for mortality. Long story short: no dice. Later, we find Achilles’ mother dipping him in the Styx in an effort to render him invulnerable. This, too, famously, does not pan out. See also: Daedalus, improvised wings. See also: Prometheus, stolen divine fire. We exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendor. It was not supposed to be this way: we weren’t supposed to be weak, to be ashamed, to suffer, to die. We have always had higher notions of ourselves. The whole setup— garden, serpent, fruit, banishment— was a fatal error, a system crash. We came to be what we are by way of a Fall, a retribution. This, at least, is one version of the story: the Christian story, the Western story. The point of which, on some level, is to explain ourselves to ourselves, to account for why it’s such a raw deal, this unnatural nature of ours.
O'Connell, Mark. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (Kindle Locations 37-46). Granta Publications. Kindle Edition.
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