Africa is a deeply patriarchal society; this is the part of the “Traditional African Value System.” Men dominate the socio-economic and political machinery and organizations. Men are regarded as natural leaders, who are superior and born to rule over women. Women are considered weaker vessels-extensions of men and secondary human beings. The pride and dignity of women are derived from and dependent on men.
In January, IEET Executive Director J. Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach met with representatives of the Japanese Consortium on Applied Neuroscience (Japanese, English). They visited Trinity College as part of a national tour to meet with American neuroethicists.
After I recently moved to India, I was asked to write another blog-article for IEET, this time about the question of India’s role in accelerating change and the technological “Singularity.”
Concerned about your cognitive functions? Did you read “Brain Damage - 83 ways to stupefy intelligence” and realize that your mind’s been mercilessly mutilated? Fear not. There’s hope. Neurogenesis - the growth of brain cells - can be activated via several science-proven techniques. Many are recent discoveries, one is as ancient as bipedalism, one is futuristic, one is wet and weird. To pop open your head, read on:
Could someone without a business degree become a marketing consultant? No? Then how is it that people without philosophy degrees are becoming ethics consultants? [1] Is it that people don’t know that Ethics is a branch of Philosophy just as Marketing is a branch of Business? Doubtful.
Are you sniveling this morning, like I am? After an insomniac night of feverish coughing? Are you annoyed with the medical profession, wondering, “why can’t researchers defeat the common cold?”
On Sunday, December 11, we explored the convergence of religion with highly imaginative future science and technologies in the Turing Church online workshop 2 in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video conferencing space.
Living in the USA is killing people, quite early. Prodigious wealth and scientific achievement isn’t keeping Americans around very long. Quite the opposite. Longevity rankings tabulated by the United Nations show the North American behemoth wheezing behind in 36th place, with a croak-time of 78.3 years, dying nearly four years earlier than the durable Japanese (82.6). Cubans live as long as Americans; Chileans and Costa Ricans live longer; so do workaholic South Koreans (2,357 person-hours) and hard-drinking Finland, where alcoholism is the #1 cause of death.
Discussions about whether or not to legalize assisted suicide often fail to take into account the fact that unassisted suicide is already legal. (Although once considered a crime, it’s now legal in the United Kingdom and in all fifty United States.) Failure to consider this fact means that unless there is a significant difference between assisted suicide and unassisted suicide that justifies prohibiting the former while permitting the latter, one must either accept inconsistency or reconsider.
Are we hurting our noggins? Internationally, are there social customs, diseases, pollutants, school policies, parental choices, drugs, diets and philosophies that cause, or are correlated with, decreased intelligence? Here are fourscore-and-a-trio of the mind-mangling menaces. A preponderance of the fearsome factors have undergone scientific scrutiny, with statistics filed in the massive archives of pubmed.gov.
Suppose you had a chance to question an ancient Greek or Roman—or any of our distant ancestors, for that matter. Let’s say you asked them to list the qualities of a deity.
It’s a pretty good bet that many of the “god-like” traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.
What is the likelihood of seeing research vessels devoted to scientific research outside the bounds of national jurisdiction?
The idea of relocating for the sake of circumventing law, in particular the notion of establishing new nations in international waters, is an idea typically initiated with liberty in mind.
Imagine an artificial being, granted the rights of humans but without a limited lifespan, that would have the ability to gather resources to itself indefinitely.
Eggs were first. Millions of years before mammals, eggs existed, their hard shells protecting the incubating embryo inside. Egg Mom wanders mobile, light in her anatomy—unlike her mammalian sister that waddles around, heavily crippled with the burden of her womb. Eggs were an evolutionary smart idea.
The morning-after pill known as Plan B is steeped in controversy again. The Department of Health and Human Services has taken the rare step of overruling the Food and Drug Administration and its science advisors and will not allow the pill to be sold over the counter in drugstores unless a woman can prove she is older than 17.
So, apparently there’s an Adderall drought going on the United States. Adderall is a prescription med that is used by people suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and narcolepsy. It’s also being increasingly used as an off-label cognitive enhancer and for recreational purposes (which I’ll get to in just a little bit).
In this essay I would like to reflect on Eastern and Western philosophy, their definition of enlightenment, and their connection to transhumanist thinking. How may Buddhist concepts like ‘Bodhi’ and the ‘Maitreya’ relate to the Western ‘Enlightenment’, human enhancement, and post/transhumanism?
The recurrence of the word neurophilosophy in articles and appearing in my inbox made me think we should all know more about this fascinating field of study that allows us to peek inside the brain and answer some of history’s greatest theoretical ponderings.
I had the pleasure of testifying as a Fellow of the IEET Tuesday afternoon in front of the General and Plastic Devices of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee about long term follow up safety studies and informed consent on silicone breast implants.
The focus of the 40th annual meeting of the American Aging Association, held a few weeks ago in North Carolina, was emerging concepts in the mechanisms of aging.
As we are exposed to more and more prosthetics that get the job done instead of acting as awkward disguises, the more our brains flex and flow around the idea of what a human looks like.
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