Transumanar

Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life

We have been thinking of this event for weeks, now I wish to organize it. I am looking at my calendar and thinking Saturday, April 28 at 10am PST would be a good choice. Date and time can still change though.

EDITED: We changed the date to Sunday, April 29 at the same time 10am PST.

I will propose my own views, summarized in the article Engineering Transcendence and to be expanded in a book Transcendent Engineering. I plan to give a revised version of the same talk at the TransVision 2007 conference in Chicago in July.

Extropia DaSilva, a “transhumanist avatar” who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything, has promised to give a talk. Some recent Extropia’s essays are available on Transumanar. Bill Bainbridge (YES, Bill is in SL) plans to give a talk. I hope to have one or more speaker(s) of the Society for Universal Immortalism.

James Hughes will present his paper “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future” (PDF).

Technology and practical organization:

The current plan is to hold the seminar on uvvy island (now completely rebuilt) but if more than 45 people sign up we may move it to a new sim on a higher performance “Class 5” server able to accommodate 80-90 participants.

Voice chat is coming to Second Life (I am participating in the beta test and have been impressed with what I have seen and heard so far), but it will not be generally available before June. So, this will be one of the last transhumanist events with text chat as the main conversation mode.

Of course, speakers will have a choice of multimedia technologies to give their talk. I will give mine by real-time streaming video broadcast. The video streaming server will of course be also available to the other speakers who, if they choose this option, will have to install webcam broadcast software like QuickTime broadcaster (Mac only, recommended option, free download) or Wirecast (Windows, commercial product). Now that I think of it, I have never been at an event in Second Life with real-time video broadcast from multiple locations, this is an interesting experiment to make.

Participants will ask questions by text chat, and speakers will answer by text, voice or video. Extropia, whose face and voice may be very well known (many people like to speculate on who her primary might be - once I advanced a guess that she may even be Ray K himself but she denied), will give her lecture and answers by text.

Posted by on 03/18 at 07:02 AM

Good news indeed, G.P. I hope to see you there and in Chicago in July.

Posted by Jay Dugger on 03/18 at 01:41 PM
Ok Giulio, I will not miss it! every avatar will be black as it is always the case when i go in SL, but this shouldn’t forbid me to understand the main part of the event ;-)

Posted by remi on 03/18 at 04:09 PM
Hi Giulio,

I am looking forward to this. Is the idea to explore the comparisons and contrasts of transhumanism with religious belief? If so, not sure how relevant the talk I have prepared would be. Having said that it is called ‘climbing technological mount impossible’ so I suppose I could always say it was inspired by the aetheist Richard Dawkins. I reckon I could also rewrite it so that it is in keeping with the theme of the semina, if we are indeed exploring the extent to which transhumanism is a religion:)

Posted by on 03/18 at 04:42 PM