Transcendent Engineering - About

So, I have finally started writing my book, Transcendent Engineering, which I hope to complete by the end of 2008. In the book I will try to show how transhumanist ideas and values can be used to offer an alternative to religion.

The decision to write this book is the result of years of discussions with many people who share similar thoughts, and many people who do not share them, in private conversations and on Internet mailing lists. Since I do not wish wasting time and being forced to accept editorial changes, I have decided to publish the book with Lulu. But I think criticism and editorial feedback are very important for an author, especially for one who is not writing in his mother language, so I will ask many trusted friends to act as severe and unforgiving reviewers.

I will also make the book available as a free download. Actually the book _is_ available as a free download on the TranscEng website, but alpha and beta versions are not necessarily complete, coherent or understandable. I am not advertising this website, but I am not hiding either, so please feel free to leave comments. On December 1, 2007, I am just copying here some older articles and writing some connectivity gluetext, so don’t expect anything coherent.

The transhumanist worldview can give a sense of meaning of life, a vision of our place in the universe, peace and happiness. This has been the historic function of the world’s great religions that, on the other hand, are now finally beginning to show some fatigue and soon will be completely unable to persuade people more and more culturally sophisticated and used to the scientific worldview.

Religions’ success is due to the fact that they offer an answer to the nightmare of death. Yes, your loved ones are dead, and sooner or later you will also die, but you will meet again in heaven. This is a *very* powerful meme as the penetration of religion demonstrates. With the coming of a secular worldview based on science, it seems impossible to continue taking religion seriously.

But is it really so? Perhaps not. I am very interested in the current experimental activities to create “transhumanist religions”, based on science, but still able to offer hope in “another life” even for those who are already dead. Some information on these experiments, links and my own thoughts can be found in my article Engineering Transcendence, on which the book is based.

While I consider myself as a a hard-core scientific rationalist, my scientific worldview and my belief in our potential for boundless expansion enabled by technology make me appreciate the plausibility of future scenarios where science, and science alone, can resurrect the dead. Of course such scenarios cannot, and should not, be taken as certainties but only as hopes based on, I think, reasonable speculations.

Posted by G.P. on 11/26 at 05:15 PM
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