what is extropy? the opposite of entropy? the idea that life will expand throughout the universe in an orderly way?
this page is listed as A-004 in the Omnias Network anomaly database. it discusses the concept of a house and links a specific instance of a house with strange physics to another structure, the tunnel network of Alcatraz Island. i immediately link this to the alcatraz zone on the map found elsewhere on the omnias network website
i look forward to reading more of "the island in the bay"
Perpetual Progress: Extropy means seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.
Self-Transformation: Extropy means affirming continual ethical, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through critical and creative thinking, perpetual learning, personal responsibility, proactivity, and experimentation. Using technology ā in the widest sense to seek physiological and neurological augmentation along with emotional and psychological refinement.
Practical Optimism: Extropy means fueling action with positive expectations ā individuals and organizations being tirelessly proactive. Adopting a rational, action-based optimism or āproactionā, in place of both blind faith and stagnant pessimism.
Intelligent Technology: Extropy means designing and managing technologies not as ends in themselves but as effective means for improving life. Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend ānaturalā but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.
Open Society ā Information and Democracy: Extropy means supporting social orders that foster freedom of communication, freedom of action, experimentation, innovation, questioning, and learning. Opposing authoritarian social control and unnecessary hierarchy and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power and responsibility. Preferring bargaining over battling, exchange over extortion, and communication over compulsion. Openness to improvement rather than a static utopia. Extropia (āever-receding stretch goals for societyā) over utopia (āno placeā).
Self-Direction: Extropy means valuing independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-respect, and a parallel respect for others.
Rational Thinking: Extropy means favoring reason over blind faith and questioning over dogma. It means understanding, experimenting, learning, challenging, and innovating rather than clinging to beliefs.
This a character progression of one of my OCs, an antagonist in my upcoming story.
Found within debris in an earthquake's aftermath, Emerald was adopted and raised by a family of (mostly) robots, such an upbringing was the seed that bore her passion for tinkering and innovating the scientific method.
By 16 she had already created her first fully functioning device, a multi-tool to aid her in building her future creations more efficiently, shortly followed by her first robot.
By 24 she has gotten her Master's degree in Bio-Robotic Engineering, and was working towards her thesis, aimed towards revolutionizing cybernetics for the benefit of mankind, but....
By 25, her research on cybernetics had proven to be a success, as shown by applying some to herself, she uses the newly found designs to attempt and improve humanity, but.... The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If humanity were to disappear from the Earth, what would be lost? On the human scale, the answer is everything; but on a planetary scale, itās tempting to
Reviewed
The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, by Adam Kirsch, Columbia Global Reports, 100 pp., $16.00 (paper)
I very much think the NYRB picked the wrong person for this review.Ā The best reviews in the journal have writers with subject matter expertise who can both contextualize a given book within a larger discourse and who also know enough to spot mistakes or arguments that donāt cash out.
For example, OāConnell writes,
Just as they tend to be secular humanists, transhumanists tend to be libertarians and, if not always outright cheerleaders for capitalism, then certainly on the whole uncritical of it.
Also,
"Despite his justified reputation as a critic of range and depth, Kirschās treatment of transhumanism is really more of a journalistic survey than an essayistic engagement. He pays little or no attention to the fact that the movement is a metastasized outgrowth of capitalist individualism, concerned as it is with the perfection of the self and the extension of its reign into perpetuity. Itās an odd omission, because thereās a case to be made that capitalismāembedded though it is, like transhumanism, in liberal humanist principlesāhas itself become a profoundly antihuman phenomenon."
I donāt know whether itās true statistically that transhumanism is libertarian dominant.Ā However, it would have helped for him to note that the World Transhumanist Association, subsequently and still Humanity+, was at one point run by a democratic socialist if Iām not mistaken, James Hughes.Ā Acrimony between libertarians and lefties has marked transhumanism possibly from its start.
Noteworthy is an informal poll of members of the transhumanist subreddit, which found an overwhelming preponderance of lefties of one stripe or another.Ā
And that leads me to an observation that forms the backdrop of the discussion about transhumanism.Ā It seems to me that transhumanism (which it should be pointed out is not a univocal belief system) will be more likely to be seen as anti-human and extreme depending on how youāve conceptualized the totality of the determining contingencies of our lives.Ā Ā
In other words, if you never appreciated the following as a whole and recoiled from it - disease, illness, disability, death, ignorance, the limitations of short term memory/memory altogether, the limitations of the body, received prejudice and instinct operating everywhere, the inertia of institutions and society, the forced circumstances of history and previous technological choices - the sum of our limitations, itās possible youāve never felt a dialectical and moral pull in the opposite direction in all possible ways.Ā If you donāt have the sense that weāre much closer to hapless object and historical victim than we are possessed of radical agency and capacities for self-transcendence, then transhumanism will somewhat understandably be seen as anti-human.Ā But, what if weāve never been able to be fully human?
Anyway, I have more to say but I feel like reading a book.
I've never gotten a tattoo because I'm reluctant to impose fixed ideas on myself.Ā Plus, I seem to always have something else to do.
āThis is what Iām about,ā is simultaneously a possibly liberating individuation but also a necessary obsolescence if youāre continually learning, exploring, pushing, growing.Ā Today's self isn't necessarily the one I want tomorrow.Ā I donāt see the point of keeping an epidermal record of life stages.
I think of our current predicament: It can take considerable and sustained effort to transcend received roles, identities, views of self, a universe of limitations and ways of thinking and being.Ā I donāt want to mark my body with something that will, to put it negatively, almost inevitably become a symbol of well intentioned error.
An idea about the self might represent a new plateau of understanding and meaning, and hence an escape from something smaller and more limiting.Ā But in time it might very well yield to another more powerful idea.
Thus Iām left wondering what symbol might represent this continual evolution.Ā Ā
Below is the extropian symbol.Ā Extropy (increasing order) is, if Iām not mistaken, a transhumanist coinage, and posited as the opposite of the idea of increasing disorder in a system, entropy.Ā
Continual expansion pastĀ āallā boundaries, expanding horizons, conscious evolution, increasing integration of knowledge, continuous learning, seeing the world through deeper principles and greater complexity - these are some of the meanings Iād attribute to this symbol.
Some #teasers for #Entropy&Extropy #E&E #Entropy and #Extropy #comic #book #illustration phase nearing completion. I'm so thrilled to be part of this project and working with some amazing #artists @everythingmcu08 @reapervision999 @greydonsquare @davemilestattoos Here are some shots of the #process, and legitimately my first shot at some photo #reference which I should have been doing and will be doing more here on out- And my #dog, who wanted a #bath during tooth brushing time. https://www.instagram.com/p/B8v5spPBgbv/?igshid=v0q3h1v3y73s
The text below is mine, from comments on the TNET article āFuturist Arts & Cultureā. My words are in response to a clear, calmly offered comment advocating consistent and total optimism in Transhumanist messages.
I must admit, that is a view which I have long taken issue with. I believe that while a dash of that stance is helpful (critical to the success of our efforts as a civilization, inā¦
