lectures

The West's Journey from Living Souls to Software Selves: A Lecture by Dr. Robert Doede

In this lecture, which was presented as part of the Human Flourishing in a Technological World Winter 2021 series, Robert Doede, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity Western University, delineates some of the key conceptual shifts in the history of the West that have crucially contributed to the conceivability and perhaps even the plausibility of the contemporary transhumanist project of engineering mind uploading. Doede explains how it is that contemporary scientists, philosophers, and intelligent laypersons find it easy, indeed almost natural, to take seriously that they are beings whose living identities are capable of being captured as digital software patterns, thereby de-coupled from their vital bodies, and then uploaded onto a non-biodegradable substrate where they can carry on their lives in perpetuity.

JP Bishop: Death and the Technological Imaginary

JP Bishop: Death and the Technological Imaginary

Delivered recently at Durham to the scholars of the Christian Flourishing project, in this lecture Dr. Bishop explores how technological innovation shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. In the “technological imaginary,” of which modern medicine is constituent, ageing and death seemingly may be infinitely deferred, and it is this innovating deferral that shapes the contemporary social imaginary around ageing and death in modern medicine.