Embodied Cognition and Psychiatry in a Technological World with Dr. Thomas Fuchs

Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs argues from a psychiatrist's perspective against the new gnosticism of the transhumanist movement, which assumes a fundamental mind-body dualism, insisting rather that processes of life and consciousness are insep­arably linked through the living body as a whole. In the unity of the per­son, both aspects are intertwined: the body is alive and therefore also mindful; the mind is alive and therefore also truly embodied.

The Winter 2021 event series is sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Disability, Technology, and Human Flourishing with Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin

Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin assesses the role of technology for human flourishing of people with disabilities in two steps. First, she defines human flourishing as depending in large part on our relationships with others, suggesting that, despite Christian theology's historical failure to understand this relational core of human flourishing, evidenced by the church's supporting the us/them divide between people with and without disabilities, there are nevertheless resources within theology that can help overcome this divide, and thus strengthen relationships between all people.

The Winter 2021 event series is sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Who Am I? Personhood, Technology, and Human Flourishing: A Lecture by Dr. Jens Zimmermann

In this lecture, Jens Zimmermann, Regent College’s J.I. Packer Chair of Theology, will address modern understandings of human consciousness, including Trans- and Post- humanist visions for the future of human society, and argues that contemporary notions of the human person presume a reductive model of human identity rooted in an already defunct scientific epistemology. As a counterpoint to this construction, Zimmermann offers a robust model of human consciousness that is grounded in the philosophically and theologically informed theory of personalism—a personalism that, in the Christian tradition, is validated in and through the Incarnation.

This lecture was presented as part of the series Human Flourishing in a Technological Age and sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Being Human in a Technological World: Pointers from Patristic Anthropology: A Lecture by Rev. Dr. John Behr

In this lecture, which was presented as part of the Human Flourishing in a Technological World Winter 2021 series, John Behr, Regius Chair in Humanity, University of Aberdeen, queries the erasure of death from the horizon of sight in the modern Western world: what challenges does this erasure raise for our understanding of ourselves as embodied human beings? As Hervé Juvin notes in the last lines of his study, The Coming of the Body (2010), which examines the various ways in which our experience of embodiment has changed over the last century: ‘Alone, the body remembers that it is finite; alone it roots us in the limits, our last frontier (for how long?); and even if—especially if—it forgets, the body alone still prevents us from being God to ourselves and others.’

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.