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.