winter-2021-past

[Past event] The West's Journey from Living Souls to Software Selves with Dr. Robert Doede

[Past event] The West's Journey from Living Souls to Software Selves with Dr. Robert Doede

Robert Doede, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity Western University, will deliniate 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 will explain 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.

[Past event] Being Human in a Technological World: Pointers from Patristic Anthropology with Rev. Dr. John Behr

[Past event] Being Human in a Technological World: Pointers from Patristic Anthropology with Rev. Dr. John Behr

John Behr, Regius Chair in Humanity, University of Aberdeen, will query 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.’

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

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

In this lecture, Jens Zimmermann 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.

[Past event] Embodied Cognition and Psychiatry in a Technological World with Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs

[Past event] Embodied Cognition and Psychiatry in a Technological World with Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs

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. Fuchs demonstrates the importance of embodied cognition for psychiatry, a medical discipline increasingly dominated by brain-centered research resulting in therapeutic approaches focussing on drug treatment, deep-brain stimulation and neuroenhancement, technologies aimed at directly changing a per­son’s psyche.

[Past event] Education, Enhancement, and the Pursuit of the Good with Dr. David Lewin

[Past event] Education, Enhancement, and the Pursuit of the Good with Dr. David Lewin

David Lewin examines the intersection between education, technology and religion by considering what kinds of human improvement are ethically justified, and how they are justified. Lewin observes that within discussions of technological human enhancement, ethical questions can’t be restricted to the ends of human improvement, as though the means to those ends are neutral. Rather, there is an ethical demand for both a vision of what it means to be human, and how that vision should be realised. General notions of improvement or enhancement suggest an ethical discontinuity between acceptable and unacceptable means of improvement: conventional forms of human enhancement, specifically through education are considered ethically acceptable, even demanded, while unconventional means of human enhancement, for instance, drugs, gene therapies or neural implants, are often considered ethically problematic or unacceptable.

[Past event] Disability, Technology, and Human Flourishing with Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin

[Past event] Disability, Technology, and Human Flourishing with Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin

Eleanor McLaughlin will assess the role of technology for human flourishing of people with disabilities in two steps. First, she will define 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. Drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea that in the biblical Genesis narrative the limit given to Adam and Eve symbolises God’s grace to humans, and on Deborah Creamer’s ‘limitness’ model in disability theology, McLaughlin will propose an important distinction between our ontological limitedness, and our encounter with specific limits that prevent us from flourishing.

[Past Event] Education by Dissent: A Theological Interrogation of Transhumanist Anthropology with Dr. Ashley John Moyse

[Past Event] Education by Dissent: A Theological Interrogation of Transhumanist Anthropology with Dr. Ashley John Moyse

Ashley Moyse interrogates some of the foundational ideas of transhumanism, which despite their appeal to novelty, futurism, and human liberation, reveal themselves to be anti-human, offering both dissent and a call to pedagogy. Heeding William Stringfellow’s claim that dissent is a humanising action, Moyse will expose the failure of transhumanists to see human being rightly. Employing critical philosophy of technology, he will show how the modern imagination in general has been turned away from the real [world of life] and toward the fictional world of a future perfect of re-engineered and re-animated zeros and one, or sequences of qubits, which in turn leads to the construction of antihuman desires.

[Past Event] Work and Leisure in a Technological World with Dr. Clark Elliston

[Past Event] Work and Leisure in a Technological World with Dr. Clark Elliston

The 21st century has seen a revaluation of work, now understood as a mode of self-realization and fulfillment, and Americans work longer and harder than ever before, despite having more material goods than ever before. Concomitantly, the modern world suffers from a devaluation of authentic leisure, which finds clear expression in two related areas of concern: sports and friendship, both of which have been co-opted by social media technologies promising ever-expanding immediacy of relation.

[Past Event] Living in the Midst of Death: Theological Reflections on Ageing and Technology with Dr. Michael Mawson

[Past Event] Living in the Midst of Death: Theological Reflections on Ageing and Technology with Dr. Michael Mawson

Michael Mawson draws upon the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Austrian born philosopher Jean Améry to reflect upon the phenomenon of human ageing. In particular, he explores how Bonhoeffer and Améry might help us to better understand and attend to the ambiguities and complexities of our experiences of ageing. In the first part, Mawson engages Bonhoeffer’s theological account of the human being as situated between life and death. In his 1933 Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer presents human beings as existing between the two conflicting promises of the opening chapters of Genesis: God’s promise to Adam in the garden (‘if you eat from this tree you will surely die’) and the Serpent’s promise to Eve (‘you will not die at all’). These two promises together encapsulate and disclose the situation of the humanity: ‘After the fall, all human beings are suspended between these two conflicting statements—living towards death, living as those already dead.’

[April 16th] Remaining Focused: Human Flourishing in the Emergent Techno-Culture with Dr. Brent Waters

[April 16th] Remaining Focused: Human Flourishing in the Emergent Techno-Culture with Dr. Brent Waters

Brent Waters argues that human flourishing entails participation in communicative associations (e.g., church, family, and friendships). “Communication” is derived from the Greek koinonia that can be variously translated as communion, community, or communicate. Communicative associations promote the sharing, rather than exchange, of material and immaterial goods that promote the wellbeing of its members. Over time, such sharing requires practicing a series of acts and relationships that are repetitive and mundane. Since human flourishing thereby comprises more ordinary than extraordinary behavior, the challenge is to prevent or resist the various social forces driving the emerging technoculture from becoming distractions that effectively diminish human wellbeing. This in turn requires a critical engagement with technology rather than its rejection.