In science fiction novels, movies, comic books, TV shows, advertising, and graphic novels, what lessons are we taught about emerging technologies? How do the subtle—and not so subtle—messages about the future that inundate us every day affect our perceptions about science, technology, and ethics? In what ways do images and ideas that gain public traction end up influencing policy decisions?

Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar
Friday, December 4, 2009
EON Reality, Irvine, CA, USA

This is your chance to learn firsthand from artists, writers, filmmakers, and culture critics whose work plays an important part in shaping our modern society.

Come and explore with us the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television. Take notes, ask questions, watch video clips, and have your say in the discussion.

Speakers include:

• David Brin
• Jamais Cascio
• Brian Cross
• RJ Eskow
• James Hughes
• Richard Kadrey
• Michael LaTorra
• Alex Lightman
• PJ Manney
• Michael Massuci
• Edward Miller
• Jess Nevins
• Annalee Newitz
• Jeannie Novak
• Matthew Patrick
• Kristi Scott
• Mike Treder
• Natasha Vita-More

Be sure to register BEFORE November 15th and save 33%—just $99, which includes continental breakfast and lunch. After November 15 or at the door it’s $150. Get all the information at this page and mark the date on your calendar now.

Click here to get quick lessons from real cheerleaders on 18 important science concepts, then test your knowledge by taking a 26-question multiple choice quiz created by George Mason University physics professor James Trefil as part of Science Cheerleader’s Brain Makeover project.

Okay, bad analogy.

But once we know the outcome, there’s no difficulty in each of us turning our lives into Homeric odysseys of trial and triumph in which Ithaca was always inevitable, and convincing ourselves we’ve merely taken dictation.

My own establishing shot has me, at the age of 13, staring into my father’s open casket. His death, I always told myself and others, was the event that hit me between the eyes with the Big Question. Not because I was “mad at God” for taking him away. I loved my father, but it would have been perverse indeed to blame God for killing a 300-pound man with a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. I was floored by an all-consuming intellectual curiosity, one I had never felt before with such heat. “My Dad” was clearly not in that casket. So where was he? As the lid was slowly lowered, I swore through my tears to learn The Truth.

Or not.

The casket scene isn’t the only one I recall from that time, you see – and at least one other calls the casket epiphany into serious question. I spent the day before the funeral avoiding hugs and well-meaning reassurances from the murmuring relatives who filled our home. At one point I ducked into my bedroom, a ploy that couldn’t succeed. Someone was guaranteed to notice the missing son and head off on a seek-and-console mission.

Sure enough, as I was reading on my bed, a voice from the doorway startled me. “Oh Dale,” said my Aunt Dar, my father’s sister. She looked at the book in my lap and gasped. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to see you reading that, dear. There is no better place to turn in times of trouble.”

It was the Bible.

What my pious aunt could not have known is that I hadn’t turned to it for comfort. I was already reading it skeptically. I don’t know when I had begun, but I know by what happened next that it wasn’t set in motion by my dad’s death four days earlier. Dar walked to my bedside and glanced at the page I was reading.

“Oh – oh no, dear, you don’t want the Book of Kings. Not now. Not that.” She was right, of course. Unless you are consoled by rivers of blood, Kings is not much use. God sends bears to slaughter children for taunting Elisha over his hair loss. Women eat each other’s children. Ahab’s 70 children are beheaded. That sort of thing.

She flipped forward to Psalms (!), patted my shoulder, and left the room, click-click-click, knitting her own happy narrative.

See the problem for the casket epiphany? Nobody starts reading in Kings. Like everyone else, I started in Genesis. I was well into my first full read-through of the Bible, something that took me three years of stops and starts to complete. Even if Dad’s death had been the impetus for my questioning, there’s no way I would already have found enough time alone to get so far.

Poking further back, I find some more plausible catalysts for my eventual disbelief. I adored Greek and Roman myths when I was a kid, which led me to wonder what was so very different about the more current versions. I read the story of Danae and Perseus (in which a god impregnates a woman, who gives birth to a great hero) around the same time I first heard of the divine insemination of Mary and birth of Christ. I read twice about the infant boy who is abandoned in the wilderness to spare him from death, only to be found by a servant of the king who brings him to the palace to be raised as the child of the king and queen—first Oedipus, then Moses.

I had also developed an attitude toward the world that is the essence of inquiry: I had fallen in love with it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and other popularizers of science, I’d come to the conclusion that the universe was wonderful, period, and that I was incredibly fortunate to get a chance to be a conscious thing in the midst of it. The wonder of it came with no strings attached, no “ifs.” I was unconditionally smitten with reality and began at some point working on the Big Question: Does God exist?

If I had any predisposition, it was the usual human one: a desire that it all be true. How could I have stood at that casket and wished for anything but the existence of God, since that might continue the existence of my father? But my love of reality naturally came with a serious distaste for self-deception. The truth itself is more beautiful than an illusion, even when that truth is uncomfortable. I would be thrilled if there was a God; I would be thrilled if there wasn’t. I just wanted to know.

In short, I took the question seriously.

Three obstacles presented themselves immediately. The first was the claim that the question simply can’t be asked. “It’s not that kind of question,” I remember a Sunday school teacher telling our class, without explaining what that could possibly mean. For the sake of the inquiry, I had to assume that was untrue and see what would happen if I asked it.

The second obstacle was the wrath of God. Doubt is a sin, probing questions an offense to the divine. After some thought, I decided that God was unlikely to be so insecure or frankly egotistical as to punish me eternally just because I was honestly wrong about him.

The third hurdle was the notion that even if it were a question like any other, there was simply no way to answer it. You can neither prove nor disprove God.

I was in high school before I surmounted that one. I realized I didn’t have to answer the question “Does God exist?” Must we believe all assertions that can’t be disproven? Russell’s Teapot says no. So a perfectly askable and appropriate question was “Why do other people believe in God, and are those reasons convincing?”

By the time I started college, I had 15 years of churchgoing and at least 10 years of skeptical thought behind me.

Our family had attended church all my life, and I continued for 20 years after my father’s death, but with a new intensity. I was wide awake, listening, thinking, reading, and questioning in the churches of nine denominations—Catholic, United Church of Christ, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Mormon, Presbyterian, and Lutheran. I asked believers why they believed, why they weren’t Hindus or Druids, what they thought was literal and what was figurative in their scriptures. And I read their scriptures—not only the Old and New Testaments, but large parts of the Qur’an, the Vedas, the Gnostic texts, the Apocrypha, and commentaries on them all.

Was I “searching”? Was I wrestling, Jacob-like, with God? Was I “on a faith journey”? Not really, no. As compelling as all those narratives are, my goal was simpler. I had already decided that I didn’t believe in the Christian scheme, and did so based largely on armchair reasoning.

For starters, I spent my early years immersed in Greek and Roman mythology prior to getting the Christian memo. When I subsequently met up with the Jesus story, it was instantly recognizable as the same thing in different (and less interesting) garb.

Second, God’s plan for salvation is hideously unfair. My birth into a Christian place and time clearly gave me a leg-up on Paradise compared to the billions born into other faiths. Would God operate such an important plan so unfairly and inefficiently?

Third, the demand that we believe in and praise God above all else seemed an unlikely and unseemly trait for a deity.

Finally, I knew that our growing knowledge of the universe and ourselves more often than not contradicted biblical claims. The advance of knowledge should prove scripture more and more accurate if it were valid; instead, there’s a steady retreat into the remaining gaps in what we know.

It all seemed like a quickly unraveling fabric of delusion.

But I continued the inquiry anyway, dogged by the nagging suspicion that I had to have missed something. I had come to my conclusion, but I was convinced that I just had to be wrong. Not because of the evidence, but because I couldn’t conjure up the chutzpah to believe I’d figured out something that everybody else had missed. With the apparent exception of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who scared my teenage self half to death, I thought myself the only nonbeliever on the face of the Earth. How could I think otherwise? The greatest minds of every generation had apparently accepted Christianity, so I was sure I’d missed something. I doubted the Christian story, but I’d yet to discover any system of thought to replace it, nor any real company for my doubts.

In college my investigation of reality was formalized. I majored in anthropology to fully understand evolution. I learned that the theory had withstood three generations of scientific onslaught before being accepted as an awe-inspiring and humbling reality that establishes a deep kinship of all life on earth – a perspective far more beautiful than special creation in my eyes. I realized, very gradually, that a full understanding of all the implications of evolution by natural selection leaves the most essential element of Christianity—human specialness among the creatures of the Earth — utterly dismantled.

But it was still just Madalyn and me, as far as I knew. Even in college—at Berkeley, for chrissakes—I hadn’t learned of any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest heroes believed? I’d heard it said that the Founding Fathers of the United States were Christians—when in fact very few were. I had heard that Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. He made that clear in his autobiography—though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives. I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.

I was in my 30s before I finally discovered, in the works of A. N. Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another: Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H. L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predisposition on my part to receive them.

A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Doubt is rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that suppressed body of work, I swam in it. In the span of a few weeks, I went from total isolation to the company of giants.

Still, I thought there must be something to it. It might be incorrect, but I hadn’t yet seen what so many had found convincing. So I went to the mountaintop, to two friends and colleagues of mine, Catholic theologians, and engaged in lengthy correspondences—only to find that they had nothing whatsoever but smoke and mirrors. Nothing.

I was astonished. More than that, I was pissed off. I felt what Dorothy felt when the man behind the curtain was revealed to be pot-bellied Francis Wupperman. That’s it? Are you kidding me?

A process that had begun with a deep desire for the truth ended at last with the solid conviction that religion is an utterly human-created construct, reflective of nothing but our hopes and fears set in the amber of our ignorance, propped up with the flimsiest of twigs and durable nonetheless. So I wasn’t to be a theologian after all. In fact, if there is such a thing as an atheologian, I am it.

Most stunning of all to me, standing there in the ruins of the temple, was the totality of the failure of Christian belief to stand up to examination. It wasn’t a question of a scale tipped slightly in the direction of disbelief, 51–49. There was nothing whatsoever remaining to support belief in the doctrines of Christianity, no close decisions, no stumpers, no fuzzy outcomes. I was dumbstruck to realize how thin a veneer covers the whole enterprise and how easily and completely that veneer is broken by the simple determination to consider the question a question.

I wanted an arduous process, but there wasn’t one to be had. I got the answer right very early on—then took 30 years checking my work.

How do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system so self-evidently false and self-contradictory? We do so by believing what we hear from those we love, from those who wish us nothing but the best: that religious faith is inherently and unquestionably good, and that all good people are people of faith.

I do have empathy for those who wish to believe. I could have used some comfortable certainties when my father died. I tremble to imagine myself on a spinning ball racing 40,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space. And though Huxley and Hume and Epicurus have helped me, I do fear death, especially now that I’ve reached my father’s last age. But I know that all the comforts and assurances I need, all we’ve ever really had, are those we get from those around us who have inherited the same strange, scary, wonderful conscious life that each of us has.

We are cosmically insignificant, a speck in space and a blink in time, inconceivably unimportant—except to each other, to whom we should therefore be unspeakably precious.

This article is an excerpt from 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), edited by Udo Schuklenk and IEET Fellow Russell Blackford. Posted by permission of the author and the publishers.

This one day ad-hoc conference will focus on upcoming trends in sustainable emerging technology, recycling, green ideas, collaboration, activism, and most importantly, it’s a great outlet for those who wish to share and implement their ideas for a healthier and more sustainable environment.

SustainaBIL organizers Brian Shaler, Todd Huffman, Mark Weinberg, Bill Erickson, and myself, Simone Syed, are excited to have the opportunity to bring together friends and participants from a variety of backgrounds to share thoughts on improving building, transportation, communication and quality of life from economic and technical standpoints. I am especially looking forward to the collaboration and brainstorming that is bound to happen as those who identify as tech/geek/bioprogressive and those who relate more to the eco-conscious/green/sustainable sphere mingle and learn from each other in a fostering environment. As movers and shakers with an eye to the future and the possibility it provides, it is the responsibility of our bioprogressive ilk to contribute and create for a better tomorrow, so….

Come and join us in a celebration of diversity, convergence, and the human spirit either in person or online! Although BIL is free, we would really appreciate that participants reserve a spot online. We also really appreciate donations, sponsorship, and any extra help you can provide. BIL will be live streamed from SkySong, with speaker videos posted online for your pleasure as we can. As we obtain equipment to use, we will post the site where you can find us.

Would you like to speak? You can contact us at: speakers@sustainabil.com

We also have a Facebook group, a Facebook event page, and a Twitter id, where you will find speaker lists and topics, as well as news on the conference.

What is BIL?

I am an organizer for the BIL UnConference Series—self organizing, emergent conferences that help spread the word about world changing, inspiring, community boosting, people helping, and generally geeky ideas. At BIL, we don’t have attendees, we have participants. Everyone who shows up is expected to contribute something, whether it be in the form of a lecture, set-up, take-down, bringing food, helping with technological aspects, or whatever else looks like needs doing! Participants call themselves BILders, and in their every day lives, seem to be especially concerned about open-source and DIY everything, transparency, technology, the arts, science, the environment, and making the world a generally more awesome place to live.

BIL began as a way to schmooze with TED speakers in Monterey, California, in 2007. Fellow BILders Cody Marx Bailey, Todd Huffman, Bill Erickson, Tyler Emerson, and yours truly, Simone Syed, realized that as much as we loved the TED lectures, we simply could not afford it. Hanging out in bars and waiting for TED’sters to arrive felt a little ‘groupie-like’, though, and it seemed like people who were willing to make the trek to begin with had some really interesting ideas on their minds. We called ourselves BIL to play off of TED and to foster excellent adventures to be had, and basically found a venue across the street from TED.



The format seemed to work: we were able to get over 300 participants and 30 speakers, as well as blurbs on WIRED and NPR. The next year, when TED moved to Long Beach, California, of course BIL followed. We converged on California State University Long Beach with over 500 amazing participants and over 100 lectures.

BIL has grown and evolved into a beautiful series of lectures; with each new BIL we obtain new speakers and participants, locations, themes, support, press, and an ever growing list of ways to make the experience more enjoyable and fluid. With three BILs already behind us, we are looking forward to sharing the six that are already on the docket for the upcoming year!

Research projects like Microsoft’s SenseCam and, most importantly, the huge increases in the affordability, portability, and storage capacity of electronic devices, are driving us closer to a form of ‘perfectly recalled life’ in which everything we see, hear, and read will be saved and available for us at any time. After cellphones have made the memorization of phone numbers an almost obsolete minor art, equally ubiquitous but enormously more powerful gadgets might do the same for most forms of autobiographical memory.

But although most proposed uses for this capability describe people attempting to remember what they saw or did at an specific moment in the past, this isn’t the most important use we have for our memory. Just like most people search the Internet for summaries and opinions instead of raw data, our memory is less an activity log than a essay we keep rewriting. “What I saw last Saturday at 3 pm” is much less important to us than “times I had fun in the park with my children,” or “the last time I felt this angry, and why.” Countless hours of raw unedited video can only take us as far as Borges’ character Funes the Memorious, whose perfect memory let him recall everything, but whose poor synthetic abilities prevented him from turning all that information into knowledge.

The Internet, the current state of the art when it comes to usefully handling massive amounts of information, offers two models to deal with it: search engines like Google, and collaborative editing and filtering communities like Wikipedia. But search engine technology is still very far from being able to understand our experiences in a way that would let it complement our memory of our own lives. It would be useful for, for example, letting us recall word for word our last conversation with a friend, but not to give us the gist of it. On the other hand, a ‘Wikipedia of your Life’ raises an untold number of privacy issues and, perhaps even worse, it doesn’t work at that scale: Wikipedia works because even relatively obscure topics have enough people interested on them to write and maintain their articles, but the huge amount of work necessary to ‘edit’ even a single individual’s electronic memories means that only those with particularly interesting or significant lives would get enough help from the online crowds.

Yet the obvious gains of eased access to and insight about your own past suggest that some people might well be interested in paying for the service. After all, psychologists often assist in this way, by helping us analyze and make sense of the patterns in our past and present. What new ways of looking at ourselves might be gained with the help of a psychologist/biographer/video editor able to work with us to extract new meanings from our experiences? A collection of beautiful sights could make you fall in love with a city you thought you didn’t like, or a compilation of daily complications might question your decision to remain in a job that stresses you too much.

Such an activity would, like all biographies (but with unprecedented sources of information), mix data analysis, psychology, and art, and thus raise the question of how much would the biographer influence your own reconstructed memory of events. Management consultants have written about the unexpected power in the hands of those in charge of writing the minutes of a meeting; the way even a recent event is summarized can deeply influence its future impact. If you give someone — a person or a program — access to the mass of your electronic memories and ask a question, how much of that someone will be put in the answer? (In what subtle ways are the technical characteristics of Google, the community customs of Wikipedia, and the details of how blogs work influencing the substantive content of the answers we find in the Internet?)

And to go back to the Wikipedia model, once your memories are electronic, why restrict yourself to recall only the things you’ve seen? ‘Desktop extensions’ for search engines let you look for information in both your own computer and the wider Internet with equal ease, and from the point of view of the user, it often makes no difference at all where the information resides, and whether it’s something that you knew before or not. As we increasingly remember things not only with our brains but also with our machines, the specific boundaries of individual memory, and hence of personal identity, might come to be redefined.

When someone substantially loses the ability to recall short-term memories, we call that condition dementia: they are demented. This usually occurs as a result of aging and can be connected with significant changes in personality and irrational behaviors.

But consider the opposite trouble: what if you were never able to forget anything? What if you held in your conscious memory every conversation, every event, and every feeling you’ve ever experienced? Without a filtering process to screen out all those memories that seem insignificant or perhaps overly troubling, it’s difficult to imagine how you could function as a sane person.

Perhaps that is the reason why humans need to sleep and dream. Scientists theorize that this is how and when the filtering occurs; a prioritization and ordering of the thousands of potentially memorable events we encounter each day, with most either erased or deeply buried and only a few highlights stored in a place of easy access. Indeed, a persistent lack of sleep can be associated with mental instability and even psychosis.

This relationship between memory and insanity is interesting to ponder as we think about the possibility of creating what IEET Trustee Martine Rothblatt has termed “mindclones.” By instantiating enough of our memories, personality traits, and thought patterns onto a very powerful computer substrate, it should be possible to create a digital copy of our mental selves, to clone our minds.

Setting aside for now the usual objections to the feasibility and/or desirability of this idea, let’s consider the challenge of incorporating enough — not too much or too little — of the right kind of memory. Finding a satisfactory balance between short-term and long-term memories is one aspect of the challenge. Our brains do this for us now without any conscious recognition of the process on our part. We find it much easier to recall in detail what we did yesterday than what we did on the same day a month ago or a year ago. This takes place automatically, as it were, and the experience of our memories gradually fading seems perfectly natural to us.

But if our mindclones are housed within computer circuitry as opposed to biological neural pathways — in hardware instead of wetware — not only will our thought processes presumably occur at much faster rates, but our capacity to store and recall memories also will be vastly expanded.

On the surface this would seem to be beneficial; more and better computer memory is always good, right? However, if your mind suddenly finds itself besieged by thousands of memories and is not equipped to sort or prioritize them effectively, what would be the result? Insanity?

In the process of developing the hardware and software that could enable a close facsimile of a unique human personality to be implemented inside a computer (or a robot brain), researchers will need to pay close attention to the question of memory. Because having too many conscious memories might be just as disabling as having too few.

Has epistemology ever been so finger-snapping hip, and ROFLMAO funny?

My humanist sentiments also open my eyes to the shortcomings of evolution (evident by the prevalence of chronic disease in late life) and the prevalence of “ageism”.  In this post I will address these latter concerns.

If humanists reflected critically and consistently upon their basic moral convictions, I believe they would become strong advocates of aging research and the aspiration to decelerate human aging.  However, most humanists are not (at least yet) strong advocates of this scientific research; indeed many probably oppose this research or at the least do not think it an important priority.  In this post I will explain why this is a mistake given the foundational moral premises of humanism. 

What separates me from those humanists who ignore or eschew aging research is that I am a 21st century humanist, while they are 20th century humanists.  A 21st century humanist endorses the aspirations of 20th century humanists (e.g. racial equality, the elimination of gender, the elimination of world poverty, etc.), but we go one step further by incorporating the challenges of an aging world and the rapid advances in biomedical science into our purview of the demands of justice (see this excellent article which played a major role in bringing me around to thinking more rationally about these issues).

A 21st century humanist recognizes the fact that no person, regardless of race, gender, nationality or *age*, deserves to suffer morbidity and mortality.  And thus we ought to aspire to reduce these risks when it is feasible to do so, whether it be by providing access to clear drinking water, bed nets to protect against malaria or developing new drugs that re-programme our metabolism and help protect against chronic diseases. 

For the first time in human history, most disease and death this century will occur in late life.  Aging will cause hundreds of millions of cancer deaths, strokes, bone fractures, infections, etc.  Furthermore, these chronic diseases are extremely costly.  The Centre for Disease control estimates that chronic diseases account for 70% of all deaths in the United States and the medical care for people with chronic diseases account for more than 75% of the nation’s $2 trillion medical care costs. (source) 

20th century humanists seek to mitigate socially created harm and oppression, whereas 21st century humanism extends the concern for the equal worth of all beyond the harms created by social institutions.  21st century humanism also seeks to mitigate the adverse consequences of natural selection- in particular, the evolutionary neglect that leaves humans vulnerable to late-life morbidity and mortality.

The average age of life expectancy, at birth, in the world today is 67. This means that most people born today will live long enough to suffer one of the chronic diseases of aging, like cancer or heart disease.  This is a fate suffered by millions every year now, especially in the developing world (contrary to what most people in the developed world think). 

21st humanists ought to be among the strongest and loudest advocates of biogerontology.  For the goal of “healthy aging” is one that follows from the core humanist sentiment that the worth of all human life, regardless of chronological age, is equal.  Once humanists open their eyes to the reality of today’s aging world, appreciate the incredible advances that are being made in the biomedical sciences, and discard their ageism, perhaps they will embrace a public philosophy well suited for meeting the full range of challenges we face in the “here and now” (and in the years to come).