Questioning Humanity

Questioning Humanity PDF Author: Thomas Osborne
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035309823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This visionary book questions what it means to be human today and in the future. Drawing on the natural, human and life sciences, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose encourage us to reconsider the human condition and the ways in which humans are affected by their animality, technology and the prospect of their annihilation.

Questioning Humanity

Questioning Humanity PDF Author: Thomas Osborne
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035309823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
This visionary book questions what it means to be human today and in the future. Drawing on the natural, human and life sciences, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose encourage us to reconsider the human condition and the ways in which humans are affected by their animality, technology and the prospect of their annihilation.

The Human Swarm

The Human Swarm PDF Author: Mark W. Moffett
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541617290
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
The epic story and ultimate big history of how human society evolved from intimate chimp communities into the sprawling civilizations of a world-dominating species If a chimpanzee ventures into the territory of a different group, it will almost certainly be killed. But a New Yorker can fly to Los Angeles--or Borneo--with very little fear. Psychologists have done little to explain this: for years, they have held that our biology puts a hard upper limit--about 150 people--on the size of our social groups. But human societies are in fact vastly larger. How do we manage--by and large--to get along with each other? In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity--and what it will take to sustain them.

No Cure for Being Human

No Cure for Being Human PDF Author: Kate Bowler
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473597412
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
***A SUNDAY TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR AND INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn't choose? Hailed by Glennon Doyle as 'the Christian Joan Didion', Kate Bowler used to accept the modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities, a series of choices which if made correctly, would lead us to a place just out of our reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. But then at thirty-five she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and now she has to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on hold indefinitely? In No Cure for Being Human, Kate searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of our modern 'best life now' advice industry, which offers us exhausting positivity, trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn and out-perform our humanness. With dry wit and unflinching honesty she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition and her faith and searches for some kind of peace with her limitations in a culture that says that anything is possible. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate's irreverent, hard-won observations in No Cure For Being Human chart a bold path towards learning new ways to live.

101 Questions for Humanity

101 Questions for Humanity PDF Author: J. Edward Neill
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781508733027
Category : Imagination
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
101 Questions for Humanity - The supreme coffee table book for armchair philosophers. Designed to provoke, question, and challenge. Crack the cover open during big parties, small gatherings, or lonely nights on the couch. Once you taste one question, you'll want to devour them all.

Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity

Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity PDF Author: Avner Cohen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847672585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
The excellent quality and depth of the various essays make [the book] an invaluable resource....It is likely to become essential reading in its field.--CHOICE

Questioning Collapse

Questioning Collapse PDF Author: Patricia A. McAnany
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521515726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly "collapsed." Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal "success" and "failure."

What is the Human Being?

What is the Human Being? PDF Author: Patrick R. Frierson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415558441
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant's philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick Frierson assesses Kant's theories and examines his critics.

God, Human, Animal, Machine

God, Human, Animal, Machine PDF Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525562710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.

In Defense of the Human Being

In Defense of the Human Being PDF Author: Thomas Fuchs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898191
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being increasingly appears to be just a product of data and algorithms. That is, we conceive ourselves in the image of our machines, and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, this book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses these new technologies only as a means, instead of letting them rule us. In Defence of the Human Being offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism or transhumanism in various areas of science and society. As alternative it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. Fuchs applied this concept to issues such as artificial intelligence, transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday conduct of life. Cutting across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychiatry, this important new book applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to the current scientific, technological and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the 21st century.

Existence, Origin And Weird Technology: Exploring Humanity's Ultimate Questions

Existence, Origin And Weird Technology: Exploring Humanity's Ultimate Questions PDF Author: Pentti O Haikonen
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811260745
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
What are we humans, and how did we become the high technology species? What would be our legacy? What is the ultimate meaning of life? Many of these questions are still waiting for full and complete answers and explanations.For thousands of years humans have pondered the fundamental questions about origin, existence and reality, and also about mind, consciousness, communication and social issues. In this day and age when advancing technology is quickly transforming our societies and our ways of life, these questions are more important than ever, not only in the theoretical sense, but also in practice. We have to understand what has happened, and what is happening.For the first time in the history, technology has given us powerful means to investigate the phenomena behind the ultimate questions. However, technology is only a tool; the thinking human is still required for the understanding of the world.This book explores these curious topics, beginning from the origin of the Universe to the emergence of life; the evolution from cells to brains; the development of cognitive ability from perception and attention to reasoning and thinking; how we interact with other humans by means of love and emotion; to the creation of thinking machines by weird technology.THIS BOOK presents novel views on these questions and provides explanations and possible answers in an easy-to-read style.