Author: David Rothman
Publisher: Tate Publishing
ISBN: 1617390003
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
I am not my body. I am my intentions, my inspirations, my heart, and my wisdom. There is a connection between my body and my presence that I have discovered encoded in my DNA. It is the telephone and wires and special features to activate when communicating with me. 'Me' meaning my presence, that entity that can know it exists, be conscious, and make choices. Imagine a mirror through which your soul could escape from the bonds of this world to a place where Virtual Souls can live, interact, and grow without any fear. Virtual Souls, by David Rothman, takes the reader inside this world where regrets can be resolved, lessons learned, and illnesses cured by the power programmed into each individual's DNA. Come on a journey with Noah Robinson, genetic engineer and computer scientist, into his creation: the Virtual Soul Machine. Follow his progress as he struggles to discover the nature of the human soul and to give a gift to humanity to cure itself of its destructive nature.
Author: Jenn Lyons
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1250175569
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 707
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Book Description
The Memory of Souls is the third epic fantasy in Jenn Lyons’ Chorus of Dragons series and one of Library Journal's best SF&F books of the year! THE LONGER HE LIVES THE MORE DANGEROUS HE BECOMES Now that Relos Var’s plans have been revealed and demons are free to rampage across the empire, the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies—and the end of the world—is closer than ever. To buy time for humanity, Kihrin needs to convince the king of the Manol vané to perform an ancient ritual which will strip the entire race of their immortality, but it’s a ritual which certain vané will do anything to prevent. Including assassinating the messengers. Worse, Kihrin must come to terms with the horrifying possibility that his connection to the king of demons, Vol Karoth, is growing steadily in strength. How can he hope to save anyone when he might turn out to be the greatest threat of them all? A Chorus of Dragons 1: The Ruin of Kings 2: The Name of All Things 3: The Memory of Souls At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Marguerite Porete
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809134274
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
We know very little about Marguerite Porete, only that she was a beguine from Hainaut who was burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1310. She might have been a solitary itinerant beguine who expounded her teachings to interested listeners.
Author: Jonardon Ganeri
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019886468X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
This book explores philosophical themes to do with self and subjectivity from the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, best known for the uncategorizable collection of fragmentary writings, in various personae, published as The Book of Disquiet in 1982, forty-seven years after the author's death.
Author: Philip R. Stone
Publisher: Channel View Publications
ISBN: 1845419006
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
This book offers critical scenarios of dark tourism futures and examines how our significant dead will be remembered in future visitor economies. It aims to inspire critical thinking by probing the past, disrupting the present and provoking the future. The volume outlines key features of difficult heritage and future cultural trauma and highlights the role of technology, immersive visitor experiences and the thanatological condition of future dark tourism. The book provides a collection of informed observations of how future societies might recall their memorable dead, and how the noteworthy dead might be (re)created and retained through dark tourism. The book forecasts a dark tourism future that is not only perilous but also full of possibilities. It is a helpful resource for students and researchers in tourism, heritage, futurology, sociology, human geography and cultural studies.
Author: Corey J. White
Publisher: Tor.com
ISBN: 1250774373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
Can't wait for the cyberpunk heist of the century? Check out this free sneak peek of Corey J. White's Repo Virtual. Dive into the first eight chapters and meet the crew that's about to change the world. The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities — augmented and virtual spaces anchored in the weight of the real. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive. Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He's been hired for a special job: stealing an unknown object from a reclusive tech billionaire. But when he finds out he's stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Karen Sobel Lojeski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119608597
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This revised second edition presents 15 years of data on Virtual Distance metrics and their predictive impact on organizational success factors shedding new light on how to correct for communication challenges that often show up as a foggy set of digital disconnects where the vitality of the virtual workforce often gets lost in transmission. This still-evolving Digital Age conundrum continues to present new complications. The rise of remote work which rests on an increasing reliance on electronic communication and the overall growth of virtual interactions has led to the escalation of a phenomenon called Virtual Distance. Virtual Distance, which influences our behavior through three components Physical Distance, Operational Distance, and Affinity Distance affects not only how we relate to others thousands of miles away but even to co-workers sitting right next to each other! Perhaps even more problematic, Virtual Distance causes measureable malfunctions in teamwork, innovation, leader effectiveness and overall performance. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Power of Virtual Distance offers specific, proven and predictable solutions that can reverse these trends and turn Virtual Distance into a unification strategy to capture untapped competitive advantage. Surprised? The Power of Virtual Distance, 2nd Edition is a must-read for leadership who want to understand the true and quantifiable costs of the virtual workplace. For the first time ever, readers can take the guesswork out of managing the virtual workforce by applying a mathematical approach derived from the extensive Virtual Distance data set: The Virtual Distance Ratio. The Virtual Distance Ratio can precisely pinpoint the particular impacts of Virtual Distance on the organization’s critical success factors. Beyond business metrics, Virtual Distance solutions also detail ways to restore meaningfulness and well-being into people’s experience of work, enhancing life lived in the Digital Age. The Power of Virtual Distance reveals an updated set of data, including the first award-winning analysis, collected from an extended range of executives to individual contributors, that represent situations and solutions in more than 36 industries in 55 countries across the globe. Readers will get a “first look” at the data and its revelations on how to be less isolated and more integrated. Helping managers globally, this book: Offers new, real-world case studies and a chance for readers to participate in thought experiments to help with personal performance, group synergy and by extension, relationship dynamics of all kinds Demonstrates (with statistically significant trend analyses) that Virtual Distance is growing at exponential rates in every corner of communities worldwide Offers expert advice on how to manage the “unintended human consequences” of today’s digital technologies Companies that successfully harness the power of Virtual Distance demonstrate better performance. The second edition of The Power of Virtual Distance is a valuable, one-of-a-kind resource for everyone – from the C-suite to human resource professionals; from divisional leaders to project managers. Everyone in the organization can benefit by discovering how to improve financials, innovation, trust, employee engagement, satisfaction, organizational citizenship and other key performance indicators. And perhaps best of all, by following the prescriptions on how to reduce Virtual Distance, the entire workforce will have the tools they need to bring about a revival of meaning, purpose and an enlivened sense of “humanhood” back into everyday work and everyday life.
Author: Klaus Corcilius
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110311887
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Does the soul have parts? What kind of parts? And how do all the parts make together a whole? Many ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers discussed these questions, thus providing a mereological analysis of the soul. Their starting point was a simple observation: we tend to describe the soul of human beings by referring to different types of activities (perceiving, imagining, thinking, etc.). Each type of activity seems to be produced by a special part of the soul. But how can a simple, undivided soul have parts? Classical thinkers gave radically different answers to this question. While some claimed that there are indeed parts, thus assigning an internal complexity to the soul, others emphasized that there can only be a plurality of functions that should not be conflated with a plurality of parts. The eleven chapters reconstruct and critically examine these answers. They make clear that the metaphysical structure of the soul was a crucial issue for ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers.
Author: Dr. Indrajit Patra
Publisher: Pen2Print
ISBN: 8195111963
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The book intends to present a critique of some select, 21st Century, hard science fiction novels in order to explicate the various ways in which the elements of posthumanism, transhumanism, techno-singularity intersect and interact with other such ideas as monstrosity, animality, machinicity, post-anthropocentrism, and Anthropocene. The study divides its analysis into seven different chapters and attempts to present an elaborate study on various aspects of posthumanism, transhumanism, and singularity. The book despite being a collection of miscellaneous essays actually intends to show how a technologically mediated transhuman/posthuman culture will normally be defined by a total dissolution of binaries such as digital and real, animal and human, and machine and man. The book also wants to describe through its analysis of some select hard science fiction novels, that man-machine merger and creation of hyper-immersive virtual reality can function as two of the most effective agents for catalyzing a radically transformative, posthuman, post-scarcity, and techno-utopian culture. The analysis presented in the book is not totally oriented to the discussion of far-future implications of accelerated technological progress which is imperative for arriving at a transhuman or posthuman stage; rather, the book is equally concerned with the implications of rapid technological advancements in our present times, and so the study also posits that before ascending to the heights of posthuman status mankind has to cope with the good and bad aspects of the Anthropocene which is the next stage in our collective evolution and journey towards the trans-/posthuman state. The first chapter of this study attempts to bring to focus the phenomenon of a technologically-mediated dissolution of the binaries between man/animal, human/nonhuman, and subject/object which will be extremely important in the analysis of the emergence of a posthuman culture later in the study. Technological advancements can be seen here as either conducive towards creating a harmonious relationship between man and animal or through systematic denigration of the agency of the animal it can pave the way for the emergence of monstrosity. In Chapter 2 of the book, we shall delve deep into the analysis of horror as illustrated in the novels and video games of the Dead Space series. Here, through a multi-theoretical perspective, we shall find how horrors and monstrosity can manifest themselves in both written as well as digital, virtual media. In Chapter 3, we shall delve into the discussion of the power of simulation in the construction of an immersive and hyperreal post- /transhuman culture where the distinction between real and virtual and material and immaterial vanishes altogether. In Chapter 4 we dedicate the entire chapter to the study of Kim Stanley Robinson’s systems novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) to attempt a critique of the elements of good and bad Anthropocene. Though not directly and intimately related to the study of posthumanism and transhumanism, yet a discussion of the elements of the Anthropocene will be of immense contemporary relevance to us. The next Chapter, i.e., Chapter 5 will attempt to present an explication of the role of machines in the realization of posthuman culture. Chapter 6 is primarily concerned with an analysis of Stephen Baxter’s novels to see how posthuman culture is constructed around the agency of the autopoietic machines. The final chapter attempts to present a brief analysis of three of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, namely Matter, Surface Detail, and Hydrogen Sonata to elaborate on the employment of posthuman/transhuman tropes in these works.
Author: Bruce F Katz
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN: 1449633676
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
We are on the cusp of a broad revolution, one with startling implications for perception, cognition, emotion, and indeed, personal identity. Still in its relative infancy, this rapidly progressing field is poised to move from perceptual aids such as cochlear implants to devices that will enhance and speed up thought to the ultimate goal of researchers, that of downloading the mind from its bound state in the body to a platform-independent existence. This controversial book describes the science that will make these transformations possible. It begins by describing how the brain works, including an overview of the architecture of the brain. It then examines the current state-of-art neural technologies, including devices that read from the brain, and devices that can write information into the brain. The book also describes how insights from the nascent field of consciousness studies show how the full transfer of the “soul” could be realized. Finally, it considers what it would be like to be a mind unbound, and the possibilities beyond those found in ordinary corporeal life.
