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Author: Jon Bialecki Publisher: Fordham University Press ISBN: 0823299384 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.
Author: Jon Bialecki Publisher: Fordham University Press ISBN: 0823299384 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.
Author: Jon Bialecki Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823299376 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.
Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0525562710 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 305
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.
Author: Adrienne Mayor Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691202265 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.
Author: Anne Foerst Publisher: Dutton Books ISBN: Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
A thought-provoking analysis of the theological implications of artificial intelligence addresses important--and controversial--questions raised by robotics about the definition of humanity, what it means to have a soul, and what robots can teach us about our relationship with God.
Author: Jon Bialecki Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520967410 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.
Author: Tom DeLonge Publisher: To The Stars ISBN: 1943272166 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 541
Book Description
For those who know... that something is going on... The witnesses are legion, scattered across the world and dotted through history, people who looked up and saw something impossible lighting up the night sky. What those objects were, where they came from, and who—or what—might be inside them is the subject of fierce debate and equally fierce mockery, so that most who glimpsed them came to wish they hadn’t. Most, but not everyone. Among those who know what they’ve seen, and—like the toll of a bell that can’t be unrung—are forever changed by it, are a pilot, an heiress, a journalist, and a prisoner of war. From the waning days of the 20th century’s final great war to the fraught fields of Afghanistan to the otherworldly secrets hidden amid Nevada’s dusty neverlands—the truth that is out there will propel each of them into a labyrinth of otherworldly technology and the competing aims of those who might seek to prevent—or harness—these beings of unfathomable power. Because, as it turns out, we are not the only ones who can invent and build...and destroy. Featuring actual events and other truths drawn from sources within the military and intelligence community, Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley offer a tale at once terrifying, fantastical, and perhaps all too real. Though it is, of course, a work of... fiction?
Author: Tom DeLonge Publisher: To The Stars ISBN: 194327228X Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
An exceptional examination from award-winning author and producer Tom DeLonge with renowned research author Peter Levenda, Sekret Machines: GODS will take you on an eye-opening journey that transcends speculation and is based on unprecedented access to officials at the highest levels of government, military and industrial agencies who have provided insights and assistance never before experienced by any researchers in this controversial field. GODS takes us beyond speculation to certain knowledge of what exactly lies at the heart of the most important Phenomenon ever to confront human understanding. This first volume introduces the reader to some of the critical issues that are foundational to an intelligent and enlightened grasp of the revelations that will follow in the next two volumes. There is another Force in the universe of our Reality, another context for comprehending what has been going on for millennia and especially in the last seventy years. Sekret Machines is the result of input from scientists, engineers, intelligence officers, and military officials -- a group we call the Advisors -- and transcends the speculation of journalists, historians and others whose conclusions are often either misinformed or only tease around the edges of the Sekret Machines. The reader will not discover wild theories or unfounded claims, but instead will confront a solid -- if often unsettling -- reality, one that demands the collaboration of all of us in every field of human endeavor if we are to understand it and manage its effects. If nothing else, readers will come to the conclusion that the Phenomenon is not what they think it is. It is, in fact, much more serious and potentially much more threatening than they can imagine. Sekret Machines: GODS is volume one of the companion investigation series to the bestselling thriller Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows by DeLonge and NYTimes bestselling author AJ Hartley. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Read together, the thriller series and the investigation series show what cannot be revealed with one approach alone.
Author: Minsoo Kang Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674049357 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 387
Book Description
Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. --
Author: Jon Bialecki
Author: Jon Bialecki
Author: Jon Bialecki
Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
Author: Adrienne Mayor
Author: Anne Foerst
Author: Jon Bialecki
Author: Thomas F. O'Dea
Author: Tom DeLonge
Author: Tom DeLonge
Author: Minsoo Kang