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The Bright Day of the Soul

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Transhumanism - Engineering the Human Condition

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Abstract

Just to be blunt, what is the point of living forever if you cannot live happily ever after? In other words, do we want our ordinary lives, with all of their messes and hassles, to go on indefinitely? To keep working like dogs, to be bored during a rainy Sunday afternoon, to suffer for love or for the lack of it, to feel lonely, and so on? In short, why would someone repeat the banality of life forever and ever?

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Notes

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    https://www.hedweb.com/

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    P. Brickman; D. Campbell, Hedonic relativism and planning the good society, in: M. H. Apley, ed., Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium, Academic Press, New York 1971, pp. 287–302.

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    P. Brickman; D. Coates; R. Janoff-Bulman, Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?, «Journal of Personality and Social Psychology». 36 (8): 917–927, 1978.

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    E. Diener; R. Lucas; C. Scollon, Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being, «American Psychologist», 61 (4): 305–314, 2006.

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    D. Lykken; A. Tellegen, Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon, «Psychological Science», 7 (3): 186–189, 1996.

  6. 6.

    The concept of “peak experience” was developed by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow; by it, we mean, in short, all of those more or less rare moments in which the subject feels “in tune with the world,” or “fully master of himself,” but, at the same time, “fused with the Whole.” It is something like a quasi-mystical experience with a strong existential connotation, for which the subject experiences a strong “fullness of meaning” in relation to his/her life and his/her place in the world. See A. Maslow, Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, Viking, New York 1964.

  7. 7.

    https://www.abolitionist.com/wireheading.html

  8. 8.

    https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html

  9. 9.

    See, for example, http://www.new-harvest.org/

  10. 10.

    https://www.wireheading.com/roborats/index.html

  11. 11.

    M. Redding, Environmentalism Mandates Transhumanism, http://micahredding.com/blog/environmentalism-mandates-transhumanism

  12. 12.

    https://lifeboat.com/ex/brave.new.world

  13. 13.

    https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/

  14. 14.

    cf. S. Dominus, Could Conjoined Twins Share A Mind?, «The New York Times», May 25, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html

  15. 15.

    T. Nagel, What is it like to be a bat?, in: «The Philosophical Review», 83 (4): 435–450, 1974.

  16. 16.

    https://www.hedweb.com/population-ethics/quantum-ethics.html

  17. 17.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation

  18. 18.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_inflation

  19. 19.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

  20. 20.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzman_brain

  21. 21.

    J. Hughes, Technologies of Self-Perfection,https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/hughes20040922

  22. 22.

    J. Hughes, Enhancing Virtues: Building the Virtues Control Panel, https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/hughes20140728

  23. 23.

    J. Hughes, Using Neurotechnologies to Develop Virtues – A Buddhist Approach to Cognitive Enhancement (Part 1), https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/hughes20121016

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Manzocco, R. (2019). The Bright Day of the Soul. In: Transhumanism - Engineering the Human Condition. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04958-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04958-4_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04956-0

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