Lifeboat Foundation

How will artificial intelligence, molecular manufacturing, biological engineering and distributed additive manufacturing change the economics of the production of goods and services?

Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have discovered a new aging clock that can accurately determine both chronological and biological age in a wide variety of species.

Aging and the nucleolus

There are two kinds of age: chronological age, which is strictly the number of years that something has lived, and biological age, which is influenced by diet, exercise, environment, and similar factors. Biological age is the superior measure of true age and is an accurate predictor of all-cause mortality.

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Love: The Glue That Holds the Universe Together. “Love contrasts with fear, light with dark, black implies white, self implies other, suffering implies ecstasy, death implies life. We can devise and apprehend something only in terms of what it is not. This is the cosmic binary code: Ying/Yang, True/False, Infinite/Finite, Masculine/Feminine, On/Off, Yes/No… There are really only two opposing forces at play: love as universal integrating force and fear as universal disintegrating force… Like in Conway’s Game of Life information flows along the path of the least resistance influenced by the bigger motivator – either love factor of fear factor (or, rather, their sophisticated gradients like pleasure and pain) – Go or No go. Love and its contrasting opposite fear is what makes us feel alive… Love is recognized self-similarity in the other, a fractal algorithm of the least resistance. And love, as the finest intelligence, is obviously an extreme form of collaboration… collectively ascending to higher love, “becoming one planet of love.” Love is the glue that holds the Universe together…” –Excerpt from ‘The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution’ by Alex Vikoulov, available now on Amazon.

#SyntellectHypothesis #AlexVikoulov #Love

P.S. Extra For Digitalists: “In this quantum [computational] multiverse the essence of digital IS quantum entanglement. The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite -\-\ a cocktail of love response and fear response.”

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Circa 2008

“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.” Herman Melville.

Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain’s legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of cetacean jujitsu, drowned poor Ahab by towing him into the abyss by the harpoon rope tangled around Ahab’s remaining leg. “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!” Gulp. We humans pride ourselves on our big brains. We never seem to tire of bragging about how our supreme intelligence empowers us to lord over all other animals on the planet. Yet the biological facts don’t quite square with Homo sapiens’ arrogance. The fact is, people do not have the largest brains on the planet, either in absolute size or in proportion to body size. Whales, not people, have the biggest brains of any animal on earth.

Continue reading “Are Whales Smarter Than We Are?” »

Lifetime adversity and increased neural processing during a traumatic event combine to increase the frequency of intrusive traumatic memories and the distress they cause, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. The increased neural processing was found in brain regions important for emotion and memory. The involuntary recollection of traumatic events is a core symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the findings could help explain why some people are susceptible to the effects of traumatic experiences and others are resilient.

“Understanding why some people develop intrusive thoughts of a stressful or traumatic event and others do not is an important step towards preventing and treating posttraumatic stress disorder,” said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Due to the nature of real-life trauma, which happens randomly and encompasses many different kinds of adversity, it is impossible to examine how neural processing during natural events contributes to PTSD. Researchers at the University of Salzburg, Austria, have now completed the first study of two well-known risk factors of PTSD, using fMRI to measure brain function during experimental trauma. After watching disturbing films of severe interpersonal violence, the study participants reported how often they experienced intrusive memories of the films, and how distressing the memories were. “This allowed us to study how the brain deals with intensely emotional events,” said lead author Julina Rattel, MSc, a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of senior author Frank Wilhelm, Ph.D.

Psychiatry as a field, meanwhile, quivers with theoretical uncertainty. It has not become a sub-speciality of neurology, as one might have expected if mental illness mapped directly to neural behaviour. And common genetic variations with large effects on mental disorders are elusive. The various incarnations of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have enabled diagnostic consistency and the objectification of mental illnesses. But the DSM has resulted in overlapping diagnoses, and contrived symptom-cluster checklists. At times, it impinges on the territory of healthy mental function. Allen Frances, chair of the task force that wrote the manual’s fourth edition in 1994, revolted against out-of-control mental diagnosis in his 2013 book DSM: Saving Normal.

Adrian Woolfson weighs up a study on the role of evolution in conditions such as depression and anxiety.

This study provides some of the first information regarding how robustly ancient life was metabolizing. Microbial sulfate metabolism is recorded in over 3 billion years of sulfur isotope ratios that are in line with this study’s predictions, which suggest life was in fact thriving in the ancient oceans. This work opens up a new field of research, which ELSI Associate Professor Shawn McGlynn calls “evolutionary and isotopic enzymology.” Using this type of data, scientists can now proceed to other elements, such as carbon and nitrogen, and more completely link the geochemical record with cellular states and ecology via an understanding of enzyme evolution and Earth history.

Project fear? Should we pay attention to American Jesuits?

But the fundamental ambition of transhumanism is more problematic. Its architects champion a use of technology to accelerate the evolution of humanity so radically that at the end of the process humanity as such would disappear. A superior posthuman being would emerge. According to Wikipedia, “Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available knowledge to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.” From its inception, the abolition of human death and aging has been one of the goals of transhumanism as it engineers a new being freed from the biological constraints of the current human condition.

From its inception, the abolition of human death and aging has been one of the goals of transhumanism.

Continue reading “Who’s afraid of transhumanism? (We all should be)” »