Natasha Vita-More.
Hello. Thank you, I am happy to be here. I am delighted to thank the Harvard College of Future Studies and Kevin and putting this together with Humanity+, and Alex, our executive director, and David, our chair, and other board members who are here and not here. It has been an exciting conference. I would like to take this time to respond to the last two talks. I would love to have an engaging conversation with all of that. What I am here to talk about is human enhancement, I have been involved in human enhancement in the 1980s.
I didn't build a future body design until the 1990s, where I created something called primo-posthuman, Vita in my name means more life. The italian aspect in it has some certain sensibility in the sense of ergonomics. There are all sort of aesthetic ways. It would be nice to have bodies adapted to our needs. I designed primo post-human as the idea of bringing together nano, bio, info and cognitive sciences and technologies. We don't have that yet. I've taken a pause in that work, and I agree the speaker who said that we need to think more about our current situation. I think that many of the speakers have approached that, but maybe not with the sensibility that I'll use. It's not new, it's just a matter of staying alive and sustaining ourselves.
From primo post human, and dealing with the far out emerging and converging sciences and technologics, the NIMBIC quartet, but there was a type of news sphere, where we will become a connective intelligence, through a metaverse, through robotics, and through all sorts of combiations that we want but don't have. This dream has been around for some time. It's been a dream of many different societies and civilizations, to engage in life, in an after life, or in some mythological structure. Looking at a cell in my body, and building this primo posthuman prototype, and going to where I am now, the issue of our brain and plasticity. Not the plasticity that was talked about earlier, which was a wise and smart idea, or cryonics plasticity which is also good. But the plasticity of our knowledgebase, how we're acquiring information and how we're assessing it, and making sure we're applying critical thinking skills and socratic method.
This was my brain by the way. I had an MRI. I have an ill life all my life, I have been supportive of developing new types of bodies. My particular brain suffers from vertigo, where I suffer from dizzy spells, hopefully I will outgrow that as I mature more. As John Smart earlier mentioned, the vulnerability of human life. Every second, about 2 people, or about 1.8 people die. It doesn't matter to me if it's from a disease or accident. Perhaps those people do have an after life, and that's to be expected to be sure. In my estimation, and according to the philosophy that I helped create, those lives are precious to us, and precious to every living being on this planet. It's life, and it's a breath of our universe.
The predicament that we face now is that life is important to transhumanism, and we don't know what we will become, maybe one big Vernor Vinge singularity, or a Kurzweilian singularity, or a Max More singularity of distributed spikes that go up and down over time. It doesn't matter if it comes suddenly, it will come and we don't know what it will be. My primo posthuman design is just one, and there has been many. For human enhancement, the control factor is to stay alive. For those who are apposed to transhumanism, whether philosophically or not, the control factor is to keep death alive - and to do that - we have to keep disease alive. We have to stop it. We have to stop disease from taking over, not only the body, but the mind, and the mimetic framework from which we gather our knowledge base.
This type of framework, from which we develop our knowledge base, I develop it from the cybernetic system perspective. Margaret Mead and so on. Second order cybernetics that puts the observer in the system that is being observed. A hard science puts the system over there and observe that. We as citizen scientists must include ourselves, we are the masters of our fate, and captains of our ship. We need to look at what it is that we desire, and what it is feasible. I take this from Dr. Gregory Stock. Gregory Stock is an engineer in biology, and a cultural catalyst, and has a number of different qualifications and is at UCLA, running conferences and whatnot, the issue that he brings is this concept is what we desire, and what is feasible. With primo posthuman, my desire was to control what is feasible. I desire to look at what we can do in the future. As a pragmatic person, I need to figure out what it is feasible right now. Like controlling our own minds, our physiology.
We need to look at the society, our society and belief systems, to accept and integrate these belief systems. We need to take a look at ethics and biopolitics, look at organizations at IEET and James Hughes, and the bioartists and their phenomenal work with cell structure and whatnot. To take a look at the marketing and capabilities at what our consumer structure is. How we market transhumanism is important, how we will do it. It's been around since 1989 as a movement, and modern transhumanism is looking at where we're going and how we're going to get there. Looking at it from a second order cybernetics, as a type of cognitive cognition quotient, instead of an emotional intelligence quotient. What's the cognitive understanding of this future. The plasticity of this brain is essential, and the adaptability of our bodies, taking control of how we talk to doctors, what our medical knowledge is, how we take what the doctor says and do our own research. Thinking about our perceptions and accept different belief systems, which si important since we're a world. The ideas and methods are crucial for transhumanity staying alive.
When we look ato ur own bodies, and look at what we desire, we can look at the social ecology of our system, we can look at what's available now for augmenting our body for enhancement. Here's some designs that I think is very interesting, in an area that has yet to be tapped for transhumanism. Industrial design makes the types of chairs, cars, cell phones, computers that we use. It's the design methodology that looks at how it works to enhance our human capabilities, the car for mobility, phone for communication et cetera. It's a social process to achieve where we want to go with enhancement.
How often do we say we are going to look at nutrition, or at that apple pie, we take a few moments to think how it's going to keep us alive? Within body, if we could know what's going on in our bodies each moment, I've had cancer twice, but I'm the one who discovered the cancer, not my doctors. I may not be that smart about my body but at least I know enough to take responsibility for my body. I think that a transhuman enhancement project to look at what kind of contract with ourselves we can make for staying alive. Here's another image.. a desktop of what kind of attributes will be the variables for staying alive and so on. What to know, need to know, to make our cognition quotient.
Now, I'm not going to go into the next three slides because they are on the websites, on the flikr images and the slide presentations. I want you to look into how cybernetics fits into here. How these different particles fit together. Cybernetics is a part of link into transhumanism, and future studies being one type as a way to study future enhancements and different types of practices. Within that transhumanism is the issue of philosophy, behavior and consciousness. Health, physicality, fitness, emotional, physical, mental and health fitness. We don't know where we're going, of course, so the next is unknown. The thematic areas are domain oriented. Each domain does have the variables. The agents are the actors within them, for relating back to your own knowledgebase, for your own staying alive.
In closing, it takes fun minds, excited minds, collaborative minds to come up for ideas for what the future will be. Whether it's a future prototype thing, or a take on any of the ideas on the future, it's juyst recycling the knowledge with new technologies and new scientists. What's important for us today is that our brains and bodies and behaviors speak louder than our worlds, and how we treat each other is essential to our future. Thank you.