Posthumanism and Transhumanism

Dr. Veronica Bindi 

Dr. Veronica Bindi is Associate Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Bindi's main research focuses on the study of dark matter, cosmic rays, solar modulation, and solar energetic particles in space. She has been a part of the team at CERN that led to the construction, integration, and testing of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS-02, detector that has been installed on the International Space Station in 2011 and that is still collecting data to this date. Dr. Bindi collaborates with NASA to plan for future space manned missions. Hailing from Italy, Dr. Bindi brings her fresh and exciting take on physics to students around the State of Hawai‘i and the world.

Dr. Kim Binsted

Kim Binsted received her BSc in Physics from McGill University (1991), and her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1996). She then went to Japan, where she conducted research at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories on human-computer interfaces, and started a company, I-Chara KK, which developed social agents for cellphones. In 2002, she joined the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii, where she is a Full Professor conducting research on astrobiology and long-duration human space exploration. She also completed a MS in Planetary Geology (2015).

Kim was a NASA Summer Faculty Fellow at Ames Research Center (2003/2004). She was Chief Scientist on the FMARS 2007 Long Duration Mission, a four-month Mars exploration analogue in the Canadian Arctic. In 2009/10, she spent her sabbatical as a visiting scientist at the Canadian Space Agency.

Kim is a co-investigator at the UH-NASA Astrobiology Institute, and is the principal investigator on the NASA-funded HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, hi-seas.org) project, which conducts long-duration space exploration simulations. She spent six months (2016/2017) in Russia on a Fulbright Award, and is a State Department Speaker Program participant.

Dr. Karen Jolly

Karen Louise Jolly is professor of medieval European history at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Her research interests extend from popular culture at the intersection of magic, religion, and science, to manuscript production and bilingual literacy in early medieval Britain. She is currently working on a historical fiction project imagining the life of a tenth-century Northumbrian scribe named Aldred, while digitizing his bilingual Latin and Old English handiwork. At UHM, she teaches pre-modern world cultures, medieval European history, and History of Christianity to 1500 in a world context.  Her teaching philosophy focuses on developing historical empathy while analyzing primary source materials in their cultural context, encouraging students to engage with voices from the past who offer us different ways of thinking about the human condition.

Transcript of Introduction by Dr Britton Elliott Brooks:

Aloha kākou and good evening.

  My name is Dr. Britton Brooks, and I am a Lecturer in Medieval British Literature here at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. I am also the founder and director of Converging Epistemologies.

  Our theme tonight is Posthumanism and Transhumanism, or, more loosely, the future of humanity. But what does it mean to be human? Is it our bipedal structure, our bones, cells, and genes? Is it our creativity, will, empathy, our intellect? Is it our languages, stories, songs, art, relationships? Is it our senses, mingled and granted meaning by our brains? Is it our souls, the self stretching onward beyond the borders of the known? What is it that makes us, us?

  ‘It takes a cosmos to make a human’, SETI Researcher Jill Tarter. ‘We are made of star-stuff’, Carl Sagan. Each of these minds point to the heart of our dialogue tonight, as they recognize the interconnected interdependence of the human and the cosmic, and the way that defines our humanity. Our constituent parts were birthed in the hearts of stars, jettisoned in explosions of light, energy, and cast out across the universe; only to be drawn together, woven through gravity, chemistry, biology, evolution, language, culture, history, choice, to create each of you sitting here this evening.

  We are star-stuff, but we are also earth-stuff, bound to this rocky sphere with its mountains and valleys, its oceans and glaciers, its forests and deserts. The sight of deep green, of chlorophyll capturing photon, pierces our psychology. The familiar sensorium of our homes contributes to our sense of self. For me: salt on the air, ocean on my skin, my son’s hearty laughter, my wife’s smile beneath our Pacific stars. We are embodied, and this embodiment has implications. Place matters, it makes us and defines us. Yet we are explorers, and even now imagine a future where humans are born, live, and die on Mars. What would that mean? How would our biology, psychology, daily life change? When we live beneath carbon fiber plates, breath recycled air, our soundscape metal on metal instead of birdsong, our sensorium locked within the artificial, only our eyes drinking in the natural, various hues of red and forms of stone the foundation of our visual world.

We explore to know, to answer our questions of origin, purpose, and end. Where did life begin? Earth? Another planet? What will it mean for us, woven of cosmic dust, to find life elsewhere? Beneath moons of ice in our own solar system? And bolder still, our search to replicate life, to mimic consciousness, thought, reason with interlaced silicon. What will it mean when algorithmic neural connections learn, improve, and can drive me home? Will an artificial intelligence become indistinguishable from a human intelligence? Will it be greater? Will it be moral? Will it need us?

  Our ingenuity also turns on ourselves, and we seek to better our human forms. Yet how far could or should we change? When would we cease to be human? With technologies like crisper we can edit our genes, eradicate disease, and are seeking even now to treat the universal limiter of all human good and evil: death. If we become deathless, would we still be human? If we augment our minds, expand our range of senses, how might we define ourselves.

  These are the questions our esteemed panel will discuss tonight. Let us come together, in this place, and dream ourselves forward. But let us also remain rooted, connected, creatures of story, history, and science. And do look up when you leave, travel back with your gaze to the beginnings of stars, nebula, planets, and marvel that the pulse of your heartbeat is the result of the unfolding symphony of the cosmos.