Existence, Origin And Weird Technology: Exploring Humanity's Ultimate Questions

Existence, Origin And Weird Technology: Exploring Humanity's Ultimate Questions PDF

Author: Pentti O Haikonen

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2022-10-21

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9811260745

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What are we humans, and how did we become the high technology species? What would be our legacy? What is the ultimate meaning of life? Many of these questions are still waiting for full and complete answers and explanations.For thousands of years humans have pondered the fundamental questions about origin, existence and reality, and also about mind, consciousness, communication and social issues. In this day and age when advancing technology is quickly transforming our societies and our ways of life, these questions are more important than ever, not only in the theoretical sense, but also in practice. We have to understand what has happened, and what is happening.For the first time in the history, technology has given us powerful means to investigate the phenomena behind the ultimate questions. However, technology is only a tool; the thinking human is still required for the understanding of the world.This book explores these curious topics, beginning from the origin of the Universe to the emergence of life; the evolution from cells to brains; the development of cognitive ability from perception and attention to reasoning and thinking; how we interact with other humans by means of love and emotion; to the creation of thinking machines by weird technology.THIS BOOK presents novel views on these questions and provides explanations and possible answers in an easy-to-read style.

The Vital Question

The Vital Question PDF

Author: Nick Lane

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781781250372

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.

Life 3.0

Life 3.0 PDF

Author: Max Tegmark

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1101946601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

New York Times Best Seller How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1970-06

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000-08-15

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0547527543

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

A New Kind of Science

A New Kind of Science PDF

Author: Stephen Wolfram

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 1197

ISBN-13: 9780713991161

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This work presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.

The Grace of Kings

The Grace of Kings PDF

Author: Ken Liu

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-04-07

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 1481424297

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

One of the Time 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time Two men rebel together against tyranny—and then become rivals—in this first sweeping book of an epic fantasy series from Ken Liu, recipient of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Hailed as one of the best books of 2015 by NPR. Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice. Fans of intrigue, intimate plots, and action will find a new series to embrace in the Dandelion Dynasty.

The Artificial Ape

The Artificial Ape PDF

Author: Timothy Taylor

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780230109735

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A breakthrough theory that tools and technology are the real drivers of human evolution Although humans are one of the great apes, along with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are remarkably different from them. Unlike our cousins who subsist on raw food, spend their days and nights outdoors, and wear a thick coat of hair, humans are entirely dependent on artificial things, such as clothing, shelter, and the use of tools, and would die in nature without them. Yet, despite our status as the weakest ape, we are the masters of this planet. Given these inherent deficits, how did humans come out on top? In this fascinating new account of our origins, leading archaeologist Timothy Taylor proposes a new way of thinking about human evolution through our relationship with objects. Drawing on the latest fossil evidence, Taylor argues that at each step of our species' development, humans made choices that caused us to assume greater control of our evolution. Our appropriation of objects allowed us to walk upright, lose our body hair, and grow significantly larger brains. As we push the frontiers of scientific technology, creating prosthetics, intelligent implants, and artificially modified genes, we continue a process that started in the prehistoric past, when we first began to extend our powers through objects. Weaving together lively discussions of major discoveries of human skeletons and artifacts with a reexamination of Darwin's theory of evolution, Taylor takes us on an exciting and challenging journey that begins to answer the fundamental question about our existence: what makes humans unique, and what does that mean for our future?

Homo Deus

Homo Deus PDF

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0062464353

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.

Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own

Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own PDF

Author: David Toomey

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-02-26

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0393089940

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“Weird indeed, and not a little wonderful.”—Nature In the 1980s and 1990s, in places where no one thought it possible, scientists found organisms they called extremophiles: lovers of extremes. There were bacteria in volcanic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, single-celled algae in Antarctic ice floes, and fungi in the cooling pools of nuclear reactors. But might there be life stranger than the most extreme extremophile? Might there be, somewhere, another kind of life entirely? In fact, scientists have hypothesized life that uses ammonia instead of water, life based not in carbon but in silicon, life driven by nuclear chemistry, and life whose very atoms are unlike those in life we know. In recent years some scientists have begun to look for the tamer versions of such life on rock surfaces in the American Southwest, in a “shadow biosphere” that might impinge on the known biosphere, and even deep within human tissue. They have also hypothesized more radical versions that might survive in Martian permafrost, in the cold ethylene lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan, and in the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant planets in other solar systems. And they have imagined it in places off those worlds: the exotic ices in comets, the vast spaces between the stars, and—strangest of all—parallel universes. Distilling complex science in clear and lively prose, David Toomey illuminates the research of the biological avant-garde and describes the workings of weird organisms in riveting detail. His chapters feature an unforgettable cast of brilliant scientists and cover everything from problems with our definitions of life to the possibility of intelligent weird life. With wit and understanding that will delight scientists and lay readers alike, Toomey reveals how our current knowledge of life forms may account for only a tiny fraction of what’s really out there.