emphasize here. It wouldn't seem right to call this book .... the canon of modern futurism. Cosmism would be an .... but
A Cosmist Manifesto Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age
Ben Goertzel
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© Ben Goertzel, 2010 This work is released by Ben Goertzel, in collaboration with Humanity+ Press, under the "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License" See 3.1$'&413-##-%+,-./ for details
Cover art is © Natasha Vita-More, 2010 released in collaboration with Humanity+ Press, under the "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License"
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ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Structure of Intelligence The Evolving Mind Chaotic Logic From Complexity to Creativity Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics Creating Internet Intelligence The Path to Posthumanity The Hidden Pattern Probabilistic Logic Networks Echoes of the Great Farewell Edge of the Bleeding Abyss
and the edited volumes Mind in Time Artificial General Intelligence Advances in Artificial General Intelligence Artificial General Intelligence 2008
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A Cosmist Manifesto
Dedication: to Valentin Turchin
This Manifesto is dedicated to Valentin Turchin (1931 - 2010), a great Soviet-American scientist and futurist visionary who died the year it was completed. I'm very sorry Val never got to read this Manifesto, as I'm sure he would have enjoyed it. He would have agreed with most of it, and had insightful and entertaining arguments to make about the rest. While I never explicitly discussed "Cosmism" with him, I have rarely met anyone more Cosmist in their attitudes, through and through.
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Ben Goertzel As a cybernetician and computer scientist, Val's contributions were numerous, including the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions, and the notion of supercompilation. He was a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence and one of the visionaries at the basis of the Global Brain idea. And his book The Phenomenon of Science, written in the 1960s, is one of the most elegant statements of Cosmist scientific philosophy ever written. I was privileged to know Val in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we both lived in North Jersey, in the context of collaborating with him on the commercialization of his supercompilation technology. Our discussions on supercompilation, immortality, AI, the philosophy of mathematics and other topics were among the most memorable I've had with anyone. The death of great minds like Val is one of the absurd horrors that Cosmist philosophy hopes to abolish via scientific and technological advance.
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A Cosmist Manifesto
The Phenomenon of Science closes with the following words:
͞We have constructed a beautiful and majestic
edifice of science. Its fine-laced linguistic constructions soar high into the sky. But direct your gaze to the space between the pillars, arches, and floors, beyond them, off into the void. Look more carefully, and there in the distance, in the black depth, you will see someone's green eyes staring. It is the Secret, looking at you."
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Ben Goertzel
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A Cosmist Manifesto
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