Peter Lehman He seemed to be defined by an absence, which then materialized as a dark, quiet persona who always kept his eyes covered in public, inviting people to project their thoughts, fears and melancholy onto him.
The Ghost of Roy Orbison Goes on Tour
How Computer Simulations May Help us Understand Religious Behavior
Wesley Wildman The human approach to processing terrifying events involves an exquisitely complex system of deeply intuitive human responses to emotional, social and environmental threats and uncertainties.
To Let Live and Make Die: Human Ethics and Moral Machines
Sylvester Johnson In this new, present age of intelligent machines, religious studies experts especially will be faced with a paradigm shift. They have approached problems of ethics and morality by assuming that moral communities are exclusively constituted by communities of biological humans.
From Sophia to Silicon: The Materiality of Information
Sylvester Johnson In my last post, I discussed Bina48, an intelligent machine engineered as part of the LifeNaut project. LifeNaut engineers have uploaded into Bina48 the memories, speech samples, and other cognitive patterns of an actual human, Bina Aspen Rothblatt.
From Bodily Resurrection to Spiritual Machines: Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Part 2
Sylvester Johnson In a letter to new converts in Corinth, the provincial capital of Achaia, the messianic Jewish preacher Paul of Tarsus affirmed for his followers that they were assured a respectable existence in the afterlife. As an astute Platonist, Paul appreciated the ‘common sense’ that dictated material entities—the human body, in this case—could not participate in eternal economies of the spiritual plane.