Biohacker’s Podcast is here! We have been working on this podcast in Finnish for over a year and have been delighted to become the number one podcast in Finland regarding health. To celebrate Biohacker Summit and upcoming Biohacker’s Handbook in English, now it is time to start producing the podcast in English.
In the first episode Biohacker Teemu Arina interviews Dr Max More. Max is a strategic philosopher recognized for his thinking on the philosophical and cultural implications of emerging technologies.
More’s contributions include founding the philosophy of transhumanism, developing the Proactionary Principle, and co-founding Extropy Institute, an organization crucial in building the transhumanist movement since 1990. At the start of 2011, he became President and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s leading cryonics organization.
[powerpress]Watch on video:
“It was almost as if I was born transhumanist. From the earliest ages I can think of I was always fascinated by the idea of overcoming limits.”
The other things Dr Max More developed interest in were living longer (well before he stopped growing he was taking supplements and thinking about life extension) and overcoming biological limits, because fragility of the human body was not satisfactory for him. Between the ages of 10-13 he studied different non-scientific approaches such as transcendental meditation, different types of religion, psychic phenomena and more. Once he developed critical thinking skills he started looking into the direction of science and technology.
“But all those years there was the same basic drive … the drive to overcome human limits, to become something more than human, not to accept our lot as given by evolution.”
Check out some of the amazing points Dr Max More is making in this podcast.
“Only in the last few years or decades have we started to think seriously about the possibilities of altering the internal environment. Of course we still do it in a very crude ways with pharmaceuticals and implants but we can expect a revolution where we hack our bodies and re-engineer ourselves. A lot of people still find it disturbing and out of natural but clearly it’s not unnatural — it’s what we’ve always done, it’s just that we’ve always done it to the outside world and we haven’t had the tools to do it internally, but now we are beginning to develop that technology. There’s nothing remotely unnatural about biohacking or re-engineering the human being — it’s just a matter of doing it carefully and cautiously.”
“We’ve come to an age when it’s time to take over [mother nature].”
Lessons from Dr Max More:
- Don’t worry too much about what other people think — pursue your own line of thinking.
- Read widely; don’t just listen to one source.
- Don’t worry about opinion at all. Look at evidence.
- Explore different areas of life. Try different things, don’t get stuck in a rut.
- Take good care of yourself.
Tags: Steven Pinker, precautionary principle, proactionary principle, Alcor, Jim Halperin, The Truth Machine, Robin Hanson, idea futures
Dr Max More will be speaking at Biohacker Summit on 24 September 2015.
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