Do you perceive a growing sense of mistrust from the public with respect to science?
This is the second parter of a Brain Parade that we ran last month. I’ve already given an answer focusing on the “culture wars” in the United States and Canada and growing acceptance of Global Warming back then.
Looking back at my […]

Is the Enlightenment ideal on the rocks or is it merely a bit shaken?

MT: The three answers that we received to this question are wildly divergent from each other. Partly this is because in common usage the term enlightenment tends to denote not just the idea that reason can be used to build authoritative systems of logic, aesthetics and ethics, (a concept rooted, as Robert Freeman points out below, in the idea of the perfectibility of man) but also the wider concept that the application of reason through the scientific method is the best way to understand the physical world.

IS the talk of WWIII Paranoid or plausible? I’m not going to answer this in depth because our commentators mirror much of my own thinking on this one. Personaly I think the whole thing is a paranoid fantasy myself but it’s one that it’s one that is perfectly capable of becoming self fullfiling.

Today we interview The Guardian’s Technology editor Charles Arthur on the Free Our Data campaign, aimed at persuading the British government to stop charging for non personal data collected at the taxpayers expense. To read the original article that started the campaign go here. (link)

I have to confess to having a crush on utopian visions. I suspect that’s a side effect of a happy childhood and reading too much science fiction growing up. On the flipside however whenever people get the idea in their heads that the world would be perfect if only we did X, Y and Z then they tend to be a bit ruthless in their pursuit of it.

As usual you’ll have to wade through my two cents first: The first step that I see happening are networked grassroot movements gaining an increasing say in the internal politics of political parties. This isn’t going to happen quickly.

Today we get a head start on the week with an interview with science fiction author Mark Budz. I talk to him about science ficiton, writing, military robots and his latest novel Idolon.

I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball but I’m very optimistic about the effect of reputation systems will have in opening up new ways of doing business that sidestep Big Capital. Which isn’t to say that I think that market capitalism is somehow about to vanish but that we’re probably going to see more and more enterprises running on a different economic model.

Today we interview Keith Brooke the British science fiction author behind Genetopia (link), Green Party candidate and the man behind curtain at Infinityplus.co.uk. I asked him a few questions about his work and his politics.

We’re seeing renewed attacks on evolution, certain branches of scientitic research and conspiracy theories involving climatologists and Global Warming. At the same time supernatural thinking (new age, crystals, ID, deified interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis) are thriving. Should we be concerned by the level of magical thinking in our society? And if so what, if anything can be done about it?

o me the answer is to the first part of the question is a hell ya. To a limited extent we’re already there. The CIA extraodinary rendition scandal was broken by a network of bloggers with digicams. Tracking the movements of a CIA black op qualifies as government level survaileance in my books.

I’ve got a lot of good commentary on this Brain Parade from people who are much more knowledgeable and articulate on the subject than I am so instead of giving you my two pence let’s just get straight to the commentators:

We’re keeping it political today with a mini interview with Jamais Cascio who is the co-founder of Worldchanging (link), one of my favourite blogs. I got some commentary from Jamais for some of upcoming Brain Parades but I also took the oppurtunity to ask him some non-Brain Parade questions as well the answers to which I relate to you here:

I’m not going to answer this Brain Parade myself. I’ve already in fact written on this topic here (link) and I’ve got plenty of good commentary that covers most of the bases I’d want to elaborate on further anyway.

‘ve interviewed a number of transhumanists here over the past few weeks. Today I bring you an interview with Paul Hughes (no related to Dr. J Hughes) the editor of Future Hi. Paul is a pscyhedelic transhumanist, part of a movement that combines elements of spirituality, pschedelic culture and transhumanist thought.

We’ve interviewed a number of transhumanists over the past month. This week we interview technoprogressive Dale Carrico, a lecturer with the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California. I’ve read some of his writing on the IEET (link) and am impressed by his point of view.

Nick Bostrom is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association. In 2004, along with James Hughes, Bostrom co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the newly created Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Natasha recently, a transhumanist theorist and futurist with a background in the arts. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about transhumanism and futurism for us.

Should contemporary SF *always* be politically oriented? Heaven forbid. SF is many things, and attempting to force it to become an instrument of political change — as opposed to philosophical transformation or existential shock — is futile. The genre wants to be free, and so do its authors.