TransRelSL

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Speakers:

Giulio Prisco, Executive Director, World Transhumanist Association (yours truly). I summarized my article/book precis "Engineering Transcendence".

Extropia Dasilva, Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything. Her talk Climbing Technological Mount Improbable is available online.

James Hughes, Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. James presented his paper "The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future".

Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association. Lincoln presented the fascinating blend of Mormonism and Transhumanism developed by the MTA.

All speakers with the exception of Extropia used audio streaming for presentations and answers to questions from the audience. James Hughes and Lincoln Cannon used the Shoutcast plugin for Winamp to stream to our Shoutcast server, and I used Nicecast on a Mac to do the same. The technical challenge was the coordination of sound streams coming from different remote locations (basically, the previous speaker has to stop broadcasting, the next speaker must start broadcasting, nobody must start broadcasting at any moment different from the scheduled moment, and an occasional restart of the Shoutcast server may be required). Audio worked very well for James and Lincoln (their voices were crystal clear). It worked very well also for me but with some interruptions (I had to restart broadcasting several times). This was due to a combination of other speakers starting their broadcast while mine was still on and the fact that my Internet connection was not so reliable yesterday.

Please see this page for a more detailed analysis of the content of the presentations.

About 60 persons attended, with a peak audience of 45. There was not too much lag despite uvvy island being only a Class 4 sim.

Extropia's talk was disturbed by a griefer who, of course, was kicked out and banned from the region.

TransRelSL

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

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