1: Extropian, as in “Transhumanists tend to believe that Kurzweil’s extropian Law of Accelerating Returns will ultimately trump the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”
2: Bemes, as in “By uploading her bemes, the transhumanist was able to create a mindfile to serve as a basis for a future cyber-conscious analog of herself.” The singular form, beme, refers to a digitally-inheritable unit of beingness (such as a single element of one’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values) as in “The transhuman survivalist had a very strong beme for paranoia.”
3: Singularity, as in “The Singularity — that era, no more than a few decades hence, when transhumanists believe machine intelligence will merge with and surpass biological intelligence.”
4: Ectogenetic, as in “Many transhumanists look forward to growing replacements for all or part of their body via controlled differentiation of stem cells in an ex vivo ectogenetic process.”
5: Mindclone, as in “Transhumanists are often accepting of the notion that one identity can simultaneously operate across multiple physical and virtual instantiations, via wireless synchronization, with each such instantiation being a mindclone of a biological original mind.”
6: Vitology, as in “Some transhumanists believe biology is simply a subset of vitology, the study of self-replicating Darwinian code subject to mutation and Natural Selection, with the codes expressed in particular molecules for biology and more generally in differing voltage states for vitology.”
7: Beman, as in “A person created with bio-nanotechnology, a cyborg, a virtual person with a human mind, and a person who integrates electronics into their life are four examples of a bio-electronic human, also known as a beman.
8: Nanobot, as in “Transhumanists have a strong tendency to wish for an acceleration of the date when many problems could be solved with large numbers of microscopic, wirelessly networked, intelligent machines, each of which are called a nanobot.”
9: Techno-progressive, as in “Transhumanists tend to be socially-conscious libertarians, also known as techno-progressive, because they believe technology will solve most of the world’s problems.
10: Transhuman, as in “People who believe it is good to transcend our human biological inheritance, such as by modifying our DNA, our bodies or the substrate for our minds, and/or by leaving the earth to live in space habitats or on other celestial bodies, are considered transhuman.”
Great, pithy, straightforward explanation of tremendous words and concepts. Congratulations on this short yet profound article, Martine!
Rudi Hoffman
Port Orange, FL Multiverse
Thanks!