As a genre, science fiction has long played with the idea of all-powerful virtual beings and explored notions of transcendence through technological advancements. It has also been at the forefront of ...exploring our anxieties and hopes regarding new technologies and the ethical and moral consequences of scientific advancement, raising deeply philosophical and theological concerns about an age-old question, namely: what makes us distinct as human beings and what lies beyond our own existence? This article aims to provide an overview of recent themes that have emerged in science fiction film and television, especially with regard to extending our lives beyond their natural biological age. As the article will outline, these ideas generally appear in notions of cyborgization or mind uploading into cyberspace. Both indicate a deeply human desire to avoid death, and the films and shows discussed in this article offer a range of different ideas on this. As we will see, the final case study, the Amazon Prime television show Upload (2020–), brings both of these elements together, touching on a broad range of ideas about cyber-spirituality along the way. The article concludes that although many shows raise interesting questions about the ethical challenges inherent in transhumanist fantasies of mind uploading, they ultimately remain ambiguous in their critique of the dream of digital immortality.
The development of technology and biotechnologies in the modern society has seemingly made immortality more approachable to humanity than ever before; medicine is advancing, life is getting longer, ...anti-ageing techniques are becoming more common, and artificial intelligence developers claim to be able to offer the possibility for internet users to make digital clones. Through research of existing practices and interviews with internet users who have lost someone, this paper will offer the answer about how much are these practices actually commonplace and available to all. This empirical research looks into the reality of digital immortality, especially when it comes to the social networks and the online sphere.
TERT promoter mutations reactivate telomerase, allowing for indefinite telomere maintenance and enabling cellular immortalization. These mutations specifically recruit the multimeric ETS factor GABP, ...which can form two functionally independent transcription factor species: a dimer or a tetramer. We show that genetic disruption of GABPβ1L (β1L), a tetramer-forming isoform of GABP that is dispensable for normal development, results in TERT silencing in a TERT promoter mutation-dependent manner. Reducing TERT expression by disrupting β1L culminates in telomere loss and cell death exclusively in TERT promoter mutant cells. Orthotopic xenografting of β1L-reduced, TERT promoter mutant glioblastoma cells rendered lower tumor burden and longer overall survival in mice. These results highlight the critical role of GABPβ1L in enabling immortality in TERT promoter mutant glioblastoma.
•The β1L tetramer-forming isoform of GABP activates the mutant TERT promoter•β1L disruption induces telomere loss and death only in TERT promoter mutant cells•Disruption of β1L reduces tumor growth and prolongs survival in xenografted mice•GABPβ1L is a potential therapeutic target for TERT promoter mutant glioblastoma
TERT promoter mutations generate a binding site for GABP and reactivate TERT expression. Mancini et al. show that GABPβ1L, among GABP subunits, is specifically required for the function of TERT promoter mutants, and disrupting GABPβ1L causes telomere loss and cell death exclusively in TERT promoter mutant cells.
ABSTRACT This paper to show how the activity of education in the modern world is linked to the Arendtian philosophical project. Starting with a brief exposition of the reading hypothesis proposed by ...Paul Ricoeur, I first intend to highlight the ethical-political sense of the Arendtian philosophical project. For Ricoeur, the investigation carried out by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition can be read as a philosophical anthropology, that is, as a genre of meditation that seeks to identify the enduring traits of the human condition that can resist the vicissitudes of the modern world. Next, I will try to explain the unfoldings of this interpretation in order to think about the antinomy of mortal and immortality in the field of education, since the central question of philosophical anthropology, according to Ricoeur, lies in the intimate disproportion of our temporal condition as mortal beings.
RESUMO Este artigo busca mostrar de que maneira a atividade da educação no mundo moderno está vinculada com o projeto filosófico arendtiana. A partir de uma breve exposição da hipótese de leitura proposta por Paul Ricoeur, primeiramente, pretende-se destacar o sentido ético-político do projeto filosófico arendtiano. Para Ricoeur, a investigação levada a cabo por Hannah Arendt em A Condição Humana pode ser lida como uma antropologia filosófica, isto é, como um gênero de meditação que busca identificar os traços perduráveis da condição humana, que podem resistir às vicissitudes do mundo moderno. Em seguida, tenta-se explicitar os desdobramentos dessa interpretação a fim de pensar a antinomia do mortal e da imortalidade no âmbito da educação, uma vez que a questão central da antropologia filosófica, conforme Ricoeur, repousa na desproporção íntima da condição temporal dos seres mortais.
This article surveys the immortality of the soul in Ecclesiastes and Akan traditional thought from an African Christian theological perspective.Using comparative analysis, it argues that there is a ...remarkable similarity between the concept of immortality in Ecclesiastes and that of the Akan religio-cultural traditions. It is theologically significant to consider the immaterial nature of humankind, death and immortality that has been regarded as mystical and not experiential. This discovery of similarity with Ecclesiastes allows the Akan, and for that matter Africans, the possibility of relocating their religio-cultural and traditional worldviews within the wider context of the biblical cultures and thus Christian theology.
Keywords: Immortality, Worldview, Ecclesiastes, Akans
The digital age has rekindled popular and academic interest in immortality. While the idea of immortality has long been recognized as fundamental to human societies, unlike death, within the field of ...sociology, immortality has not yet established itself as a distinct and autonomous field of study. This paper contributes to the recently emerging scholarship promoting a sociology of immortality. Drawing inspiration from C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination (1959) and building upon significant research in the field of immortality, we offer to use the concept of the immortological imagination as an analytical and conceptual tool for further developing a sociology of immortality. We refer to the immortological imagination as a complementary concept to Penfold-Mounce’s thanatological imagination, seeing both concepts as stemming from two different lineages and academic traditions. After defining the immortological imagination and how it differs from and complements the thanatological imagination, the paper moves to discuss examples in popular culture establishing the potential impacts and influences of the immortological imagination, particularly within the digital context.
It has often been claimed that the
Platonov reproduced the idea of ‘immortality’ which belonged to the soviet topos of ‘new man’ and that the
Platonov contradicted the
by making this idea ridiculous. ...Such an overly complicated understanding of Platonov’s work can be replaced by a simpler explanation: An analysis of several of his texts shows that the young and the elder Platonov, the poet and the journalist were unanimously in favour of a certain concept of ‘immortality’, that simply did not fit into the then-mainstream topos of ‘new man’. This first part of the study explains how Platonov rejected the fantastic notion of ‘immortality’ that dominated the corresponding discussions in soviet intellectual life in the decade after 1917. The second part analyses Platonov’s relationship to the stalinist version of ‘new man’ and its specific variant of ‘immortality’.
In eighteenth-century post-Leibnizian German philosophy, the debate on immortality did not concern only the fate of the soul after death but also the fate of the body. Leibniz had famously maintained ...that no animal ever dies, for the soul is never entirely deprived of its living body. In spite of Bilfinger's almost isolated defense, this doctrine never became dominant, even among Leibniz's followers. Christian Wolff, long considered a mere popularizer of Leibniz's philosophy, departed from this account of immortality and replaced it with the traditional Platonic model, based on the survival of separated souls. After reconstructing Leibniz's, Wolff's, and Bilfinger's positions, this paper considers how the debate evolved within the so-called Wolffian school during the 1730s and 1740s. Both partisans and detractors of separated souls diverged from Leibniz on a crucial point: namely, they argued that another key Leibnizian doctrine, pre-established harmony, entails that the soul need not be forever united to its body. Furthermore, the cases of Johann Heinrich Winckler, Johann Gustav Reinbeck, Israel Gottlieb Canz, and even Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten show that the post-Leibnizian detractors of separated souls drew, in fact, more inspiration from the neo-Platonic and esoteric doctrine of the subtle body than from Leibniz's original immortalism.
PDF
