Christians have always been concerned with enhancement—now they are faced with significant questions about how technology can help or harm genuine spiritual transformation. What makes traditional and technological enhancement different from each other? Are there theological insights and spiritual practices that can help Christians face the challenge of living in a technological world without being dangerously conformed to its values? This book calls on Christians to understand and engage the deep issues facing the church in a technological, transhumanist future.

If artificial neural networks are ever to form the foundation for higher level cognitive behaviors in machines or to realize their full potential as explanatory devices for human cognition, they must show signs of autonomy, multifunction operation, and intersystem integration that are absent in most existing models. This model begins to address these issues by integrating predictive learning, sequence interleaving, and sequence creation components to simulate a spectrum of higher-order cognitive behaviors which have eluded the grasp of simpler systems. Its (...) capabilities are described based on simulations calling for increasing levels of functionality and are used to show how the model can progress from fundamental sequence learning and recall tasks to sophisticated behaviors such as an ability to solve simple mathematical expressions and a creative capacity for the formation and application of inductive rules. (shrink)

As with many human desires, transhumanist hope often lapses into transhumanist hype, but that recognition usually seems to come from those who fear the prospects. As a result, denunciations are frequently as vague as they are dismissive. Yet, despite potential benefits in the transhumanist agenda, there are legitimate reasons for questioning some of its particular projections and doing so can help distinguish between the hope and hype. Focusing on inherent limitations to cognitive enhancement, for instance, is instructive because that arena (...) is so intimately connected to personhood and is also the gateway to other envisioned forms of improvement. Identifying those restrictions is also germane to considerations of Christian engagement with the realities of a transhumanist future—a future whose “superior” beings can never escape faith. (shrink)

The transhumanist venture brings dramatically to the forefront the matter of Christian responsibility in a techno-scientific age. From the beginning, Christians have struggled to determine the roles they are expected to play in the divine–human narrative. This tension is palpable through the refrains of prophetic and apocalyptic literature, calling for a change of heart and action on the one hand but professing on the other that, without divine intervention, no meaningful transformation is possible. If the church is to fulfill its (...) mission, it cannot be via “business as usual,” following historic trends merely to react to exigencies of the moment. Recognizing that we are never where we are meant to be, the church has a significant opportunity to lead the way forward. (shrink)

Despite its explanatory clout, the theory of evolution has thus far compiled a modest record with respect to predictive power—that other major hallmark of scientific theories. This is considered by many to be an acceptable limitation of a theory that deals with events and processes that are intrinsically random. However, whether this is an inherent restriction or simply the sign of an incomplete theory is an open question. In an attempt to help answer that question, we propose a classification scheme (...) for several types of prediction that might occur with regard to evolutionary systems, then explore the nature of these predictions in a system that simulates the evolution of neural architectures. This provides a platform from which to consider the relevance of such observations for real biological systems and illuminates a variety of key issues pertaining to prediction in those environments. (shrink)