““I gave the card back to Lulu. “I don’t want this,” I said. “I want a better one—one that you’ve put some thought and effort into. I have a special box, where I keep all my cards from you and Sophia, and this one can’t go in there… but not good enough either. When I was your age, I wrote poems for my mother on her birthday. I got up early and cleaned the house and made her breakfast,”” (Chua 187).

In “Paper Tigers”, Wesley Yang mentions the high expectations Asian Americans have to live up to and questions whether those expectations set up by their parents can help them to better prepare for the future. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School graduated from Havard, claims that children are stronger than we think and parents are responsible to motivate them to go further, reaching their full potential. The quote from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother explains how Chua refuses to accept the birthday cards from her two daughters because they don’t fit into her standards. She wants more from them, knowing that they are capable, yet lack a little push. There are complaints but the result, two birthday cards that Chua still has, proves that demanding greater effort in parenting helps the children to achieve. Even though Chua was raised by strict parents but she decided to do the same to her daughters to prevent “family decline”.

Works Cited

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Penguin Books; Reprint edition, December 27, 2011.

“You know, your film makes an argument, which will be familiar to some people, but which will be quite provocative to others, that actually the way we use the criminal justice system in this country, particularly the way we use incarceration, is really an extension of slavery, that it’s a form of racialized control.”

Randall Robinson in “Thoughts on Restitution” notes that “the black male is far more likely than his white counterpart to be in prison, to be murdered, to have no job, to fail in school, to become seriously ill” (235). The documentary 13th argues the mass incarceration of black and brown people in America is a continuation of slavery under the 13th Amendment. The amendment outlaws all forms of slavery unless it is used as the punishment for a crime. Using this loophole in the amendment, the U.S criminal justice system targets people of color and is able to force them back into slavery. Much of the evidence provided in the documentary itself demonstrates how life for blacks in America is still incredibly difficult and, in turn, proves ideas involving restitution should be given due consideration by politicians.

“If “individual human minds” are downloaded on a computer disc, indeed it would appear that we could solve some burning ethical issues, such as overpopulation. We would no longer have to worry about life and death as such, not to be concerned of physical pain, aging, and disease, feel fear, attachment, emotions of failure, and success neither could we experience love, hate, and other emotions related not only to the meeting of minds but also to that of bodies (Hellsten)”

        To live is Christ, To Die is Gain (Philippians 1:21). Meghan O’Gieblyn was a former Christian enthusiast who became fascinated with the world and overall ideological atmosphere of the transhumanist movement. The despair she felt with the absence of God was healed and replaced by the promise of restoration, through science, and the process of transfiguration towards a nonbiological substrate of supercomputers. The parallels presented in Ghost in the Cloud between the transhuman enthusiast and Christian philosopher on the idea of eternal life for humans were uncanny. Meghan states, “Trans-humanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice,” and she contemplated with the idea that AI will serve the role of Jesus Christ and be our ultimate savior to bestow to humanity the experience of true eternity.                        

     Megan O’Gieblyn had spent a considerable amount of time dedicated to dreaming about the “postbiotic future” of transhumanism and its connection with the ideologies of Christianity. However, she has been insouciant to the fact that Christians believe death is an essential experience for a human to understand life. Death is the center of our existence and is what defines human purpose and individuality. We gain meaning, relation, urgency, happiness, and feeling from death. Death was God’s greatest gift to humans. I think about death multiple times a day, not in a morbid or suicidal way; however, I understand that I need to make the most out of my limited time in this life. The idea of fusion with technology as the next stage of human evolution does; in fact, allow humanity to achieve resurrection and immortality, but this process stirps us away from every single quality that makes us human including the ability to learn, chose with our own perspective, and determine the course of our own actions.

           Ray Kurzweil, the pristine, god-like, and illustrious prophet of modern transhuman belief, is the reason Meghan O’Gieblyn believes in the contemporary world of transhumanism. She analyzes Kurzweil’s perspective and perpetuates a certain belief to the reader that he is carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment and furthering human progression with pushing for technological advancements to human transcendence. Kurzweil believes our bodies would become incorruptible and limitless and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. This utopian dream would evidently eradicate careers, intellectual growth, educational institutions, relationships, creativity, and every other aspect that is a part of the human experience. In his academic journal “The Meaning of Life,”, Sirkku Hellsten further analyzes Kurzweil’s illogical and inhumane way of thinking. Kurzweil notes the change to humanity would perpetuate “Singularity,” which accentuates that there is no metaphysical category of person. In essence, we lose our defining characteristics…lose our value, ethics, and morals. We lose our sense of appreciation for life and therefore would completely lose the idea of hope and emotion. I particularly enjoyed the integral question purposed by Hellsten revolving the “divine ruler” of transhumanism that was not addressed in Ghost in the Clouds, “if all human minds could or would move into virtual reality and continue “living” in cyberspace then who or what is left behind to maintain the operations?” It is difficult to imagine a world ran by artificial intelligence; a government or ruling class led by computer information systems that are “exponentially more intelligent” who decide on pressing and difficult issues relative to the well-being of the general public that would be programmed to think a certain way. Human progression is predicated on the divergence of thought and a future founded on the tempting fallacy of computer-generated singularity will precisely halt human progression, and ultimately the human race.

Works Cited

Hellsten, Sirkku K. “‘The Meaning of Life’ during a Transition from Modernity to Transhumanism and Posthumanity.” Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu, Edited by Scott M. Fitzpatrick, vol. 2012, no. 210684, Feb. 2012, doi:https://www.hindawi.com/journals/janthro/2012/210684/.

 “She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.”

Our most recent reading “E.T. and God” by Paul Davies illustrated how the discovery of life outside of Earth would affect already existing religions, but not how it could spark new ones. In his article, “The New American Religion of UFOs,” Sean Illing describes this new religion’s differences compared to older ones. Obviously, instead of a God or gods, these people believe in extraterrestrial life. However, the fundamental belief system is different from other religions in the past. Rather than believe that something has happened such as how Catholics believe that Jesus died on the cross and that Moses parted the Red Sea, these people believe in the future. They believe that their religion is something that will be proved and undeniable.

Works Cited

Illing, Sean. “The New American Religion of UFOs.” Vox, Vox, 4 June 2019, www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/4/18632778/ufo-aliens-american-cosmic-diana-pasulka.

“Our destruction is so familiar—so synonymous with civilization—in fact, that we tend to overlook how strange the world that we’ve made has become. For instance, it stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass. This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.”

In “The Sixth Extinction,” Kolbert discusses the effect of Bd, a fungus that was essentially the cause of the extinction of the Panamanian golden frog. In the article, “Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction,” author Peter Brannen states that we are overlooking how strange the world has become as compared to how it once was. Similarly, Kolbert offers that “In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.” Both writers share the idea that we are not aware of what is going on right under our noses. Brannen’s statement underscores the shocking wildlife numbers that have dramatically dropped over the years. He argues that this extreme difference has been in part caused by industrial agriculture. I find it ironic that our lifestyles, and in turn our behaviors, are causing our own destruction. Even with the issue of global warming, people still deny that it is actually happening, despite the fact that we are already seeing its effects. We are seeing whole species go extinct yet we are not as scared as perhaps we should be. 

Brannen, Peter. “Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 13 June 2017, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/.

Kat Jackowicz