[ExI] Natasha's brand new doctorate

[Max More]

Hello all.

I want to make sure that all (especially you old-timers) here know that one
of the longest-term subscribers (who also happens to be my wife) is a
newly-minted PhD.

Despite full-time work and numerous other activities, Natasha pushed on and
completed her doctoral work, capped off with a dissertation:

“Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman
/ Posthuman”

Natasha flew to England to defend her dissertation last week. Her defense
on July 5 was a thorough success!

She is now the very well-deserved possessor of a doctorate from Great
Britain’s University of Plymouth's Science, Technology Research Centre,
School of Media Arts and Design.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract:
The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic,
design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining
personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing
the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a
person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single
century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in the
domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces
with biology.
        The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential
of emerging and speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of
human enhancement that approach life expansion. In doing so, the thesis
constructs an inquiry into historical and current attempts to append human
physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering emerging and
speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal
identity as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human
enhancement, a new axis is sought that identifies the transhuman and
posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life expansion.
        The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable
artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement that explicitly
pursue extending human life? This question centers on the potential of the
study’s proposed enhancement technologies in their relationship to life,
death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic
approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders
that need to be mediated between them.
        The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and
design, technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of
life expansion. The critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders
between these interconnecting forces by bringing to light issues of
sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns, including
morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the
thesis’ interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative
technologies.
        The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation:
qualitative interviews with experts of the emerging and speculative
technologies; field studies encountering research centers of such
technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the
heuristics of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view
of the human use of technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the
research is a theoretical framework for further research in artistic
approaches to life expansion.

I’m very proud of what Natasha has accomplished. This was a highly unusual
topic that had to overcome some significant academic barriers.

Onward!

--Max



-- 
Max More, PhD
Strategic Philosopher
Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader*
CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation
7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
480/905-1906 ext 113
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