18.06.2022

“Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” by Eric Charles Steinhart

Magick Matters
"Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death" by Eric Charles Steinhart
"Our digital technologies have inspired new ways of thinking about old religious topics. Digitalists include computer scientists, transhumanists, singularitarians, and futurists. Writers such as Moravec, Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Chalmers are digitalists. Although they are usually scientists, rationalists, and atheists, digitalists they have worked out novel and entirely naturalistic ways of thinking about bodies, minds, souls, universes, gods, and life after death. Your Digital Afterlives starts with three digitalist theories of life after death. It examines personality capture, body uploading, and promotion to higher levels of simulation. It then examines the idea that reality itself is ultimately a system of self-surpassing computations. On that view, you will have infinitely many digital lives across infinitely many...>>
View
18.06.2022

“Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives, and Digital Cultures” by Danielle Kirby

Magick Matters
"Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives, and Digital Cultures" by Danielle Kirby
"Religion and spirituality are being transformed in our late modern and secularising times. New forms of belief proliferate, often notable for not being limited to traditional systems of reference or expression. Increasingly, these new religions present worldviews which draw directly upon popular culture—or occulture—in fiction, film, art and the internet. Fantasy and Belief explores the context and implications of these types of beliefs through the example of the Otherkin community. The Otherkin are a loosely-affiliated group who believe themselves to be in some way more than just human, their non-humanity often rooted in the characters and narratives of popular fantasy and science fiction. Challenging much current sociological thinking about spirituality and consumption, Fantasy and...>>
View
18.06.2022

“Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance” by Alvin Eng Hui Lim

Magick Matters
"Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance" by Alvin Eng Hui Lim
"In many contemporary and popular forms of religious practice, digital technology and the spiritual are inseparable. Ranging from streaming broadcasts of spiritual possessions to screenings of mass prayer conferences in stadiums, spirits and divinities now have new forms in which they can materialise. By offering the notion of ‘digital spirits’, this book critically attends to the intersections of digital media and spiritual beings. It also puts forward a new performative perspective on how they interact. Taking cues from the work of Stewart Hoover and Heidi Campbell, among others, the book begins with an outline of the current debates around religion, performance and digital media. It then moves on to examine how mediality and religion, where...>>
View
18.06.2022

“Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace” by Douglas Rushkoff

Magick Matters
"Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace" by Douglas Rushkoff
"This is an ideas-led, exuberant documentary about the converging strands of a new era, the empowerments of cyber-technology, and the precipitation of new ways of life. Originally written in 1994, it outlines the strands of the cyber subculture as it was emerging—the favored drugs, the influential individuals, the hackers and their motivations, the science chaos and the complexity of fractuals. This book will endure as a reminder of how modern cyberculture came about—a note to the future form an individual perceptive enough to grasp the profound effects of the cyber revolution."...>>
View
17.06.2022

“The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest” by Penelope A. Lewis

Magick Matters
"The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest" by Penelope A. Lewis
"In recent years neuroscientists have uncovered the countless ways our brain trips us up in day-to-day life, from its propensity toward irrational thought to how our intuitions deceive us. The latest research on sleep, however, points in the opposite direction. Where old wives tales have long advised to "sleep on a problem," today scientists are discovering the truth behind these folk sayings,and how the busy brain radically improves our minds through sleep and dreams. In The Secret World of Sleep, neuroscientist Penny Lewis explores the latest research into the nighttime brain to understand the real benefits of sleep. She shows how, while our body rests, the brain practices tasks it learned during the day,...>>
View