Transhumanist Wager, The Read Online Free PDF

broken pool stick
on a football player’s head. The dean smiled. He secretly wished he had done
that, too, when he attended Victoria twenty-five years ago and was ridiculed as
a skinny computer science geek. Guess Jethro meant what he said in the essay,
the dean thought.
    Unwilling to follow the expulsion
recommendation of the university chancellor, the dean called Jethro into his
office with a plan. He told the young man to take a semester off, and offered
him a coveted job as an assistant to a good friend: Francisco Dante, a spirited
and renowned journalist for the award-winning weekly, International
Geographic; it was one of the few remaining media sources the dean enjoyed
anymore. All others, like the popular USA Daily Tribune newspaper, or
the ubiquitous and glitzy International Media Network (IMN) television channel,
were heavily commercialized, superficial, and annoyingly conservative.
    Dante, a hulking Spaniard and
longtime transhuman advocate, was currently covering the Congo war in Africa.
His assistant had been shot and killed last month. Dean Graybury warned Jethro
the experience would be heavy and grueling, but ultimately eye-opening and
transformative. Furthermore, the dean promised Jethro he would pull strings to
get him back into Victoria when the fall semester came around, assuming he
agreed to stay away from pool cues.
     
     
    ************
     
     
    Jethro Knights welcomed the
adventure of going to the Congo for International Geographic . A few
weeks after he arrived in Central Africa, Francisco Dante wrote the dean from
their jungle camp:
     
    Where did
you find this guy? He’s the perfect assistant—engaged, intelligent, efficient,
and super low-maintenance. If only he doesn’t leave me to join the revolution.
I’ve rarely met someone so impenetrable, so lacking in fear.
     
    Jethro did his job for the
reporter, learning the journalism trade along the way. They became friends and
carefully looked out for each other, often discussing transhumanist concerns
late into the night around a campfire. There was little to do in the jungles of
the Congo except to follow the military around, avoid snake bites, and stay out
of the way of bullets and shelling from guerrilla fighters. They lived mostly
on remote trails in rainforests, or on the backs of army trucks, waiting for
that perfect moment to snap a photograph or conduct an important interview.
Occasionally, they would find themselves amongst a plethora of limbless and
headless bodies, consoling a weeping chief whose village had just been
ransacked by a looting warlord and his militia.
    Jethro's declared major of
philosophy in college offered consolation to what he had witnessed in the
Congo. Jethro chose this major because, besides giving mental strength through
the use of reason and logic, philosophy was the one subject that united all
others. It bridged gaps between various pieces of knowledge, while also
instructing how to find the pieces that weren't yet discovered—the most
interesting ones. Jethro was born in love with the unknown. A propensity to
ask, Why? Philosophy gave the explorer direction when no map was
available.
    Beginning with childhood, Jethro
was attracted to transhuman philosophy. This was because he instinctively
viewed life as a chance to improve himself, hoping one day he might reach a
self-actualized perfection. He knew that much was obvious for any advanced
thinking entity living in an evolutionary universe. He spent much of his youth
considering ideas around his personal development: reading nonfiction science
books, following sci-fi cinema, forming futurist thoughts, and keeping a detailed
journal about how to be his best self. His budding transhuman perspective
spanned seasons and years, evolving, maturing, and finally snowballing all the
way into his first semester at college.
    At Victoria, he formally immersed
himself in the academics of transhuman thought, rigorously considering and
debating its every philosophical idea and