… and just perhaps, they will help to define the most familiar and comforting path toward substrate-independent posthumanity …

SmartHand device. (Credit: Image rights American Friends of Tel Aviv University)
Ekenstam told a television interviewer, “I am using muscles which I haven’t used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don’t have them anymore. It’s amazing.” The team first chose to build a hand, however, because of its unique challenges. “The fingers in the hand are the most complex appendages we have,” Prof. Shacham-Diamand observes. “The brain needs to synchronise the movement of each digit in a very complicated way.” While the prototype looks very “bionic” now, in the future SmartHand scientists plan to equip it with artificial skin that will give the brain even more tactile feedback.

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meta-
adj.,pref. [from analytic philosophy] One level of
description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to
describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on
deliberate confusion between meta-levels.
-valent
suff. Having a specified valence or valences.
valence
1. Chemistry. The combining capacity of an atom or radical, determined by the number of electrons that it will lose, add, or share when it reacts with other atoms.
2. The ability of a substance to interact with another or to produce an effect.
3. Psychology. The degree of attraction or aversion that an individual feels toward a specific object or event.
4. Linguistics. The number of arguments that a lexical item, especially a verb, can combine with to make a syntactically well-formed sentence, often along with a description of the categories of those constituents.
5. The capacity of something to unite, react, or interact with something else.
an extropic state
of contemplating supersymmetric psychosocial symphonies of
human suffering, surmounting, senescence, and survival through
an incomprehensibly vast and escalating expansion of the extropian multiverse. speculative spelunking through assymetric archipelagos of mechapsychogenetic transhuman permutation, pain and poise, pretense and probity, prevarication and promise.

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