Excited for the release of 'Transcendence', I made a point to be there opening night. I enjoyed the film thoroughly, and much to my surprise swaths of negative film reviews followed in the proceeding weeks. Surprised by the sheer number of negative reviews, I began to reflect on why this should be? An unsupported conclusion I mused together, was the fact that Transcendence marketing may have portrayed the film to be a futuristic action film, instead of correctly portraying what it is; a film devoted to exploring the various values and dilemmas surrounding Augmenting Human Consciousness to an Artificial Platform.

In my opinion, this film does a beautiful job exploring these ideas not only through the language of the film, but through imagery and symbolic representations. Throughout the next year I hope to pull together a collection of essays, which will outline the large ideas Transcendence tackled; self identity, augmenting consciousness vs. consciousness through addition vs. artificially created consciousness, the Chinese Gym Argument scaled to a global network, human value systems in new intelligent species, progress without violence, human-hood vs person-hood, and many more.

I was fortunate enough to work with Professors at UC San Diego on one of these topics (Augmenting Conscious Experience from Biology to an Artificial Platform), and I owe them a debt of gratitude.