---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "goertzel" <goertzel@camden.rutgers.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 2015 23:00
Subject: Re: Fwd for Ted Goertzel
To: <gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be>
Cc:

It seems to me that both science fiction and futurist writing in general are largely male domains. There are some exceptions, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.  I don't know if Ayn Rand counts as a futurist, but she certainly has been influential, albeit with a very sexist view of the world. Perhaps men are more inclined to abstract thought not grounded so directly in experience.  In The End of the Beginning we were trying to move to focus to the more immediate future which is challenging.

The second most influential secular book of the 19th Century was Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. But the most influential was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  I don't know if the difference between the two is suggestive of the difference between male and female writers generally, but it is suggestive.

On 2015-08-28 13:59, Jayne Gackenbach wrote:

Thanks Ted for your qualifiers which are excellent points - your
right re our book being more about self and yes women do drift to that
and further to be fair the VR and digital physics sections (changes
and views of reality) are all authored by men, but one - me -
anyway while i appreciate the popular press emphasis on gender
switching, the reality is that it is a very small percentage of the
population - maybe leading edge - hard to say - my point is more along
the lines of Wilber's take on gender differences in various
transpersonal practices - he comments that men want to stare at walls
while women want to hold and embrace and feel - this is of course a
bit simplistic but the dominance of male views in the whole idea of
transcending consciousness as a sort of silent stillness or blank or
pure consciousness is fine but the woman's engaged, active, and
intuitive perspective takes the experient in a different direction -
how is this related to the issues at hand here - perhaps in how the
questions are asked?

Jayne

----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis Heylighen" <fheyligh@vub.ac.be>
To: "Global Brain Discussion" <gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be>
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 11:07:22 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Fwd for Ted Goertzel

[This was rejected by the mailing list, probably because Ted is
subscribed at the different address than the one he sent this from.]

From: Ted Goertzel <tedgoertzel@gmail.com>

"Boundaries of Self and Reality" sounds psychological, which may explain
why it interested more women.  It is also about current reality, not the
Singularity or the Global Brain.  So far as I know, no one, male or female,
has written about gender issues related to the Singularity. Ben wrote the
chapter on The Future of Human Nature in our book, but I don't recall that
he discussed gender differences.

  I think we might interest Humanity+ press on a book on gender and the
singularity if someone were to volunteer to organize one.  Already today,
gender is becoming a choice rather than something biologically determined,
presumably that will be more so as technology improves. Will men be able to
get surgery enabling them to get pregnant and give birth?  Or will that
function be taken over by incubators?  Will we be able to have both male
and female sexual organs, as some animals and plants do?  If our life span
is greatly extended, will we be able to have generations of children? What
would we like the Singularity to bring?

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Jayne Gackenbach <jayneg@athabascau.ca>
wrote:

As a woman who is editing a book for Elsevier along the same lines as
Ben's, if a bit narrower, called "Boundaries of Self and Reality Online",
we have 18 contributing chapters lined up of which five are authored by
women. Maybe women need to ask women.
Jayne

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org>
To: gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 2:03:28 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: Book "The End of the Beginning" finally published!

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson
<dante.monson@gmail.com> wrote:
> after forwarding this message about the book, I was asked why there are
only
> men within the author list ?


Well, we made a web page for the book and sent out a bunch of emails
and social media announcements soliciting authors....   Adult males
were the ones who responded by sending chapters....   The author list
wasn't restricted to our chums, though many who responded were in fact
our chums...

I did make an effort to get geographical/cultural representation ...
but it happened that of the African and Asian transhumanists I
solicited, the ones who responded favorably and wanted to submit
chapters, were both young males...

So I think this really reduces to the question of why the overall
topic of the Singularity, transhumanism and advanced tech appeals to
men more than women....  When I used to organize transhumanist
conferences, recruiting one or two good on-topic female speakers was
always something I had to explicitly strive for... I generally found
men more eager to push themselves forward and advertise themselves in
this way, than women...

(Note, I am simply being empirical in the above observations, not
making any hypotheses about the causes....   But I note that when I
was working in psychology for a while in the 90s, things I organized
attracted a high proportion of females....  So this doesn't seem to be
an artifact of my or Ted's personal styles, but more of the subject
area...)

-- Ben

-- Ben

--
    This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to whom it
    is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal, and or privileged
    information. Please contact us immediately if you are not the intended
    recipient of this communication, and do not copy, distribute, or take
    action relying on it. Any communications received in error, or
    subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed.
---