Amy Kurzweil and Daniel Story write for Aeon on the questions raised by interactive LLM AI simulations of deceased people: These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters … Read more“Chatbots of the dead”
Author Joanna Ebenstein discusses her life’s work and her new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life in this episode of the Alta Live podcast.
Shayla Love writes for The Guardian: In many ways, the renaissance in psychedelic research was born from the studies on terminal cancer patients at Johns Hopkins and New York University (NYU). The writer Michael Pollan covered one such study in the New Yorker, and his subsequent book, How to Change Your Mind, shot up bestseller … Read more“The end-of-life patients finding solace in magic mushrooms”
Part of my morning ritual walk, which is undertaken partly for exercise, partly as a kind of moving meditation practice, is to navigate this stretch of several hundred feet of shoreline adjacent to the local river. Because of its position, slightly downstream of the point where two branches of the river meet, tree trunks washed … Read moreWalking the boulder field
A heads-up that death doula Alua Arthur’s new book may be pre-ordered via this link: Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End.
Mihika Agarwal writes for Vox on the rise of AI-assisted grief processing: In the spring of 2023, Sunshine Henle texted her mother. She asked where she had gone, told her that she missed her, and soon received a response: “Honey, I wish I could give you a definite answer, but what I do know is … Read more“The race to optimize grief”
I’ve just returned from the first annual Sacred Harvest event at Sky Meadow, an idyllic 115-acre spiritual retreat in the mountainous Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The Harvest was a wonderful three days of wholesome work, exploration and soul-talk, and provided me with the opportunity to fulfil my long-term ambition of creating and installing a wind … Read moreThe Sky Meadow Wind Phone
B. David Zarley writes for Freethink on the subject of psychedelic therapies for dying people: “Existential distress” of the kind faced by people at the end of their lives is not a mental health disorder you’ll find in the DSM-V, points out Paul Thielking, a board certified doctor in palliative and hospice medicine and the … Read more“Psychedelics are helping dying patients overcome their existential distress”
Worker THX-1138 confesses to the prophet OMM in this scene from George Lucas’s 1971 dystopian science fiction movie THX-1138. The Amazen Kiosk, a very widely lampooned 2021 publicity stunt mental health initiative from Amazon.com, Inc.