Category Archives: secularism

Naked Singularity now available as an Audiobook

Cover design by Anthony Freda

VN Alexander’s “gut-wrenching” and “beautifully written”  2003 novel is now available as an audiobook, read by the author.  Listen to a sample on Spotify.

Synopsis: When Hali’s father asks her to  help him end his life to spare his wife the misery of a long illness, she reluctantly agrees. While family and friends in the Bible Belt insists on letting “God’s will” decide such matters, Hali broods upon the idea of predetermination and an afterlife in a way that is both challenging and deeply moving. Ultimately, she is unable to do what her father wishes, and she is forced to accept the help of a manipulative male nurse, adding further complications that result in a slow and painful end.

The audiobook of Naked Singularity is now available on all platforms, including Spotify, Overdrive (for libraries), Apple, Google Play, Kobo, StoryTel (in Sweden), Hoopla, Barnes & Noble and Amazon’s Audible.

Want to review the book?  Get a code to listen free on Spotify. Please leave a comment below.

Reviews for the 2003 hardcover edition:

“Best of 2003: Best Locally Produced Literary Figure” –Dallas Observer

“A painful tale about euthanasia. The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and sympathy from first to last.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Alexander takes on a gut-wrenching topic and writes eloquently about the family’s daily emotional pain, leading up to a lurid, macabre ending and a climax that is so true, it is barely believable.” Publishers Weekly

“At once deeply intellectual and extremely sensual” –Ethical Culture Review

“Beautifully written” Texas Books in Review

“Alexander takes the reader down an intriguing road loaded with questions and choices, none of them easy…. Naked Singularity is sad, touching and heartfelt, a taut story about love and living, pain and dying.” Curled up with a Good Book Review

“Woven into Naked Singularity‘s metaphors and narrative is a profound understanding of chaos and complexity. It renders esoteric constructs concrete, and in a setting none of us can escape.” J. P. Crutchfield, co-author of “Chaos,” Scientific American.

The hardcover edition was originally published by The Permanent Press in 2003. The print versions, hardcover or paperback, is available at any bookstore.

See more press/reviews/interviews about Naked Singularity. Leave a review of the new audiobook on Amazon or Goodreads.

Local readers, If you are a member of Hudson Valley Current, you can order a signed hardcover first-edition for $25 or a $15 signed paperback.

The Perils of Coding Humans: A Response to Transhumanism


15 week live online course
Mondays at 12PM EST starting Jan 9, 2023  (Details for new course for 2025 coming soon.)
$180
Instructor: Dr. V. N. Alexander
IPAK-EDU

The September 12, 2022 White House Executive Order* pledges R&D funds to the biotech industry to enable it “to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way [emphasis added] in which we write software and program computers.” We may be glad of this implied admission that the biotech industry currently cannot “predictably program biology” nor effectively “write circuitry for cells,” as demonstrated by the failure of the COVlD-19 synthetic mRNA injections. But we may also be concerned that technocrats—who believe that such advances will be possible once they “unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence”—will continue to use us as lab monkeys as they pursue impossible goals.

Some see the issue as a battle between the ideologies of pure mechanism and spiritualism. As long as we see the problem this way, it might remain irreconcilable. In this course, we will use lessons learned from science—complex systems science, the philosophy of creativity, and Continue reading

Alexander selected to serve on Fulbright Specialist roster, 2018-2021

Victoria Alexander has been selected as a Fulbright Specialist, available to serve institutions in over 150 countries worldwide. Alexander is an expert in Vladimir Nabokov’s non-gradualist approach to the evolution of insect mimicry.

“As the number of students interested in arts and humanities programs declines worldwide, my work has focused on showing how these disciplines are vital to developing critical and creative thinking skills. My specialty, biosemiotics (the study of signaling and sign-use in living systems), combines the fields of poetics, complexity science, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and biology to investigate the nature of creativity, adaptation, learning, and intentionality.”

The Fulbright Specialist program is supported by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning, Non-US institutions interested in hosting Dr. Alexander can apply at https://fulbrightspecialist.worldlearning.org/eligibility-host-institutions/

 

Lynn Margulis, Evolutionary ‘Naturalism,’ Chance and Conspiracy

“The endosymbiosis hypothesis is retrogressive in the sense that it avoids the difficult thought necessary to understand how mitochondria and chloroplasts have evolved as a series of small evolutionary steps.” -Thomas Uzzell and Christine Spolsky, 1974

The above old quote may make us chuckle now that Margulis’ theory has been vindicated by DNA analysis. Uzzell and Spolsky imply that endosymbiosis seemed to them too easy and naïve, like a myth describing how the first humans sprang from sown dragon’s teeth. Even though there was nothing prima facie impossible about the idea — no physical laws violated — these critics nevertheless felt that the endosymbiosis hypothesis was tantamount to a “revival of special creation.” [1] Symbiogenesis, the idea championed by Lynn Margulis, is here associated with the supernatural because it was considered to be a rare and too fortuitous event. Continue reading

May 11, VN Alexander on Nabokov at Library in Rosendale, NY

rosendale WEDNESDAY, MAY 11 7 PM FREE

“Vladimir Nabokov and Insect Mimicry: The Artist as Scientist”

Victoria N Alexander

Public Scholars, NY Council for the Humanities: In collaboration with the NY Council for the Humanities, the Rosendale Public Library presents a slide/lecture on the controversial novelist and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov, that reveals his insights into the mysteries of mimicry and how the scientific community responded to his studies. Fantastic images of insect mimicry will be used as examples of how important art is to good science. This event is made possible through the Public Scholars program with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

rosendalelibrary

 

The Science of Making Choices

What happens in your body when you choose to go right or left?  What makes your choices? your Self? What does the word “choice” really mean?

VN Alexander, PhD discusses the science of making choices from a complexity science-biosemiotics perspective. From “Science, Art and Biosemiotics” series, produced and directed by Lucian Rex.

To read more about this topic see The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature. 

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Atheists sue over WTC cross

Statues of mythological and/or fictional characters and themes can be found in state and federal parks all over the country, like this statue of Neptune at a city park in Virginia Beach.  As far as I know atheists don’t try to get these removed. The American Atheist Organization is suing to remove a cross from the WTC memorial.  The “cross” is actually a section of welded I-beam that was found sticking up from the rubble after 9/11.  Witnesses found the coincidental resemblance to Christ’s cross significant. While I don’t agree that such coincidences are supernaturally caused, I think they are interesting. Significant coincidences are at the heart of all “chance” phenomena which lead to the emergence of life, language, and art. (That’s my natural philosophy in a nutshell.) I could no more reject public tributes to Christianity than I could to any great work of fiction. Somehow it just doesn’t piss me off.  I understand it as art. It doesn’t bother me that others take it differently.  (I even have a portrait of a black Madonna hanging in my home.  It’s a really cool painting that my great-grandmother brought over from Poland.)  That’s why I think there is something up with AAO’s president David Silverman who isn’t able to detach himself emotionally from the power of religious symbolism.  He released this statement about the WTC cross Continue reading

Naked Singularity now on Kindle

My second novel may not get quite as much attention as my other two novels (with pretty females on their covers), but Naked Singularity is my personal favorite and I’m happy to announce that it’s finally available on Kindle.  The subject is dark — euthanasia — but heavy as it is, it’s also darkly comic. Here’s a thoughtful review from poet Gerrit Henry published when the novel first appeared in 2003.

Alexander, Victoria N. Naked Singularity.The Permanent Press, 2003, Sag Harbor. 189 pp. One of the many dark beauties of Victoria N. Alexander’s new novel is that, not only is it the proverbial good read, it is also a proverbially brilliant one. Alexander–holder of a PhD–has dished up a heart-stoppingly beautiful heroine who holds similar degrees in teleology (the study of why) and she thinks, and writes, like a dream. Witness this sample from a soliloquy by Hali on death: “You had thought death would at least be romantic, but now you realize there is nothing to be thankful for–how vacuous, how colorless, how without pity, how without regard for your intentions . . . . ” This, from a piece of popular fiction, is almost asking too much in the matter of sheer, unabused style. Continue reading