Is winning in gambling so possible and desirable that, as Flip Wilson once said, “[y]ou can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine” — or, as an old-fashioned lottery ad put it, “someone will win the lottery. Just not you [if you do not even buy a ticket]”? (WQ 2011) This appealing view of gambling can be contrasted with an opposite (critical) view, in that “[s]ome Islamic nations prohibit gambling”; with severe punishment for any violation. (WK 2011) Contrary to these different views about gambling (and other claims as will be discussed in the book), gambling (in relation to risk and caution) is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. This questioning of the different conventional views about gambling does not mean, however, that there is nothing good in gambling, or that those fields of study (related to gambling) like psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, probability theory, and so on are worthless. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of gambling, especially in the dialectic context of risk and caution — while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the detached theory of gambling) to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on gambling in an original way. This seminal project is to fundamentally alter the way that we think about risk and caution in gambling, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate. In this book: Introduction — The Fascination with Gambling Risk and Its Audacity Caution and Its Timidity Conclusion — The Future of Gambling About the Author : Dr Peter Baofu is the author of 53 new theories in 44 books to provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge ranging from the social sciences through the formal sciences and the natural sciences to the humanities, with the final aim for a unified theory of everything. He is known for his pioneering works on “multilateral acoustics,” “metamorphic humor,” “heterodox education,” “post-human mind games,” “post-Earth geology,” “substitutive religion,” “post-cosmology,” “contrarian personality,” “post-ethics,” “multifaceted war and peace,” “post-humanity,” “critical-dialectic formal science,” “combinational organization,” “hyper-sexual body,” “law reconstruction,” “comprehensive creative thinking,” “hyper-martial body,” “multilogical learning,” “contingent urban planning,” “post-capitalism,” “selective geometry,” “post-democracy,” “contrastive advantages,” “ambivalent technology,” “authoritarian liberal democracy,” “the post-post-Cold-War era,” “post-civilization,” “transformative aesthetic experience,” “synthetic information architecture,” “contrastive mathematical logic,” “dialectic complexity,” “after-postmodernity,” “sophisticated methodological holism,” “post-human space-time,” “existential dialectics,” “unfolding unconsciousness,” “floating consciousness,” “hyper-spatial consciousness,” and other visions. Dr Baofu earned an entry to the list of “prominent and emerging writers” in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007) — and was also interviewed on television and in newspapers about his original ideas. He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He had taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, and North America. He finished more than 5 academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from the world-renowned M.I.T., and was a summa cum laude graduate.