Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human.
Posthumanism is not to be confused with transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.[Ferrando, Francesca "The Body" in Post- and Transhumanism: an Introduction. Peter Lang, Frankfurt: 2014.] The notion of the posthuman comes up both in posthumanism as well as transhumanism, but it has a special meaning in each tradition.
Posthumanism
In
critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive the
human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions
humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that
human nature is a universal state from which the human
being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of
free will, and unified in itself as the apex of
existence. Thus, the posthuman position recognizes imperfectability and disunity within oneself, and understands the world through heterogeneous
perspectivism while seeking to maintain intellectual rigor and dedication to objective observations. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an
emergentism ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined
individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.
[Haraway, Donna J, "Situated Knowledges" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, New York: 1991]
Approaches to posthumanism are not homogeneous, and have often been very critical. The term itself is contested, with one of the foremost authors associated with posthumanism, Manuel DeLanda, decrying the term as "very silly."
The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the "cyborg" of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.[Haraway, Donna J, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, New York: 1991. "A Cyborg Manifesto" originally appeared in Socialist Review in 1985.] Following Haraway, Hayles, whose work grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanism—which separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a "shell" or vehicle for the mind—becomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because information technology puts the human body in question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious of information technology advancements while understanding information as "disembodied," that is, something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into it and human life practices.
Post-posthumanism and post-cyborg ethics
The idea of post-posthumanism (post-cyborgism) has recently been introduced.
[Mann, Steve. "The post-cyborg path to deconism." CTheory (2003): 2-18.][Bredenoord, Annelien L., Rieke van der Graaf, and Johannes JM van Delden. "Toward a "Post-Posthuman Dignity Area" in Evaluating Emerging Enhancement Technologies." The American Journal of Bioethics 10, no. 7 (2010): 55-57.][Mann, Steve, James Fung, Mark Federman, and Gianluca Baccanico. "Panopdecon: deconstructing, decontaminating, and decontextualizing panopticism in the postcyborg era." Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (2002): 375-398.][Campbell, Heidi A. "Postcyborg Ethics: A New Way to Speak of Technology." Explorations in Media Ecology 5, no. 4 (2006): 279-296.][Spiller, Neil. "The Magical Architecture in Drawing Drawings." Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 2 (2013): 264-269.]
This body of work outlines the after-effects of long-term adaptation to cyborg technologies and their subsequent removal, e.g., what happens after 20 years of constantly wearing computer-mediating eyeglass technologies and subsequently removing them, and of long-term adaptation to virtual worlds followed by return to "reality."
[Mann, Steve. "'WearCam'(The wearable camera): personal imaging systems for long-term use in wearable tetherless computer-mediated reality and personal photo/videographic memory prosthesis." In Wearable Computers, 1998. Digest of Papers. Second International Symposium on, pp. 124-131. IEEE, 1998.][Azuma, Ronald, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier, and Blair MacIntyre. " Recent advances in augmented reality." IEEE computer graphics and applications 21, no. 6 (2001): 34-47.] and the associated post-cyborg ethics (e.g. the ethics of forced removal of cyborg technologies by authorities, etc.).
[Muri, Allison. The Enlightenment cyborg: a history of communications and control in the human machine, 1660-1830. University of Toronto Press, 2007.]
Posthuman political and natural rights have been framed on a spectrum with animal rights and human rights.[Woody Evans, 2015. "Posthuman Rights: Dimensions of Transhuman Worlds". Revista Teknokultura 12(2). [3]] Posthumanism broadens the scope of what it means to be a valued life form and to be treated as such (in contrast to certain life forms being seen as less-than and being taken advantage of or killed off); it “calls for a more inclusive definition of life, and a greater moral-ethical response, and responsibility, to non-human life forms in the age of species blurring and species mixing. … It interrogates the hierarchic ordering—and subsequently exploitation and even eradication—of life forms.”
Hybrid Interfaces: Supersenses, Cyborg Systems, and Hybrid Bodies
Technology integrated into the human body changes how individuals interact with the external world. Sensory activity is mediated by technology, creating a new interface with the world. The introduction of nanotechnologies and hybrid computing into the organism alters the normal perception and cognition of things and the world. The fusion of the human body with technology within the organism lays the groundwork for the emergence of individuals endowed with new attributes and capabilities. Human beings and the modification of their psycho-physical characteristics become subjects of direct manipulation, necessitating a reevaluation of the concept of humanity from various humanistic, philosophical, and biological perspectives.
Human ability to incorporate inorganic elements of technological nature into oneself can radically alter both inner and outer appearance, transforming individuals into cyborgs. This new hybrid form replaces the humanistic view of humanity and raises a series of new philosophical questions concerning ethics and human nature.
Especially for new generations, the combination of carnal body and virtual body can determine forms of identity hybridization and possible negative effects on identity formation.
Transhumanism
Definition
According to
transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical
future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer, unambiguously,
human by our current standards."
Posthumans primarily focus on cybernetics, the posthuman consequent and the relationship to digital technology. Steve Nichols published the Posthuman Movement manifesto in 1988. His early evolutionary theory of mind (MVT) allows development of sentient E1 brains. The emphasis is on systems. Transhumanism does not focus on either of these. Instead, transhumanism focuses on the modification of the human species via any kind of emerging science, including genetic engineering, digital technology, and bioengineering.
Transhumanism is sometimes criticized for not adequately addressing the scope of
posthumanism and its concerns for the evolution of
humanism.
Methods
Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or
mind uploading, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a
cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology,
life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced
internet bot,
nootropic, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.
Posthuman future
As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured
future where
Human extinction or otherwise absent from the
Earth.
[Ferrando, Francesca "Space Migration Must Be Posthuman" in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, Springer 2016, pp. 243-256.] Kevin Warwick says that both humans and posthumans will continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities.
Recently, scholars have begun to speculate that posthumanism provides an alternative analysis of apocalyptic cinema and fiction,
often casting
vampires,
werewolves,
zombies and greys
as potential evolutions of the human form and being.
[Deborah Christie, Sarah Juliet Lauro, ed. (2011). Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. Fordham Univ Press. p. 169. , 9780823234479] With these potential evolutions of humans and posthumans, human centered designed ways of thinking needs to also be inclusive of these new posthumans. The new "post human resists binary categories and, instead, integrates the human and the nonhuman.
[6]" Human centered thinking needs to be redone in a way to include posthumanism.
Many science fiction authors, such as Greg Egan, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Bruce Sterling, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, Charles Stross, Neal Asher, Ken MacLeod, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann Leckie, and authors of the Orion's Arm Universe,
Posthuman god
A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of a "posthuman god"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of
human nature, might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly
Deity-like by present-day human standards.
This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some
science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a higher plane of existence—rather, it merely means that some posthuman beings may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that their behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination.
[Michael Shermer. Shermer's Last Law, Jan 2002, see also * Oliver Krüger: Virtual Immortality. God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism., Bielefeld: transcript 2021 ]
See also
External links
In 2017, Penn State University Press in cooperation with Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and James Hughes established the
Journal of Posthuman Studies, in which all aspects of the concept "posthuman" can be analysed.
title="Bar code 9789401204774 reference." target="_external">. ISBN 9789401204774
