Posthuman

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Posthuman (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with posthumous.

Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of

futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human.[1]
The concept aims at addressing a variety of questions, including ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity.

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.[2] The notion of the posthuman comes up both in posthumanism as well as transhumanism, but it has a special meaning in each tradition.

Posthumanism

Main article: Posthumanism

In

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 emergent 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.[3]

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."[4] Covering the ideas of, for example, Robert Pepperell's The Posthuman Condition, and Hayles's How We Became Posthuman under a single term is distinctly problematic due to these contradictions.

The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the "

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.[7]

Post-posthumanism and post-cyborg ethics

The idea of post-posthumanism (post-cyborgism) has recently been introduced.[8][9][10][11][12] 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."[13][14] and the associated post-cyborg ethics (e.g. the ethics of forced removal of cyborg technologies by authorities, etc.).[15]

Posthuman political and natural rights have been framed on a spectrum with animal rights and human rights.[16] 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. … [I]t interrogates the hierarchic ordering—and subsequently exploitation and even eradication—of life forms.”[17]

Transhumanism

Main article: Transhumanism

Definition

Further information on an intermediate form between human and posthuman: Transhuman

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."[18] 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.[19] Transhumanism is sometimes criticized for not adequately addressing the scope of posthumanism and its concerns for the evolution of humanism.[20]

Methods

Further information: Human enhancement

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and

genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.[18]

Posthuman future

As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured

zombies and greys[24][25] as potential evolutions of the human form and being.[26]

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,[27]
have written works set in posthuman futures.

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

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.[28]

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.[29]

References

  1. ^ "posthumanism". Oxford Dictionary. Archived from the original on November 8, 2017. Retrieved 8 November 2017.
  2. ^ Ferrando, Francesca "The Body" in Post- and Transhumanism: an Introduction. Peter Lang, Frankfurt: 2014.
  3. ^ Haraway, Donna J, "Situated Knowledges" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, New York: 1991
  4. ^ "CTheory.net". www.ctheory.net. Archived from the original on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2009-01-16.
  5. ^ Haraway, Donna (1985). "Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s". Socialist Review: 65–108.
  6. ^ Haraway, Donna J, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, New York: 1991. "A Cyborg Manifesto" originally appeared in Socialist Review in 1985.
  7. ISBN 978-0-226-32146-2
    .
  8. ^ Mann, Steve. "The post-cyborg path to deconism." CTheory (2003): 2-18.
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Campbell, Heidi A. "Postcyborg Ethics: A New Way to Speak of Technology." Explorations in Media Ecology 5, no. 4 (2006): 279-296.
  12. ^ Spiller, Neil. "The Magical Architecture in Drawing Drawings." Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 2 (2013): 264-269.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. Azuma, Ronald, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier, and Blair MacIntyre. "Recent advances in augmented reality[dead link
    ]    ." IEEE computer graphics and applications 21, no. 6 (2001): 34-47.
  15. ^ Muri, Allison. The Enlightenment cyborg: a history of communications and control in the human machine, 1660-1830. University of Toronto Press, 2007.
  16. ^ Woody Evans, 2015. "Posthuman Rights: Dimensions of Transhuman Worlds". Revista Teknokultura 12(2). [1]
  17. ISBN 978-0745662411
    .
  18. ^ a b c "Transhumanist FAQ". Humanity+. Version 3.0. c. 2016 [Version 1.0 published c. 1998]. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2006-12-31. Retrieved 2018-08-13.
  19. ^ LaGrandeur, Kevin (2014-07-28). "What is the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism?". Institute for Ethics and Transforming Technologies. Retrieved 8 November 2017.
  20. doi:10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0271
    .
  21. Springer
    2016, pp. 243-256.
  22. ^ Warwick, Kevin (2004). I, Cyborg. University of Illinois Press.
  23. ISBN 9789004390348
    .
  24. ISBN 9781733634007
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  25. ISBN 978-1733634045
    .
  26. ISBN 0-8232-3447-9
    , 9780823234479
  27. ^ "Archailects". Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica.
  28. ^ 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
  29. ^ "Journal of Posthuman Studies: Philosophy, Technology, Media".
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