Post-Humanism has nothing to do with Humanism. SILLY.

A few nights ago I had a dream that I lived in deep dark city in the future, and that an army of men wearing all black, even over their faces, started rounding people up to be militarized and controlled. They killed everyone who resisted. If you submitted, they might very well let you live, but you had to accept that your life belonged to them, and that everything you did, and whether you lived or died, depended upon their caprice. I decided to run for it. I hid in the empty buildings left by the people they had taken. Someone else was with me. I knew him in waking life but I don't remember who he was and I never saw his face.

I was ultimately killed by a dog. It was a black dog with electronic red eyes. It had chased me down the last hall, into the last room, and I shut myself in with a door made of glass. I could see him on the other side, looking for me. I knew he would find me soon enough so I picked up a rifle with one bullet and tried to shoot him through the glass. The bullet missed, the glass shattered, and he attacked.

It wasn't a nightmare, actually. It was more a dream about urgency and purpose than about fear. It was about the physical will to live in conflict with the reasons for being alive: that is, freedom, autonomy, expression, love.

And the dog, I knew this in the dream-way that one knows these things: The dog had been an ordinary black lab. At some point it had been infected with an artificially engineered nanovirus. He caught the virus in the way one catches any ordinary cold, by breathing it in. The nanovirus lodged itself in some muscle tissue somewhere and started multiplying itself, and those replicas began to manufacture metal and dissolve calcium, began to wire into the nervous system and attack organic cells, consuming them as energy and replacing them with tiny machines. Many of the basic organs were left intact to save energy, like the heart. But this dog's bones were as strong as steel, and his brain and eyes were hardwired terminator style.

I have no doubt that this dream was inspired by Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Namely the "mites", which are microscopic nanotech devices programmed to do any number of things. These mites are omnipresent and inevitable in the air around you. Of course there are some malcontents that engineer and release harmful virus mites, which is why cities have developed their own immune systems a la defense mites that are programmed to seek and destroy the harmful ones.

But what's interesting to me is that despite all this talk in the book of implants and even of smart tattoos that achieve this end, those mites, those viruses in the Diamond Age never assimilate humans or animals the way the dog in my dream was subsumed. They either killed the organism, or tracked it, or read its mind, or made it prettier, but they never reproduced themselves. They never attempted to make a larger machine out of many small ones, to, in effect, turn a "natural" creature into a cyborg at least not in the physical sense. Most of Stephenson's stuff (this is the guy who brought you Snowcrash, remember), seems more focused on virtual realities, mental departures that may or may not ultimately culminate in a sort of bodilessness, but bodilessness nonetheless is different from a body infected with a machine like cancer.

No, that kind of cyberpunk belongs to the Japanese, mostly. The way they explore the relationship between technology and the body is fairly unique and developed. Human souls can exist inside machines, machines can gobble the body from within.



There seem to be two criteria when talking about post-humanism.

First, there is the physical body. Second, there is consciousness. When the physical body digresses from its natural state, it relies on technology to exist as it does, and becomes, in essence, part machine. I can't see two feet in front of my face without glasses or contacts. I've got a metal wire glued to the back of my bottom teeth. My grandmother has fake knees. Whatever.
When you outsource basic and necessary pieces of information (how many phone numbers do you know by heart?), you've used technology like an external hard drive for your mind. If you have long-distance friends you talk to primarily over the internet, you're allowing for - not a little - a lot of mitigation of your personality, your personhood, by a machine. One is tactile, the other is metaphysical. One is mechanical, the other is wireless.

There are people who argue that we have already become post-human and people who say we have not. Usually when they argue, they are really favoring one of those two things as a definition of what makes us human. In the physical sense, the litmus test is "if you shoot it in the heart, does it die?". I really want to talk about a Star Trek TNG episode right now, but I'll contain myself.

The problem with both of these threads in any case is they lie across a spectrum, and spectrums are dubious ugly little critters that muck everything up, and the whole universe lies across one. They say that physical accompaniments make us super-human, but the first time some guy used a sharp rock as an extension of his hand to make up for his short, clawless fingers, was he post-human? They say that uploading one's consciousness makes us cybernetic, but when the first guy drew a story about some buffalo on a wall, was he post-human?

And hey, are these not the very traits by which we distinguished the human from all others? Were they not written into our very makeup?

The anticipation is of the ticker tipping over, when we cross that line and develop out of our very skins. But I don't know if we're becoming post-human, I think it's far more likely we are becoming more human.

But what's crazy about all this is the pervasive sense that technological development takes us away from nature, as if the two exist on a kind of pulley system. Here's where post-humanism meets post-modernism and gets really annoying. Because who's to say what is natural? Who is to define the essence of a human? To even enter into an argument about post-humanism is to take a weirdly empiricist stance. On the contrary, if there is no outside judge, if nothing outside of us defines us, then we are what we are and it doesn't matter.

But it does matter doesn't it? Because of the fear. I have no idea why humans write into their fictions the most awful and terrifying psychosomatic wars between organic and artificial, fictions which by and large express seething anxiety over being enslaved, crushed, destroyed, or simply replaced by robots, and then turn around like hungry, cloying, desperate children tugging at the skirts of progress, begging more more more technology, more upgrades, more devices, faster, easier, stronger, smarter machines.

Is it self-conscious? Is it our discomfort over how much we love it? Is anything actually being lost? Why is almost every science fiction film or book dystopian? Are we afraid of a world in which we dial in our emotions like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Losing, maybe, our ability to feel? Losing touch with mortality? Losing our sense of limitation? Is the fear warranted or is this evolutionary adolescence? How can we possibly take ourselves from ourselves?



That's all I can fit in one blog post. Just a thought.