What is Post-humanism?
Let’s start here: What does it mean to be human if we are disembodied?
As someone who is active in both technology and the arts, I think I’ve got a unique perspective on this. The postulate of the post-human movement is predicated on the belief that the mind can be abstracted from the body and housed within a machine. The scenario was played out in science fiction but is now thought by adherents to be within reach. The human subject is connected to a powerful computer and all the thoughts, memories, beliefs and associations are extracted through a digital process and recorded in a computer. The subject continues to think, communicate and exist but without a body. If you hook the computer up to a system the extracted brain can be used to run operations.
I suppose you can consider this a kind of singularity.
Let’s examine the underlying assumptions that support this model:
Our experience of the world manifests to us vis-a-vis the brain and the brain is just like an awfully powerful computer. Given the ever-increasing power of computers, we should soon be able to create a computer that can function equivalently to the human brain. Once this has been achieved we can extract our sentient selves and live, in perpetuity, in machine form.
This is not a technological fantasy: it reflects religious, social, and economic beliefs.
The post-human belief system is based on a shared social understanding of what it means to be human. It may frequently be expressed through a technological fantasy of the computer-based human but it is just as visible in the way that we picture our selves.
But where does identity reside if we are disembodied? Look no further than social networks to envision what this can look like. A new framework to understand and contextualize friendship, social membership and human contact. And with it the awkward reconnects with high school sweethearts now grown so different as to be barely recognizable and the friends whose context is the network and not corporeal.
Reconstructing Social Systems in Our Own Image
Google’s social graph attempts to quantify and operationalize our emergent identities. In the industry we tend to see this effort as a marketing opportunity or, to put it more kindly, a more accurate way to deliver meaningful and relevant content and experiences to people. In addition to that we may see an emergent phenomenon: With the introduction of highly integrated social applications that respond to and build upon each other (i.e., ifttt, storify) the door opens for automated connections and consequent actions that are not triggered by individual actions but by the collective action of multiple systems.
It promises to be increasingly easy to lose control, not only of the posts that display in your Facebook timeline, but in the actual social connections, recommendations and communications that are generated on your behalf.
Why it Really is Post-human(ism)
It’s an easy shot, but just for laughs and giggles, compare the fifteenth century immaculate conception with the twenty-first century version that displays at the top of this post.
The Renaissance version by Bellegambe depicts the fetus as a vision, a thought in the process of becoming. In Bellegambe’s day anatomy was in its infancy, yet more importantly, it didn’t represent the truth that mattered. What did matter was theological and interpersonal. Hirst’s may be purely anatomical, (and it is modeled after scientific models used by medical students) but, intention is important and the title, Virgin Mother, is Hirst’s way of pointing us back to the religious subject and forcing the comparison. Students of art history will see this as a trope in the Dechampian tradition, but viewed in the context of the post-human movement it could just as easily be our David.
Views and attitudes are never final nor are they ever independent of the social conditions from which they emerge.
Image top: Virgin Mother, Damien Hirst, 2005 Bronze, approx. 33′
Image bottom: St. Anne and the Conception of Mary, Jean Bellegambe, c. 1515, oil on wood, 36 x 26 cm
Share this article
