Speculative Posthumanism

8/17/2019 Speculative Posthumanism

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Key cross-references: Computational Turn, Artificial Intelligence, AugmentedIntelligence, Biohacking, Post-Humanities, Inhuman Rationalism,

Transhumanism, Xenofeminism

Speculative Posthumanism

David Roden

Posthumanism comes in different flavours. The most common are CriticalPosthumanism (CP) and Speculative Posthumanism (SP). Both are critical of

human-centered (anthropocentric) thinking. However, their critiques apply to differentareas: CP questions the anthropocentrism of modern intellectual life; SP opposeshuman-centric thinking about the long-run implications of modern technology.

Critical posthumanists argue that Western Humanism is based on a dualist

conception of a rational, self-governing subject whose nature is self-transparent. According to Katherine Hayles and Neil Badmington, the term “posthuman” isappropriately applied to a late stage of modernity which the legitimating role of thehumanist subject handed down from Descartes to his philosophical successors has

eroded (Badmington 2003; Hayles 1999).

Whereas critical posthumanists are interested in the posthuman as a cultural andpolitical condition, speculative posthumanists are interested in a possibility of certaintechnologically created things. If CP uses “posthuman” as an adjective, SPnominalizes the term.

Speculative posthumanists claim that there could be posthumans: that is, there couldbe powerful nonhuman agents that arise through some human-instigated

technological process. Another way of putting this is to say that posthumans wouldbe “wide human descendants” of current humans who have become nonhuman invirtue of a process of technical alteration (Roden 2012; 2014).

The term “wide descent” is used to describe this historical succession becauseexclusive consideration of biological descendants of humanity as candidates forposthumanity would be excessively restrictive. Posthuman making could involvediscrete interventions into the reproductive process such as genetic engineering, or

exotic-seeming technologies such as methods of copying and "uploading" humanminds onto powerful computer systems.

SP is frequently conflated with Transhumanism, but it should not be.

Transhumanists, like classical and modern humanists, wish to cultivate supposedlyunique human capacities such as autonomy, reason and creativity. However, theyhope to add the fruits of advanced technologies to the limited toolkit of traditional

humanism, believing that prospective developments in the so-called “NBIC” suite oftechnologies 1 will allow humans unprecedented control over their capacities and

morphology (Bostrom 2005a, 2005b; Sorgner 2009).

Transhumanism is thus an ethical claim to the effect that technological enhancementof capacities like intelligence or empathy is a good thing.

SP, by contrast, is a metaphysical claim about the kinds of things that could exist inthe world. It states that there could be posthumans. It does not imply that

posthumans would be better than humans or that their lives would be comparable

from a single moral perspective. One can hold that a posthuman divergence from1 NBIC stands for “Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science.


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humanity is a significant possibility but not a desirable one (Roden 2012a; Chapter5).

This is not to say, of course, that SP lacks ethical and political implications but these

become apparent when we have an adequate account of what a posthumandivergence (or “disconnection”) might involve. I will return to this issue in the last part

of the entry.

There are no posthumans (as conceived by SP). Thus we are currently ignorant of

their mechanisms of emergence. It is conceivable that posthumans might arise inmany different ways, thus a philosophical posthumanism requires a mechanism-independent account of the concept of the posthuman. For example, we should nottreat mind uploading as a sine qua non of posthumanity because we do not knowthat mind uploading is possible or has posthuman-making potential.

A plausible condition for any posthuman-making event is that the resulting nonhuman

entities are capable of acquiring ends and roles that are not set by humans – andthat this autonomy is due to some alteration in the technological powers of things.Given our dated ignorance of posthumans this claim captures the core of the

speculative concept of the posthuman. This is referred to as the “DisconnectionThesis” (DT). Roughly, DT states posthumans are feral technological entities. Less

roughly, an agent is posthuman if and only if it can act independently of the “WideHuman” - the interconnected system of institutions, cultures, individuals, and

technological systems whose existence depends on biological (“narrow”) humans(Roden 2012; Roden 2014: 109-113).

One of the advantages of DT is that it allows us to understand human-posthumandifferences without being committed to a “human essence” that posthumans will lack.

Rather, we understand WH as an assemblage of biological and non-biologicalindividuals, whose history stretches from the world of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers tothe modern, interconnected world.

Becoming posthuman, then, is a matter of acquiring a technologically enabledcapacity for independent agency.

The fact that human-posthuman disconnection would not result from a difference inessential properties does not entail that it would not be significant. Just how

significant depends on the nature of posthumans. But DT says nothing aboutposthuman natures beyond ascribing a degree of independence to them. It is thusmultiply satisfiable by beings with different technological origins and very differentnatures or powers (e.g. artificial intelligences, mind-uploads, cyborgs, synthetic lifeforms, etc.).

Nonetheless, one picture of posthuman technogenesis has had pride of place in

philosophical and fictional writing on the posthuman. This is the prospect of human-created artificial intelligences (robots, intelligent computer or synthetic life forms)acquiring human intelligence or greater than human intelligence (superintelligence)thereby transcending human control or even understanding.

In futurist thought, this is called ‘the technological singularity’. The term comes from a1993 essay by the computer scientist Vernor Vinge ‘The Coming TechnologicalSingularity: How to survive in the posthuman Era’. According to Vinge, a singularitywould involve accelerating recursive improvements in artificial intelligence (AI)technology. This would come about if the relevant AI or Intelligence Amplification(IA) technologies were always “extendible” so that the application of greaterintelligence could yield even more intelligent systems. Our only current means of

producing human-equivalent intelligence is non-extendible: “If we have better sex, it

does not follow that our babies will be geniuses” (Chalmers 2010: 18).


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posthuman forms of life and being. At this point, arguably, the perspectives of CPand SP converge.

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Speculative Posthumanism