The Posthuman Condition

Introduction to the Posthuman Condition

There seems to be an inherent compulsion in the human condition to try and understand our own existence. From diverse epochs of human history comes evidence of attempts to make sense of what we are, and how we relate to the world. We understand how earlier humans saw forces of nature, controlled by Gods, as determining human existence and subjecting us to their whim. By enhancing our technical capabilities, the story goes, we gained increasing confidence in our ability to exert control over those forces and impose our own will on nature. In the humanist period of western development, where science advanced and deities held less sway, it even became possible to think of our selves, with our intelligence and skills, as coming to dominate a fickle and violent nature. Indeed, some thinkers came to believe the universe is precisely tuned to the production of human existence — a theory latterly known as the ‘Strong Anthropic Principle’.

Today the possibilities suggested by synthetic intelligence, organic computers and genetic modification are deeply challenging to that sense of human predominance. These developments awaken deep-rooted anxieties about the threat to human existence from technology we cannot control or understand. We know we are capable of creating entities that may equal and even surpass us, and we must seriously face up to the possibility that attributes like human thought may be created in non-human forms. While this is one of our deepest fears it is also the holy grail of the computer sciences. Despite the enormous problems involved, the development of an artificially conscious entity may happen within our lifetimes. Would such an entity have human-like emotions; would it have a sense of its own being?

This book argues that such questions are difficult to answer given the redundant concepts of human existence that we have inherited from the humanist era, since many widely accepted humanist ideas about consciousness can no longer be sustained. In addition, new theories about nature and the operation of the universe arising from computer modelling are starting to demonstrate the profound interconnections between all things in nature where previously we had seen separations. This has implications for traditional views of the human condition and for some of the oldest problems in philosophy.

All material © Robert Pepperell, 2002