The Disconnection Thesis

Speculative Posthumanism

Our technical activity in areas such as the NBIC technologies

(Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science)

could produce “living” beings significantly alien to us.

There might be post-humans…

The Posthuman Impasse

Given Speculative Posthumanism,

Discounting the posthuman consequences of our actions seems irresponsible.

Accounting for them, then, seems obligatory

….but maybe impossible.

The SP Schema

SP: Descendants of current humans could cease to be human as a consequence of a history of technical alteration.

Key features of SP

• Value Neutrality

• Descent is wide not just biological

• Human-Posthuman difference consists in a relation between historical individuals

…not concepts or abstract kinds.

Value Neutrality: Alteration vs. Enhancement

• Bostrom: A posthuman is a being with:

“a central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means”

Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up’, in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, ed. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 107-137.

Wide Descent: Supporting Assumptions

I) The appropriate concept of descent for SP is not biological but technically mediated to an arbitrary degree.

II) Humanity is already the socio-technical result of a technogenetic process.

Wide Human Descent

• The Wide Human (WH) is an assemblage with both “narrowly” human and narrowly non-human parts (e.g. domesticated animals, technologies, etc.).

• An entity is a wide human descendant if it is the result of a technically mediated process:

A) Caused by a wide human descendant (recursive part).

B) Caused by a part of WH.

The Disconnection Thesis

A wide human descendent is a posthuman iff:

I.it has ceased to belong to WH (The Wide Human) as a result of technical alteration.

II.Or is related by wide descent to such a being.

“Apophatic” Accounting

Flat OntologyWhile] an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status.

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum 2009), 58.

Flat ontology disavows essences and thus blocks accounting by apophasis!

Disconnections

• Superhuman intelligence via recursive intelligence amplification (Vingean singularity)

• The production of novel cognitive formats (e.g. Instrumental elimination of propositional attitudes)

• Non-Personal Phenomenologies

Disconnections

• Non-human social dispositions (Super-cooperators, super-individualists…)

• Technically engendered Niche-differences

• ?

Metaphysical Implications

A posthuman-making event occurs iff. a part of WH goes “feral”, “AWOL”, etc. and this is an effect of technology (Disconnection thesis)

No entity is intrinsically posthuman. An entity is posthuman in virtue of its historical relationship to WH.

To be a posthuman-maker a technology T just has to instantiate this causal role. (Multiple Realizability)

No Radical Aliens

• What if some posthumans are very weird indeed (swarm intelligences, etc.) ? We might not be in a position to interpret and thus evaluate these forms of life.

• A flat-ontology countenances varying difficulty of human-relative interpretation.

…But not human-relative uninterpretability (that requires a human cognitive essence!)