The Post-human Fallacy

I'm actually sitting here watching The Incredibles for the second time this weekend, searching for the Main Nerve. What was it that triggered my rat-brain to respond to the so-called philosophers of the post-human with the emotional equivalent of fatwa? I have no problem with superheroes; I saw and dug the last Batman movie; I'm a fan of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and find the refrain "Humanity must be o'erleapt!" to have healing power. The current spurs to my thought are a NYT Mag interview with the maker of Wikiscanner, and a piece in Der Spiegel, but they might as well have been Heroes, Fringe, or Mitt Romney. No shortage.

The idea of superfluous human potential is a soothing fantasy. For a Saturday evening's entertainment, a spectacular fiction. Theorists of the post-human are -- I think; the lines blur between what are, to a post-humanist, the inevitable consequences of the "post-human condition," and what are ideological postures to be advocated -- doing something apart from the modern project of perfectible humanity, sublated into pure Spirit.

Which makes a defense of a -- by contrast, if not authentically -- humanist position a little more slippery. If we were talking about exceeding human potential through cloned organs, genetic modification, artifical neural nets, usw, it would suffice to refute such ambitions with a sardonic, "Cf. Levi, Primo, 'Angelic Butterfly,' in The Sixth Day and Other Tales," which is one of Levi's sci-fi works, describing the reluctant work of a Nazi scientist locked into experiments in human potential. Turns out that believing adult humans are actually larval and dosing them with hormones has ugly consequences.

But post-human theorists can't be caricatured as a new generation of Dr. Mengeles. There is a sense of fatigue in the work that any resolute modernist would shy from, and that frankly, gets its impetus (if you can call it that) from the same place as sparked Levi's pity/scorn for humanity. The problem of justifying human activity (building, writing, producing, spawning) via humanism (if our works are meant to give us fleeting access to our higher nature, where in the pantheon is Auschwitz?) is yes cumbersome. That doesn't mean that we can shunt off the responsibility to account for the ideology beneath our actions elsewhere, like "I dunno. Humanity is a problem. Let's leave it to the cyborgs."

This isn't about the menace inherent in any discussion of our non-human doppelgangers (Although of course it is also about that. I think of a Mitt-Romney-Terminator, what about you? Also: What's the difference between zombies and cyborgs? Braaaiinsss).

I suspect that theorists of the post-human, like acolytes of any new religion, need a coping mechanism to deal with radical inhumanity. Rather than do the hard work of admitting that hideous humans are still human, isn't it easier to change the subject; to enter into endless divagations about what constitutes a human, when life begins, what is the nature of consciousness, und so weiter?

How tired of human problems do you have to be to fantasize about artificial intelligence and artificial corporeality? Isn't the Singularity just one more otaku vision of hyperreal pocket pussy, as the NYT slyly suggests?

MEET SINGLES: Afraid of, or excited by, the prospect of ultraintelligent machines that can think, learn and know that they’re thinking and learning?[...]

More later. Perhaps sometime I'll be able to articulate my love of Nietzsche vis-a-vis my hatred of cyborgs (seriously, Human, All too Human is not a curse, it's a gift). Right now, I'm going to Netflix A Scanner Darkly...peace...
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