Presentation for Talk given at the Anthropotech Conference, Bristol 9-10 January 9-10 http://www.anthropotech.org.uk/multimedia.html

1. David Roden, Open University

2. Posthuman Possibility Space (PPS)
Impossible Posthumans
Possible Posthumans

3. Comprehending {PPS}
{PPS} Set of possible posthumans
Nick 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.

4. Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement II
DE) P is an F-enhancer if and only if
• Some S has function F.
• Doing P makes S a better F’er
Brains have the function Learning.
If taking Ritalin makes brains better learners,
Ritalin is a Learning-enhancer.

5. Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement III
1) Doing P makes S acquire a new function F*.
AND S loses F or gets worse at Fing.
2) Doing P creates a new system S* with a new function F*
AND S loses F or gets worse at Fing.
OR S* replaces S
Neither 1) nor 2) constitute enhancements.

6. Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement III
Technology as “Dangerous” supplement
• Real examples: Language, submarines,
symbolic search, rocketry, etc.
• SF examples: The Borg, Instrumental
Elimination of the Folk

8. Instrumental Elimination of the Folk
Once the channel is opened between two or more people they can
learn (learn) to exchange information and coordinate their behavior
with the same intimacy and virtuosity displayed by your own cerebral
hemispheres. Think what this might do for hockey teams, and ballet
companies, and research teams! If the entire population were thus
fitted out, spoken language of any kind might well disappear
completely, a victim of the "why crawl when you can fly?" principle.
Libraries become filled not with books, but with long recordings of
exemplary bouts of neural activity. These constitute a growing cultural
heritage, an evolving "Third World," to use Karl Popper's terms. But
they do not consist of sentences or arguments.
Churchland, Paul 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional
Attitudes”, Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67-90.

9. Posthumanism: Alteration vs. Enhancement IV
“Enhancement” does not comprehend all of
{PPS}
But, then what does it meant to be
“posthuman”
and how (if at all) do we delineate PPS?

10. Posthumanism: Speculative and Critical
Speculative Posthumanism (SP)
• Concerned with the implications of possible successors to
humans brought about by technological agency.
Critical Posthumanism (CP)
• Interrogates the foundational status of the human in ethics,
politics and epistemology.
Are SP and CP antithetic or complementary?

11. Speculative Posthumanism
(SP) Wide Descendants of current humans could cease to
be human by virtue of a history of technical alteration.
Exclusive consideration of biological descendants of humanity as candidates for posthumanity
would be excessively restrictive. Future extensions of NBIC technologies may involve discrete bio-
technical modifications of the reproductive process such as human cloning, the introduction of
transgenic or artificial genetic material or very exotic processes such as personality uploading or
“mind-cloning”. Thus entities warranting our concern with the posthuman could emerge via
modified biological descent, recursive extension of AI technologies (involving human and/or non-
human designers), quasi-biological descent from synthetic organisms, a convergence of the
above, or via some technogenetic process yet to be envisaged.
“The Disconnection Thesis” (forthcoming in the The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and
Philosophical Assessment).

12. The Disconnection Thesis
A Wide Human Descendant is a posthuman:
1) If it has ceased to belong to the Human Social/Technical
Network as a result of technical alteration.
2) Or if it is a wide human descendant of a posthuman.

13. Critical Posthumanism
Q: What are Critical Posthumanists critical of?
A: Humanism . . .
. . . or, rather, anthropocentrism. A humanism is just a philosophy with an
anthropology and not all humanisms are anthropocentric!
A humanism qualifies as anthropocentric if its anthropology privileges
humans or some notional human standpoint.
CP enjoins the evaluation, critique and rectification of anthropological
assumptions in order to overcome anthropocentric thinking.

14. Sampling the Diversity of CP
The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean
by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The
subject of writing is a system of relations between
strata . . . the psyche, society, the world. Within
that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity
of the classical subject is not to be found (Jacques
Derrida, Writing and Difference).
Inspired ultimately by Immanuel Kant, correlationists are devoted to the human-world correlate as the
sole topic of philosophy . . . this has become the unspoken central dogma of all continental and much
analytic philosophy.
Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux
[The] posthuman does not really mean the end of Naturalism is, among other things, the
humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain metaphysical hypothesis that the
conception of the human, a conception that may objective world is not constrained by
once have applied, at best, to that fraction of any reasons or standards of
reasonableness (James Ladyman and
humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go).
conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings
exercising their will through individual agency and
choice. (N Katherine Hayles, H
ow We Became Posthuman)

15. Anthropological Bounds on SP
• Not all conceivable posthumans belong to PPS (i.e. some conceivable
posthumans may be impossible).
• Given any WHD, anthropology plausibly constrains the scope for
disconnection.

16. How Anthropology Bounds Posthuman
Possibility
• A disconnection requires a posthuman difference-maker (e.g. a
technological singularity)
• Anthropology bounds the posthuman by constraining possible
difference makers.

17. Thesis: There needs to be Synthesis
Speculative Posthumanists must evaluate CP claims about the
deficiencies of humanisms to understand the scope for
disconnection.

18. The ontic axis specifies distinguishing human attributes: having a human
essence, belonging to a natural kind or a historically differentiated population
The transcendental axis specifies conditions of possibility for subjectivity,
objectivity, Being, value, etc
(Transcendental Humanism, Agent Instrumentalism . . .)

19. I was reading Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, enjoying
the ingenious variety of his robots, when I happened upon the passage where he argues it will soon
be possible to download human consciousness into a computer. To illustrate, he invents a fantasy
scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction, reading
the information in each molecular layer as it is stripped away and transferring the information into
a computer. At the end of the operation, the cranial cavity is empty, and the patient, now inhabiting
the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exactly the same as it was
before.
How, I asked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec’s obvious intelligence to believe that
mind could be separated from body? Even assuming such a separation was possible, how could
anyone think that consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged, as if it
had no connection with embodiment? Shocked into awareness, I began to notice he was far from
alone. (Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman)
Hayles is no doubt right. (Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism)

20. • If Hayles is right, uploaded persons do not belong in
posthuman possibility space.
But increased substrate dependence widens the
scope for disconnection through morphological
variation.

21. An object is a possible object of human experience. Any object of
human experience is knowable (transcendental phenomenology)
That p entails that p is knowable (verificationism)
Given TH, there can be no unknowable facts or things in
themselves.
It is conceivable that there would be facts about posthumans
humans cannot know.
TH rules out such posthumans.

22. 1. The ability to have beliefs (thus desires, intentions) requires a grasp of what belief is
since to believe is also to understand 'the possibility of being mistaken'
2. Believers must understand that others might have true or false beliefs about the same
topic.
3. Thus no belief can be adopted by someone not already involved in evaluating her own
and others’ attitudes according to shared standards and norms.
4. Language is the only intersubjective framework in which beliefs can be assessed.
5. Only language users are believers.
• Since intentions and desires presuppose belief, only language users are agents.
• Since knowing that p entails belief that p, only language users are knowers.

23. • Ascribing belief/agency to non-language users is only a predictive strategy,
implying zero ontic commitment.
• There are currently no non-human agents/knowers, anywhere.
• Agency Instrumentalism rules out non-language-using posthumans.

24. Conclusions:
• Posthuman possibility is anthropologically bounded.
• SP’s metaphysical scope varies according to CP’s critical hits
and misses.
• SP/CP are not antithetic projects.
• The enhancement debate does not address “our” future in
PPS.