https://vegasharmon.com/tags/humanism/ Recent content in Humanism on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lookup-without-understanding/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/lookup-without-understanding/ “Artificial intelligence” is no more intelligent than a pocket calculator or a library: just because both can be used to quickly find something out, it does not mean that there is an intelligence there that understands something. This seems wrong. But why? The first reason that comes to mind is that AI is not as passive as a calculator or library. In contrast to a calculator, an LLM’s outputs are underspecified by human inputs. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fundamental-humanist-backlash-to-ai/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fundamental-humanist-backlash-to-ai/ It is easy to see why the C.E.O.s of A.I. companies might promote this theory. Mistrust is a familiar force in American public life. Both A.I. populism and A.I. doomerism are, in their own ways, politics as usual. They correspond to two well-established modes of discourse—the one of white papers and probability distributions, the other of spirited (and justified) calls for redistribution. But if people hate A.I. because it is at odds with their vision of the good life—because they see it as fundamentally anti-human—then the existing categories won’t suffice. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-a-complex-hesitation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-a-complex-hesitation/ As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ (Seven Beauties 4). As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-the-search-for-a-definition-of-man/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/sf-as-the-search-for-a-definition-of-man/ ‘Science Fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)’ (8). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-as-the-posthuman/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-as-the-posthuman/ For all intents and purposes, then, the monster represents what we might name the posthuman: a being replacing the human, coming after the human, and existing beyond human capacity. Frankenstein’s creation anticipates the posthuman condition. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-s-questions/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-monster-s-questions/ Consequently, pondering his own state of being, he asks: ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (Shelley 128). His questions point to the central motif of the story: the question of human nature, a human essence, and what to include in the definition of this essence. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/what-it-means-to-be-human/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/what-it-means-to-be-human/ ‘What constitutes human nature?’ or ‘What does it mean to be human?’ have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration.