https://vegasharmon.com/tags/posthumanism/ Recent content in Posthumanism on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle. In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common (at least among far-thinking futurist types who populated the Bay Area) to believe that the coming Singularity would be the single greatest event in the history of the universe, the culmination of the techno-capitalist project that has already done so much good for humanity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “extropian” community in the Bay Area (a futurist collective committed to fighting entropy and death, which organized around local meetups, an academic institute and a popular mailing list) eagerly awaited the Singularity, believing that a glorious transhuman future — free from all death, suffering, and scarcity — awaited them on the other side. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/science-without-scientists-knowledge-without-knowers/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/science-without-scientists-knowledge-without-knowers/ So far, the progress of science, the accomplishments of literature, have gone hand-in-hand with the formation of scientists and writers. But that consonance between human type and achieving a result has now been broken. The future we are looking at is one of more science but fewer, or no, scientists. Astrophysics without astrophysicists, history without historians—this is the future. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tech-magnates-need-no-arguments/ Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/tech-magnates-need-no-arguments/ Yet a certain intellectual vacuity has hardly proved to be an obstacle to the ambitions of contemporary tech giants. To the contrary. So it would be naive to suppose that what is wanted are better arguments or sturdier postulates. The far-reaching developments taking place right now—particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence—are not the result of some philosophical breakthrough. The authority of the tech magnates does not derive from victory in some forensic contest but from the fact that they need no arguments to begin with: They are simply moving forward regardless. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-computer-longs-to-be-human/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-computer-longs-to-be-human/ Homay King argues in Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality that the epistle’s “tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing…Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/biopunk-and-the-posthuman-predicament/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/biopunk-and-the-posthuman-predicament/ It is from within the genre tradition of science fiction and especially cyberpunk that biopunk was born into a world that has become science-fictional itself. At the heart of this development lies the realization that we are now not ‘considered fully human’ and that ‘after the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament’ (Braidotti 1), one clear indication of which seems to be that ‘contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’ (Braidotti 40). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-breaks-up-dichotomies/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-breaks-up-dichotomies/ For me then, at the heart of cyberpunk fiction is the radical breaking up of dichotomies and the destabilizing of boundaries: machine/human, nature/culture, male/female, high culture/ low culture, body/mind. Because of this, cyberpunk is believed by many critics to embody the postmodern, post-industrial, globalized, and late-capitalist world at the end of the twentieth century (Luckhurst 196ff.; McHale 225ff.). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-versus-biopunk/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-versus-biopunk/ This opposition of mechanical versus biological augmentation then prompts McHale to conclude in regard to his cyberpunk poetics that there are two sets of posthuman conceits employed by the authors: ‘We might call the first set, corresponding to the Mech option, cyberpunk proper, and the second set, corresponding to the Shaper option, “bio-punk”’ (ibid.). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-anti-capitalist-pose/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-anti-capitalist-pose/ In addition, cyberpunk strikes a revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist pose similar to its nominal relation ‘punk.’ To facilitate this critique, cyberpunk essentially orchestrates the evanescence of the human body initiated by ‘multinational capitalism’s desire for something better than the fallible human being’ (Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Cyberpunk’ 191). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-caste-societies/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/cyberpunk-s-caste-societies/ Cyberpunk’s societies are fraught with inequality, exploitation, and insecurity. Its worlds are unstable and fragmented, its representation stressing the fluidity of its ontological aspects (McHale 247). Cyberpunk emphasizes the construction of a globalized society into class or caste systems, showing off the mobility of characters from the elite class and the rigidity of the lower classes. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Upholding God’s design and keeping the boundaries of nature and culture under supervision were thus the ideals of pre-modern utopian endeavors. With modernity came the urge to control and manipulate nature, resulting in the gardener’s approach as a concept of utopianism. (…) In gardening utopias, man took control over his garden, giving it ‘constant attention and effort,’ forcing ‘his preconceived design on the plot’ (Bauman, Liquid Times 99) by selection, cultivation, and exclusion of unwanted elements. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/grieving-the-lost-future/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/grieving-the-lost-future/ So many people have lived such grand lives. I have certainly lived a greater life than I expected, filled with adventures and curious people. But people will soon not live any lives at all. I believe that we will soon build intelligences more powerful than us who will disempower and kill us all. I will see no children of mine grow to adulthood. No people will walk through mountains and trees. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-as-a-private-affair/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/happiness-as-a-private-affair/ All of these are not part of individualized, consumption-oriented society of liquid modernity; rather ‘happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow[, it] […] has become a private affair, and a matter for here and now’ (Society 240). 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/immortality-through-stardom/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/immortality-through-stardom/ Liquid modernity seems to prefer the individualistic approach to immortality through the symbolic (in either the memory of one’s children or in leaving traces in the collective memory) by making a mark on history. The self-centered and celebratory road of stardom, self-aggrandizement, and public exposure seems to be the contemporary strategy of choice in order to achieve immortality. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ The ultimate argument for this disappearance, though, belongs to Michel Foucault and his claim that ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (The Order of Things 387). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/needs-are-socially-constructed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/needs-are-socially-constructed/ Because of the socially constructed nature of both need and satisfaction, Levitas further argues, there cannot be an evaluation of utopia based on universal principles of what constitutes a ‘good society’ and what a ‘bad society’: ‘If needs are socially constructed, the project of trying to read off the good society from a definition of human nature and human needs is doomed to failure’ (184). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-destinations-appear/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-destinations-appear/ But as Levitas has argued, the fragmentation of these futures, the dissolution of clear-cut boundaries, and the presentation of multiple possible paths leave us in the dark, unable to decide which way to turn as no destinations appear. 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-cyborg-as-central-metaphor/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-cyborg-as-central-metaphor/ Robotics and computer science had progressed immensely and the cyborg became the central metaphor to understand social and cultural reality as a construction of multiple identities, a metaphor truly made for the late twentieth-century imagination: ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 149). 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-hunter-s-utopia/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hunter-s-utopia/ The hunter’s utopia is thus most importantly characterized not as a fixed goal to strive for, but as a process of living in constant movement. ‘Hunters search for fun, excitement, validation, consumer goods and identity’ (‘Liquid’ 76), Jacobsen argues, all the while sampling and surfing their way through an endless array of opportunities. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-insignificance-of-politics/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-insignificance-of-politics/ Bauman shares Levitas’s analysis that the possibility of utopian change is located in politics and that political agency has been dissolved: ‘The most conspicuous feature of contemporary politics,’ Bauman writes, ‘is its insignificance’ (In Search 4). The dual translation between the public and the private that politics is supposed to facilitate has been turned inside out, as Bauman argues, and ‘politics has been effectively disarmed’ (Society 169). Flaws in policy cannot be grasped as unethical anymore, because they do not connect to the individual directly, whereas unethical private actions become political outrages (as witnessed in the Clinton– Lewinsky affair), when the individual life choices do not appeal to the public. 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/the-u-via-banishes-the-question-of-meaning/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-u-via-banishes-the-question-of-meaning/ But Bauman is wary of the utopian perspective that the hunt offers, as he concludes his musings by saying that ‘the utopia, or “u-via”, of hunters, the utopia of life revolving around the pursuit of constantly elusive fashion, does not give sense to life, whether authentic or fake. It merely helps to banish the question of life’s meaning from our minds’ (Culture 30). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of two places. It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the silly human values. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-speed/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-speed/ Most importantly, utopia in liquid modernity is ‘linked to mobility, not to a place’: ‘The liquid modern equivalents of the Utopias of yore are neither about time nor about space – but about speed and acceleration’ (Society 241). Bauman concludes that ‘the posture of the gardener is nowadays giving way to that of the hunter’ (Liquid Times 100). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-the-education-of-desire/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/utopia-as-the-education-of-desire/ ‘The function of utopia,’ Levitas concludes, ‘thus reverts from that of a goal and catalyst of change to one of criticism, and the education of desire, without any necessary move forward into action’ (196). 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. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shadows-of-the-coming-race/ Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/shadows-of-the-coming-race/ My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that “all this will soon be done by machinery.