Thanks for writing this; I’ve briefly attempted looking at his ideas, but most of it is unreadable. Most of his remaining ideas seem at least somewhat mystical, which makes me skeptical, but it’s useful to know!
I will review more posthumanism, things like Dark Ecology, Object-Oriented Ontology, and such.
[According to dark ecology,] we must obliterate the false opposition between nature and people… the idea of nature itself is a damaging construct, and that humans (with their microbial biomass) are always already nonhuman.
Object-Oriented Ontology… rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects
Somewhat independently of transhumanism, posthumanism developed in a more philosophical and less scientific style in the liberal arts department, with different viewpoints, often ambiguous and not at all happy.
posthumanism… refers to the contemporary critical turn away from Enlightenment humanism… a rejection of familiar Cartesian dualisms such as self/other, human/animal, and mind/body...
My personal thought is that the future is weird, beyond happy or sad, good or evil. Transhumanism is too intent on good and evil, and from what I’ve read so far, posthumanism uses less human value judgments. As such, posthuman thoughts would be essential for an accurate prediction of the future.
Solaris (1972) seems like a good story illustration of posthumanism.
The peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.
The second law of thermodynamics isn’t magic; it’s simply the fact that when you have categories with many possible states that fit in them, and categories with only a few states that count, jumping randomly from state to state will tend to put you in the larger categories. Hence melting-arrange atoms randomly and it’s more likely that you’ll end up in a jumble than in one of the few arrangements that permit solidity. Hence heat equalizing-the kinetic energy of thermal motion can spread out in many ways, but remain concentrated in only a few; thus it tends to spread out. You can call that the universe hating order if you like, but it’s a well-understood process that operates purely through small targets being harder to hit; not through a force actively pushing us towards chaos, making particles zig when they otherwise would have zagged so as to create more disorder.
This being the case, claiming that life exists for the purpose of wasting energy seems absurd. Evolution appears to explain the existence of life, and it is not an entropic process. Positing anything else being behind it requires evidence, something about life that evolution doesn’t explain and entropy-driven life would. Also, remember, entropy doesn’t think ahead. It is purely the difficulty of hitting small targets; a bullet isn’t going to ‘decide’ to swerve into a bull’s eye as part of a plan to miss more later! It would be very strange if this could somehow mold us into fearing both death and immortality as part of a plan to gather as much energy as we could, then waste it through our deaths.
This seems like academics seeking to be edgy much more than a coherent explanation of biology.
As for transhumanism being overly interested in good or evil, what would you suggest we do instead? It’s rather self-defeating to suggest that losing interest in goodness would be a good idea.
Thanks for writing this; I’ve briefly attempted looking at his ideas, but most of it is unreadable. Most of his remaining ideas seem at least somewhat mystical, which makes me skeptical, but it’s useful to know!
I will review more posthumanism, things like Dark Ecology, Object-Oriented Ontology, and such.
Somewhat independently of transhumanism, posthumanism developed in a more philosophical and less scientific style in the liberal arts department, with different viewpoints, often ambiguous and not at all happy.
My personal thought is that the future is weird, beyond happy or sad, good or evil. Transhumanism is too intent on good and evil, and from what I’ve read so far, posthumanism uses less human value judgments. As such, posthuman thoughts would be essential for an accurate prediction of the future.
Solaris (1972) seems like a good story illustration of posthumanism.
This seems wrong.
The second law of thermodynamics isn’t magic; it’s simply the fact that when you have categories with many possible states that fit in them, and categories with only a few states that count, jumping randomly from state to state will tend to put you in the larger categories. Hence melting-arrange atoms randomly and it’s more likely that you’ll end up in a jumble than in one of the few arrangements that permit solidity. Hence heat equalizing-the kinetic energy of thermal motion can spread out in many ways, but remain concentrated in only a few; thus it tends to spread out. You can call that the universe hating order if you like, but it’s a well-understood process that operates purely through small targets being harder to hit; not through a force actively pushing us towards chaos, making particles zig when they otherwise would have zagged so as to create more disorder.
This being the case, claiming that life exists for the purpose of wasting energy seems absurd. Evolution appears to explain the existence of life, and it is not an entropic process. Positing anything else being behind it requires evidence, something about life that evolution doesn’t explain and entropy-driven life would. Also, remember, entropy doesn’t think ahead. It is purely the difficulty of hitting small targets; a bullet isn’t going to ‘decide’ to swerve into a bull’s eye as part of a plan to miss more later! It would be very strange if this could somehow mold us into fearing both death and immortality as part of a plan to gather as much energy as we could, then waste it through our deaths.
This seems like academics seeking to be edgy much more than a coherent explanation of biology.
As for transhumanism being overly interested in good or evil, what would you suggest we do instead? It’s rather self-defeating to suggest that losing interest in goodness would be a good idea.