If you showed ancient man what life is like in postmodern times (the Strange Times), I don't think he would even be able to process it. Sure, the basics are still the same - streets, buildings, police ; money, jobs, love, power. These things are more or less unchanged since 5000 BC. But it takes decades to get acclimated to how the world really works, and the devil's in the details. This is the age of the spiritual machine - we have plastic hearts, we carry ghosts of music with us in our pocket, we access a net of communication which lets us send banal text messages to someone on the other side of the globe. Even old fogeys like Thucydides would acknowledge that this is still humanity, no matter how weird it's gotten.
But there are people on the fringe, who I wonder - have they left humanity already?
I'm thinking of the Lizard Man, who has taken decades to change his body into something else. He's out of society now - he will never again be able to go to the bank or get a cheeseburger without his lizard-ness separating him from the rest of us.
Or Stephen Hawking. He's practically a robot, and his intelligence and status falls well outside the bell curve. He doesn't live like we do. He doesn't think like we do. How much of us is in him?
I think Thucydides (who I've arbitrarily picked to speak for ancient man) would recognize that these guys, no matter how different they are, are still humans. Like Spider Jerusalem said, as long as there's still a human mind, it's still a human, right?
In writing this post, I made four or five different google searches - looking up facts, scanning through pictures of the lizard man, creating links to other related topics... In many ways this post only partially came from my brain, and partially came from the web of information out there. I don't have to remember a fact, as long as I can figure out how to access it. The internet serves as my "off-board memory", in a sense. Are these my thoughts, my memories? Or are they just a resonance between my meat and the growing collective consciousness?
I mean, we're all cyborgs now, augmenting our minds and our lives with technology. And then there's the work on the genome that they're doing. You better believe that if I have the option of rasing genetically enhanced humans, I'd take it. Let's make them disease resistant, extend their lifespan, hone their intelligence... after all that tinkering with the very blueprints of life, will we still be human?
I think these are interesting questions. I don't think we'll ever reach a point where we collectively decide that we're not humans anymore, but if we do, we'll see this period of history as being well on the way. We'll look back and say, yeah, we were cyborgs then, and didn't recognize the changes that were taking place were kind of fundamental.
This is a really insightful post, Cram, and I agree with almost all of it. The only part that I would like to contend with is the part which I have bolded.
I agree that the escalation of the scale and scope of technology has altered the way in which we live, but to me your statement seems to say that the technology that we use alters the way that
we're alive. A subtle lexical difference, but it carries major undertones. My apologies if this is not what you were intending, but in the interests of seeing this hypothesis to its conclusion, I'll continue.
Yes, technology has altered the way in which we conduct our daily life practices, but to say that the change in daily life practices has changed us seems a little far-fetched to me. After all, there have been several such technological leaps among civilizations, and within and among those civilizations we do not consider the people to be any different in fundamental makeup. For example, before the advent of writing people had to memorize stories and tell them verbally. After writing came about, however, people no longer had to memorize whole epics (note: I know that the majority of people were still illiterate until very recently, but I am just speaking in terms of the potential of literacy here) and communicate solely by sound and kinesics. The invention of writing served in a similar way to computer information archiving, making it to where storytellers did not have to remember entire stories on their own.
In this example, we don't think of the literate societies as fundamentally different, as pen-and-paper (quill-and-papyrus?) golems or something (sorry, that's the best pre-technological analogy to cyborgs I can think of off the top of my head), but merely as a group of people who uses different techniques to accomplish the same challenges of the past. The physical, psychological and social measures of humanity (e.g. the need to eat, socialize, be warm, have some level of mental stimulation, etc) still applied between both sets, and it is only the means of satisfying those measures that were altered.
I don't mean to sound Carlylian here by reducing humanity to the satisfaction of needs, as if we were some sort of all-encompassing digestive system. I merely want to say that the basic human needs, drives and responses, both physically and psychologically, remain the same over time over a population, changing only slowly by evolutionary processes. In the meantime, the developments that change our way of life do not alter the fundamental way in which we interact with our world, because if those developments/tools were removed, people would still exist and be capable of the same life activities as they were previously able to undertake.
In regards to those who have "left humanity already," as you put it, I agree that they are still human, although they utilize different tools to fulfill their physical and social needs. Likewise, I agree that even with the most out-there developments of the transhumanist movements, there might never be a time in which we "collectively decide that we're not humans anymore." The changes that [most or many] transhumanists are attempting to enact are not changes to discard our basic needs and drives, but are instead changes to give ourselves the capabilities of fulfilling those things more effectively.
If, one day, the trannies are able to give us true hivemind, bodily regeneration, immortality, the cessation of suffering, nanotech life, or any other host of changes that would alter one of the fundamental underlying drives of the human condition, it would then be useful to declare humanity to have transcended its humanity. However, until one or more of the drives which connect us to our progenitors and their lineage is severed, I think it is probably more useful to think of the developments in terms of useful tools to alter the superficial processes of drive fulfillment, rather than as developments which make humanity into "cyborgs" or, as in my example, quill-and-papyrus golems.
