Rethinking THE HUMAN

The human. A living entity that thinks and is singular in its capacity for reason, rationality, and purpose creation. Seneca famously described humanity as “the reasoning animal”. Neither god nor animals - we are Homo Sapiens. How human is the human? The “human” body is the domain of codes, cells, enzymes, and genes; of metabolic networks, biopathaways, immunoknowledge and protein folding; of synoptic networks, fibre axon terminals, and large dendritic trees. None of these things are human in any meaningful way. Also, we share 99% of our biological information with chimpanzees. So, if we are made up of inhuman processes, cells, and organisms, then what does it mean to be human? And what do we mean when we talk about the inhuman? What is technology doing to the idea of the human? Is humanity our consciousness? The spectacular development of biogenetics is gradually dissolving the frontiers between humans and animals on the one side and between humans and machines on the other, giving rise to the idea that we are on the threshold of a new form of Intelligence, a “more-than-human” singularity in which mind will no longer be subject to bodily constraints, including those of sexual reproduction. We as species are at a point where we can transcend ourselves, we can abandon what it means to be human and embrace what is yet to come. Each of us humans are in equal measures, inhuman. We have inhuman capacities within all of us. The inhuman is already there, the question is, how do we make good on that?