Abstract
In this essay I claim that Vinge’s idea of a technologically led intelligence explosion is philosophically important because it requires us to consider the prospect of a posthuman condition succeeding the human one. What is the “humanity” to which the posthuman is “post”? Does the possibility of a posthumanity presuppose that there is a ‘human essence’, or is there some other way of conceiving the human-posthuman difference? I argue that the difference should be conceived as an emergent disconnection between individuals, not in terms of the presence or lack of essential properties.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The term “assemblage” is used by the philosopher Manuel Delanda to refer to any emergent but decomposable whole and belongs to the conceptual armory of the particularist “flat” ontology I will propose for Speculative Posthumanism in section Disconnection and Anti-Essentialism below. Assemblages are emergent wholes in that they exhibit powers and properties not attributable to their parts but which causally depend upon their parts. Assemblages are also decomposable insofar as all the relations between their components are “external”: each part can be detached from the whole to exist independently (Assemblages are thus opposed to “totalities” in an idealist or holist sense). This is the case even where the part is functionally necessary for the continuation of the whole (DeLanda 2006, p. 184).
- 2.
Another way of putting this is to say that in any possible world that humans exist they are rational. Other properties of humans may be purely “accidental”—e.g. their colour or language. It is not part of the essence of humans that they speak English, for example. Insofar as speaking English is an accidental property of humans, there are possible worlds in which there are humans but no English speakers.
- 3.
Absent defeaters (See Chalmers 2010).
- 4.
Where the emergent property occurs at the same time as the microstates on which it depends, we have an instance of “synchronic emergence” (Humphrey 2008, pp. 586–7).
- 5.
Vinge alludes to this possibility in his far-future space epic A Fire Upon the Deep (Vinge 1992). In Fire posthumans so powerful as to be god-like in comparison with the most enhanced transhuman exist on a computationally extreme fringe of space known as “the Transcend” where they are studied by “applied theologians” from observatories on the margins of the Milky Way.
- 6.
Given our acknowledged dependence on technical systems, the long-run outcomes of relinquishment may be as disastrous as any technological alternative.
References
Agar, N. (2010). Humanity’s end: Why we should reject radical enhancement. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bedau, M. A. (1997). Weak emergence. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 375–399.
Bostrom, N. (2009). Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up. In G. Bert & C. Ruth (Eds.), Medical enhancement and post humanity (pp. 107–137). Dordrecht: Springer.
Buchanan, A. (2009). Moral status and human enhancement. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37(4), 346–381.
Buchanan, A. E. (2011). Beyond humanity? : The ethics of biomedical enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. J. (2010). The singularity: A philosophical analysis. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17, 7–65.
Clark, A. (2004). Natural born-cyborgs: Minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence. Oxford: OUP.
Clark, A. (2006). Language, embodiment and the cognitive niche. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(8), 370–374.
Cranor, C. F. (2004). Toward understanding aspects of the precautionary principle. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 29(3), 259–279.
Dale, T. (2010). Trinity. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta.http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/trinityAccessed 28 Sep 2011.
Davidson, D. (1984). Thought and Talk. In: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, (pp. 155–170). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain. London: Penguin.
DeLanda, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London: Continuum.
Delanda, D. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum.
Haraway, D. (1989). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In W. Elizabeth (Ed.), Coming to terms (pp. 173–204). London: Routledge.
Harman, G. (2008). DeLanda’s ontology: Assemblage and realism. Continental Philosophy Review, 41(3), 367–383.
Humphreys, P. (2008). Computational and conceptual emergence. Philosophy of Science, 75(5), 584–594.
Kevin, N. L., John, O. S., & Marcus, W. F. (2000). Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 23(1), 131–146.
Metzinger, T. (2004). Being no one: The self-model theory of subjectivity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Okasha, S. (2002). Darwinian metaphysics: Species and the question of essentialism. Synthese, 131(2), 191–213.
Rawls, J. (1980). Kantian constructivism in moral theory. Journal of Philosophy, 77(9), 515–572.
Stross, C. (2006). Accelerando. London: Orbit.
Vinge, V. (1992). A fire upon the deep. New York: Tor.
Vinge, V. (1993). The coming technological singularity: how to survive in the post-human era, vision-21:interdisciplinary science and engineering in the era of cyberspace. http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html Accessed 8 Dec 2007.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roden, D. (2012). The Disconnection Thesis. In: Eden, A., Moor, J., Søraker, J., Steinhart, E. (eds) Singularity Hypotheses. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32559-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32560-1
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)