Posthuman Blues

Never enough

Becoming posthuman may not be enough. We must become postbiological. From a sheer computational perspective, meat-brains are inefficient and decidedly user-unfriendly. They cling to faulty reality constructs and suffer from hardwired glitches that we've mistakenly labeled "normal" and "virtuous." Superstition is glorified while the reptilian urge to seek out leaders (real or hallucinatory) is condoned under a blanket of "patriotism."

Cruel symphonies of twitching neurons

Biological, meat-based life might be a necessary larval form of intelligence, the mentational equivalent to the Industrial Revolution's reliance on environmentally debilitating fossil fuel. But permanence is illusion; we are a species in transit. The prospect of moving on can seem so devastatingly soulless. What happens to emotions -- neurochemical ephemera -- when we control our minds instead of the other way around? Will postbiological humanity (an oxymoron, to be sure) cling to emotions when they're no longer needed? They may be viewed as charming cognitive momentos or they may be systematically erased.

Capillary dilation or the so-called "blush response"

Philip K. Dick's androids could be revealed by their incapacity for empathy. Yet they remained eerily human, like peripheral reflections of ourselves.

Getting rid of the meat

Mathematician Roger Penrose thinks that artificial intelligence is impossible because the human brain relies on quantum-level structures that, in his view, can't be duplicated artificially. Conceivably, uploads that fail to take quantum effects into account will be unable to collapse the quantum mechanical wave state, leaving reality unwritten. A universe without consciousness becomes a blur of raw probability: a realm antithetical to life as we know it. We might have to take some meat with us after all . . . or at least a convincing simulation. But will we choose to bring along the capacity for fear, self-loathing, love, despair?

Little Gray Men

If aliens are contacting us, what do they possibly want from us? Interestingly, many "abductees" claim that extraterrestrials have evolved past the need for emotion and now seek human assistance to revitalize their genetic stock. Are we dealing with a postbiological species that uses visual symbolism? The "aliens" might actually be our descendants: a tragically posthuman race on the razor's edge of extinction, unable to summon empathy without a mediating intelligence. They may be posing a question: Do we take our emotions with us or leave them on the evolutionary scrap-heap?

In heaven, everything is fine

There's something chilling about abandoning emotion. Emotion is at the very core of our heritage as a species, just as a water-bound existence was to early lifeforms. Posthumans may elect to become emotional amphibians, deliberately savoring pangs of jealosy and wonder one moment and becoming "vast, cool and unsympathetic" the next. To say nothing of creating altogether new emotions . . .