[ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism

[Darren Greer]

> On 5 December 2011 12:52, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
>> But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment
>> views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free will,
>> rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are less sharp
>> than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable institutions
>> and ethical behaviors?
>
>

About a year ago I was wandering around my house looking for something I
had misplaced. Suddenly the thought occurred to me that I could just Google
to find out where it was. I marveled at what had just happened, and
realized that the Internet had fused itself with my consciousnesses. It was
an extension of it, and its contents were now in fact my own memory,
amplified and expanded to a profound degree. It was at that moment that I
realized I was entirely ready and willing to move it into my brain, even
though the technology wasn't available yet, so I could search the database
for that misplaced ashtray.

One of the tenets that most posthumanists can agree on is that our
ever-changing and adapting collective consciousness is now,
and probably has been since the second world war or longer, a construct
amalgam of technology, informational systems, rationality, and
evolutionary imperative rather than the purely human consciousness as a
by-product of free will and separation of mind and body/thought
and environment toted  (and promoted) by the enlightenment.  The sooner we
as a society (or collection of them) accept this, the faster we can begin
to have conversations about ethics and workable institutions.
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