A DEFENCE OF PRE-CRITICAL

POSTHUMANISM
On May 27, 2011, in Uncategorized, by enemyin1

Transcript of a paper given at Nottingham Universitys Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman Conference,
Sept 7, 2010.
Mankinds a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.[1]

Since emerging in nineties critical theory, transhumanism and cyberpunk literature, the term posthuman
has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the status of the human is radically in doubt. Two
main usages or, if you will, two distinct posthumanisms can be discerned over this period.

Transhumanists, futurists and science fiction authors regularly concatenate or hyphenate post and
human when speculating about the long-run influence of advanced technologies on the future shape of
life and mind.

By contrast, for cultural theorists and philosophers in the continental tradition the posthuman is a
condition in which the foundational status of humanism has been undermined. The causes or symptoms
of this supposed crisis of humanism are various as the bio-engineered clades ramifying through the postanthropoform solar system of Bruce Sterlings 1996 novel Schismatrix. Posthumanism, in this diagnostic
or critical sense, is expressed in the postmodern incredulity towards enlightenment narratives of
emancipation and material progress; the deconstruction of transcendental or liberal subjectivities; the end
of patriarchy; the emergence of contrary humanisms in post-Colonial cultures; the reduction of living
entities to resources for a burgeoning technoscience, or, if some theorists are to be believed, all of the
above.[2]

In this paper, I will argue that these two usages do not only reflect divergent understandings of the
posthuman the speculativeand the critical - but reflect a foreclosure of radical technogenetic change on

the part of critical posthumanists. This gesture can be discerned in four arguments which occur in various
forms within the extant literature of critical posthumanism:

the anti-humanist argument

the technogenesis argument

the materiality argument

and the anti-essentialist argument

All four, as I hope to show, are unsound.

Analysing why these arguments fail has the dual benefit of preventing us from being distracted by the antihumanist hyperbole accruing to theoretical frameworks employed within critical posthumanism - such as
deconstruction and cognitive science but, more importantly, contributes to the development of a
rigorous, philosophically self-aware speculative posthumanism.

Contemporary transhumanists argue that human nature is an unsatisfactory work in progress that should
be modified through technological means where the instrumental benefits for individuals outweigh the
technological risks. This ethic of improvement is premised on prospective developments in four areas:
Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science the so-called NBIC
suite. For example, improved bionic neural interfaces may allow the incorporation of a wide range of
technical devices within an enhanced cyborg body or exo-self while genetic treatments may increase
the efficiency or learning or memory (Bostrom and Sandberg 2006) or be used to increase the size of the
cerebral cortex. The wired and gene-modified denizens of the transhuman future could be sensitive to a
wider range of stimuli, faster, more durable, more intellectually capable and morphologically varied than
their unmodified forebears.

Just how unrestricted and capable transhuman minds and bodies can become is contested since the
scope for enhancement depends both on often hypothetical technologies and upon hotly contested
metaphysical claims. Among the prospective technologies which excite radical transhumanists like Ray
Kurzweil are the use of micro-electric neuroprostheses which might non-invasively stimulate or probe the
brains native neural networks, allowing it to jack directly into immersive cognitive technologies or map its
state vector prior to uploading an entire personality (Kurzweil 2005, 317);[3] the elusive goal of artificial
general intelligence the creation of robots or software systems which approximate or exceed the

flexibility of human belief-fixation and comportment; or, perhaps less speculatively, improvements in
processor technology sufficient to emulate the computational capacity of human and other mammalian
brains (Ibid. 124-125).

Among the metaphysical issues that trouble all but the most facile of transhumanist itineraries is the
scope of functionalist accounts of mental states and processes. Functionalist philosophers of mind claim
that the mental states types such as beliefs or pains are constituted by the causal role of token states
within a containing system rather than by the stuff that the system is constituted from. The causal role of
a token state is defined by the set of states that can bring it about (its inputs) and set of the states that it
causes in turn (its outputs). The substrate on which that state is realized is irrelevant to its functional role.
[4] Some philosophers of mind David Chalmers, say are functionalists with regard to representational
states like beliefs or desires, but not with regard to phenomenal states, like having a toothache or seeing
pink. If Chalmers is right, then we can never produce artificial consciousness purely in virtue of emulating
the kinematics of brain states. However, if we accept the accounts of philosophers with (however
divergent) functional analyses of the property of state consciousness like Daniel Dennett and Michael Tye
the prospects for artificial consciousness seem somewhat brighter (Dennett 1991). Given a sufficiently
global functionalism, a simulation of an embodied nervous system in which these constitutive
relationships were actually instantiated would also be a replication lacking none of the preconditions for
intentionality or conscious experience regardless of whether they were implemented with biological
material as this is currently understood. For radical transhumanists influenced by functionalist and
computationalist approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science, then, neural replication opens up the
possibility of copying the patterns that constitute a given mind onto non-biological platforms that will be
inconceivably faster, more flexible and more robust than evolved biological bodies (Kurzweil 2005).

These radical augmentation scenarios indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC technologies
could lead to a new posthuman form of existence. Following an influential paper by the computer
scientist Virnor Vinge, this ontological step change is sometimes referred to as the technological
singularity (Vinge 1993): an epochal discontinuity resulting from positive feedback exerted by technical
change upon itself (Bostrom 2005, 8). Characteristically the scenario is painted in terms of the creation of
artificial super-intelligence intelligence being the variable considered most liable to affect the rate of
technical growth. Vinge claims that were a single super-intelligent machine created, it could create still
more intelligent machines, resulting in a growth in mentation to plateaux far exceeding our current
capacities. Lacking this intellectual prowess, we cannot envisage some of the ways post-singularity
intelligences might re-order the world. A post-singularity world would be constituted in ways that cannot be
humanly conceived. If it could be humanly conceived it would not be the genuine article. The idea of the
singularity, then, is that of a principled limit on human cognition, and predictive power, in particular. It is
homologous, in many respects, to Immanuel Kants idea of the thing-in-itself, which lacking any mode of
presentation in the phenomenal world of space and time must necessarily elude systematic empirical
knowledge.

Commitment to the possibility of a singularity nicely exemplifies the philosophical position of speculative
posthumanists. Posthumans in this sense are hypothetical descendants of current humans that
are no longer human in consequence of some augmentation history.

For speculative (or pre-critical) posthumanism, a technically mediated transcendence of the human
constitutes a significant ontological possibility.

Speculative posthumanism is logically independent of the normative thesis of transhumanism: one can be
consistently transhumanist while denying the ontological possibility of posthuman transcendence.
Similarly, speculative posthumanism is consistent with the rejection of transhumanism. One could hold
that a posthuman divergence is a significant ontological possibility but not a desirable one.[1]

Critical posthumanists such as Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, Don Ihde and Neil Badmington do not
contest the potential of NBIC technologies or advance principled arguments against enhancement (Clark
is a warm-blooded, moderate transhumanist according to my taxonomy) but argue that speculative or precritical posthumanism reflects a philosophically nave conception of the human such that the posthuman
would constitute a radical break with it. This position is clearly implied in the title of Katherine Hayles
seminal work of cultural history How We Became Posthuman. For Hayles, the posthuman is not a
hypothetical state which could follow some prospective singularity event, say, but a work in progress: a
complex and contested re-conception of the human subject in terms drawn from the modern sciences of
the artificial: information theory, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life (Hayles 199, 286).

One example of the intellectual tendencies that inform this new cultural moment is so-called Nouvelle AI
(NAI). Where the manipulation of syntactically structured representations is the paradigm of intelligence
traditional AI, NAI draws inspiration from computational prowess exhibited in biological phenomena
involving no symbolization, such as swarm intelligence, insect locomotion or cortical feature maps. The
guiding insight of NAI is that the preconditions of intelligence such as error-reduction strategies, pattern
recognition or categorization can emerge in biological systems from local interactions between dumb
specialized agents (like ants or termites) without a central planner to choreograph their activities.

If human mentation emerges likewise from millions of asynchronous, parallel interactions between dumb
components, Hayles argues, there is no classically self-present human subjectivity for the posthuman to
transcend. Mental powers of deliberation, inference, consciousness, etc. are already distributed between
biological neural networks, actively-sensing bodies and artefacts (Hayles 1999, 239).

I have christened this the anti-humanist objection to posthumanism given its striking similarities to the
deconstruction of subjectivist philosophy and phenomenology undertaken in post-war French antihumanisms Derridas in particular (Ibid. 146). Hayles proximate target, here, is the putatively
autonomous subject of modern liberal theory. The autonomous liberal subject, she argues, is
unproblematically present to itself and distinct from the conceptually-ordered world in which it works out
its plans for the good (Ibid. 286). The posthuman subject, by contrast, is problematically individuated,
because its agency is constituted by an increasingly smart extra-bodily environment on which its
cognitive functioning depends and because of the open, ungrounded materiality or iterability of
language which is both arrested by the context of embodied action and infected by its opacity (Derrida
1988 152; Hayles 1999, 264-5). The decentered or distributed posthuman subject is no longer sufficiently
distinct from the world to order it autonomously as the subject of liberal theory is required to do.

But is this right?

Lets suppose, along with Hayles and other proponents of embodied and distributed cognition, that the
skin-bag is an ontologically permeable boundary between self and non-self (or exo-self). Proponents of
the extended mind thesis like Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue from a principle of parity between
processes that go on in the head and any functionally equivalent process in the world beyond.[5] The
parity principle implies that mental processes need not occur only in biological nervous systems but in the
environments and tools of embodied thinkers. If I have to make marks on paper to keep in mind the steps
of a lengthy logical proof, the PP states that my mental activity is constituted by these inscriptional events
as well as by the knowledge and habits reposing in my acculturated neural networks.

However, given the parity between bodily and extra-bodily processes, this cannot make the activity less
evaluable in terms of the rationality standards we apply to deliberative acts. Even if the humanist subject
emerges from the summed activities of biological and non-biological agents, this metaphysical
dependence (or supervenience) need not impair its capacity to subtend the powers of deliberation or
reasoning liberal theory requires of it.[6] Derridas more systematic deconstruction of the semantically
constitutive subject nuances this picture by entailing limits on the scope of practical reason in the face of
the outside or exception which infects any rule-governed system (Derrida 1988, p.152). The rule or
desire is always precipitate, in this way, but there is a difference between being ahead of oneself and
being be-headed. The posthuman, in Hayles critical sense of the term, is not less human for confronting
the fragile, constitutively precipitate character of cognition and desire.

This is not to say, of course, that there is no merit in the model of the hybrid self that Hayles presents as
posthuman or that it has no implications for pre-critical or speculative posthumansim. On the contrary, a
deconstruction of the classically constitutive subject of post-Cartesian thought is, I have argued, a useful
prophylactic against immaterialist fancies or transcendentally inspired objections to the naturalizing project
of cognitive science (Roden 2006). However, the naturalization of subjectivity and mind is at best a
conceptual precondition for envisaging certain transcendent posthumanist itineraries involving the
emergence of artificial minds from new technological configurations of matter. It does not represent their
culmination.

There are two other objections that may potentially survive this analysis. Firstly, it could be objected that
critical posthumanism like the extended mind thesis shows that the human is always already
technically constituted. In her contribution to a recent Templeton Research Seminar on transhumanism
Hayles argues that transhumanists are wedded to atechnogenetic anthropology for which humans and
technologies have existed and co-evolved in symbiotic partnership. Not only would future transhuman
enhancement be a technogenetic process; but so, according to this story, are comparable transformations
in the deep past. Human technical activity has, for example, equipped some with lactose tolerance or
differential calculus without monstering the beneficiaries into posthumans. One of the proponents of the
extended mind thesis, Andy Clark, has framed the technogenesis argument against posthumanism
particularly clearly in his book Natural Born Cyborgs:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is
just one more move in an ancient game. . . We are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff
and structure deep into our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any
post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in
which so many of us now live, love and work (Clark 2003, p. 142).

Natural born cyborgs, as suggested, are already dealers in hybrid mental representations which exploit
both a linguistically mapped environment and our multifariously talented brains. This is significant
because our capacity to ascribe structured propositional attitudes to others arguably presupposes the
capacity to use language to represent their contents. Representing the contents of beliefs is necessary for
evaluating them and it is independently plausible to suppose that, as Donald Davidson argues in his
essay Thought and Talk, having the capacity to evaluate beliefs is part of what is required in a
believer (Davidson 1984).

Clearly, if we restrict the evidence base to cases where augmentation has not resulted in a species
divergence or something very like it, then we will induce that this is not liable to happen in the future.
However, some pre-human divergence had to have happened in our evolutionary past and it is at least
plausible given the natural born cyborgs thesis that technologies such as public symbol systems

were a factor in the hominization process. Given a pre-human divergence has occurred in the past,
perhaps due to evolutionary pressures brought about the development of simpler symbolization
techniques, why preclude the possibility that convergent NBIC technologies might prompt a similar step
change in the future?

I have argued elsewhere that a cognitive augmentation that replaced public language with a non-symbolic
vehicle of cognition and communication might assuming Clarks account of hybrid representations
lead to the instrumental elimination of propositional attitude psychology through the elimination of its
public vehicles of content. Post-folk folk might, arguably, be opaque to the practices of intentional
interpretation we bring to bear in our i.e. human social intercourse and thus might well form initially
discrete social and reproductive enclaves that might later seed entirely posthuman republics.

Another of Hayles objections to standard posthumanists visions of transcendence is their supposed

elision of the materiality of human embodiment and cognition: the materiality argument. The fact that
computer simulations can help us understand the self-organizing capacities of biological systems does
not entail that these can be fully replicated by some system by virtue of implementing a sufficiently finegrained software representation of their functional structure.

It is true that some posthumanist scenarios presuppose that minds or organisms can be fully replicated on
speculative non-biological substrates like the computronium or smart matter imagined in Ken
MacLeods Fall Revolution novels. However, this objection applies to a fairly restricted class of posthuman
transcendence itineraries: namely those involving the replication ofexisting minds and organisms in
computational form. Although Hayles provides no arguments against pan-computationalism or globalfunctionalism, it might well be the case that synthetic-life forms or robots, being differently embodied, will
be differently-minded as well (who knows?). In this case, the materiality of embodiment argument works in
favour of the pre-critical posthumanist account, not against it. On the other hand, she may be wrong and
the pan-computationalists right. Mental properties of things may, for all we know, supervene on their
computational properties because every other property supervenes on them as well.

I turn, finally, to an objection that is perhaps implicit rather than explicit in the arguments of Critical
Posthumanists to date but is worth considering on its own, if only for its speculative payoff. I refer to this
as the anti-essentialist argument.

The anti-essentialist objection to posthumanism starts from a particular interpretation of the disjointness of
the human and the posthuman. This is that the only thing that could distinguish the set of posthumans and
the set of humans is that all posthumans would lack some essential property of humanness by virtue of

their augmentation history. It follows that if there is no human essence no properties that humans
possess in all possible worlds there can be no posthuman divergence or transcendence.

This is a potentially serious objection to speculative posthumanism because there seem to be plausible
grounds for rejecting essentialism in the sciences of complexity or self-organization that underwrite many
posthumanist prognostications. Some philosophers of biology hold that the interpretation of biological taxa
most consonant with Darwinian evolution is that they are not kinds (i.e. properties) but individuals.
Evolution by natural selection is a form of self-organisation involving feedback relationships between the
distribution of genetic traits across populations and their phenotypic consequences in particular
environments. An individual or proto-individual can undergo a self-organizing process, but an abstract
kind or universal cannot. Thus, the argument goes, evolution happens to species qua individuals (or
proto-individuals) not species qua kinds. To be biologically human on this view is not to exemplify some
set of necessary and sufficient properties, but to be genealogically related to earlier members of the
population of humans (Hull 1988).

Clearly, if biological categories are not kinds and posthuman transcendence requires the technically
mediated loss of properties essential to membership of some biological kind, then posthuman
transcendence envisaged by pre-critical posthumanism is metaphysically impossible. [7]

Underlying the anti-essentialist objection is the assumption that the only significant differences are
differences in the essential properties demarcating natural kinds. But why adhere to this philosophy of
difference?[8] The view that nature is articulated by differences in the instantiation of abstract universals
sits poorly with the idea of an actively self-organizing nature underlying the leading edge cognitive and life
sciences. A view of difference consistent with self-organization would locate the engines of differentiation
in those micro- components and structural properties whose cumulative activity generates the emergent
regularities of complex systems.

For example, we might adopt an immanent ontology of difference for which individuating boundaries are
generated by local states of matter: such as differences in pressure, temperature, miscibility or chemical
concentration (Delanda 2004). For immanent ontologies of difference that of Gilles Deleuze, say the
conceptual differences articulated in the natural language kind-lexicons are asymmetrically dependent
upon active individuating differences (Ibid. 10). A Deleuzean ontology is obviously not the only option
here: any ontology which reconciles the existence of real or radical differences with the lack of
transcendent or transcendental organizing principles would do.

In short: we can be anti-essentialists and anti-Platonists while holding that the world is profoundly
differentiated in a way that owes nothing to the transcendental causality of abstract universals, subjectivity
or language.

Conclusion:

I have argued that critical posthumanists provide few convincing reasons for abandoning pre-critical or
speculative posthumanism. The anti-essentialist argument presupposes a model of difference that is illadapted to the sciences that critical posthumanists cite in favour of their naturalized deconstruction of the
human subject. The deconstruction of the humanist subject implied in the anti-humanist objection may
itself be a useful prolegomenon to a posthuman-engendering cognitive science; but it complicates rather
than corrodes the philosophical humanism that critical posthumanism problematizes while leaving open
the possibility of a radical differentiation of the human and the posthuman. The technogenesis objection is
weak, if conceptually productive. The elision of materiality argument is based on problematic assumptions
and, even if sound, would preclude only some scenarios for posthuman divergence.

Of these, the anti-essentialist objection seems the strongest and most wide ranging in its implication. Our
response to it suggested that it might be circumventable with an immanent ontology of emergent
differences such as Deleuzes ontology of the virtual. However, a consequence of embracing locally
emergent differences in this way is that there can be no adequate concept of posthuman difference
without posthumans. For it is surely a consequence of any such account that a science of the different
cannot precede its historical emergence or morphogenesis, even if only in simulated form. This implies
that the posthuman is at best a placeholder signifying a possibility that we cannot adequately
conceptualize ahead of its actualization. However, this does not preclude a theoretical development of the
implications of the posthuman insofar as we can conceptualize it.

Moreover, the emptiness of the signifier posthuman has an ethical or, perhaps, antiethical[9] consequence that arguably should be considered more fully in the light of Derridas remarks
about the precipitate character of thought. If the speculative idea of the posthuman is a placeholder for
differences that are determinable only via some synthetic process such as the creation of actual
posthumans, modified transhumans, or a range of simulations or aesthetic models (as in cybernetic art)
- these differences can be determined only by progressive actualization. Thus posthumanist philosophy is
locked into a dialectically unstable preterition, falling between speculative and synthetic activity. To
understand what it as yet undetermined, it must attempt however incrementally to bring it into being
and to give it shape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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____(2008), Why I Want to Be Posthuman When I Grow Up, B. Gordijn, R
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Chadwick (eds.), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer.
____ (2005b), In Defence of Posthuman Dignity, Bioethics 19(3), pp. 203-214.
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___Language, Embodiment and the Cognitive Niche, Trends in Cognitive Science 10(8), pp. 370374)
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_____(1995). The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
_____(1989)Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behaviour, Philosophical
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_____(2004), Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.
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Hull, David (1988), On Human Nature, in PSA 1986, vol. 2, A. Fine and P. Machamer (eds.), East
Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 3-13; reprinted in Hull (1989) and Hull and
Ruse (eds.), Philosophy of Biology (1998).
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p=450, Accessed08.09.2009.
Kurzweil, Ray (2005), The Singularity is Near (New York Viking).
LaPorte, Joseph (2004), Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change (Cambridge CUP). Lisewski,
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201219.
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Cognition(Oxford Blackwell), pp. 49-63.
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[1] Sterling (1996), p. 59.

[2] This appears to be the position of Rosi Braidotti in her recent plenary address to the 2009 Society for
European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Conference in Cardiff.
[3] For a rather less sanguine commentary on the state of the art in non-invasive scanning see Jones
2009.
[4] By analogy, any system could count as being in the state White Wash Cycle if inputting dirty whites at
some earlier time resulted in it outputting clean whites at some later time.
[5]
Parity Principle. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to
go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that
part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.(from Clark and Chalmers (1998) p.XX)

[6] The notion of supervenience is frequently used by non-reductive materialists to express the
dependence of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the latter.
Informally: M properties supervene on P properties if a things P properties determine its M properties. If
aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and x is beautiful, y
must be beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the entailments involved. Natural
or nomological supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws are like our own. Metaphysical
supervenience, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold with logical or conceptual necessity.
[7] This objection is overdetermined, further, by the fact that the possibility of successfully implementing
radical transhumanist policies seems incompatible with a stable human nature. If there are few cognitive
or body invariants that could not in principle be modified with the help of some hypothetical NBIC
technology then transhumanism arguably presupposes that there are no such essential properties for
humanness. Transhumanism might still be consistent with an etiolated historical essentialism which holds
that any being descended from from a member of soe hypothetical ancestor population is human.
[8] David Hull points out that the genealogical boundaries between species can be considerably sharper
than boundaries in character space (Hull 1988, 4). The fact that nectar-feeding hummingbird hawk moths
and nectar-feeding hummingbirds look and behave in similar ways does not invalidate the claim that they
have utterly distinct lines of evolutionary descent (Laporte 2004, 44).
[9] In her address to the Cardiff, SEP-FEP conference, The Ethics of Extinction Claire Colebrook argued
that while ethos implies habit, place and environment, situations of catastrophic change (e.g. climate
change) imply the need to overcome these rooted modes of action and affect. Hence the prospect of
humanity being superseded by non-humans requires an anti-ethics which imagines or simulates the
radically non-human.
[1] Although some hold that the singularity is beyond good or evil, one might hold that certain
posthumans would be worse off than even the most miserable human; a possibility that could warrant
anti-transhumanist policies such as technological relinquishment or pre-emptive species suicide.

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One Response to a defence of pre-critical posthumanism

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January 26, 2013 at 7:43 pm

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