How we became post human

“Post,” with its dual connotations of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the day of “the human” may be numbered’ (Hayles, N. K., 1999, p. 283)


The title of the book How we Became Posthuman assumes that we have in actual fact already become posthuman – post-Homo-sapien. It comes as no surprise then, that what it means to be posthuman foregrounds this book. Postulating on the relationship between the concept of human and
posthuman, Hayles discusses two possible scenarios of post humanity. The first an apocalyptic position that sees intelligent machines antiquating humans and humans themselves becoming posthuman (p. 283). The human to Hayles, however, is an ‘embodied being’ (p. 283).
Embodiment in terms of evolutionary biology looks at human beings through the lens of its own complete history (Harris, Dr. A., 2011 (n. k.)); it gives innate body memory prominence over the modern mind. The modern mind is therefore naïve in comparison to its body counterpart, thus emphasising the role that the body plays in shaping the mind. Intelligent machines on the other hand do not have an evolutionary history or an ‘origin story’ to borrow Haraway’s phrase (1991, p. 150). Terror may be associated with the relationship between intelligent machines and humans due our close association, they are however, limited in their capacity to emulate the ‘embodied being’ (p. 284). The complete history of the human body impacts on human behaviour at every level and the relatively modern intelligent machine does not have this vast evolutionary history (p. 284). It becomes possible for a philosophical discussion of human existentialism by juxtaposing the human with ‘artificial life forms’ (p. 161). This point brings us to the second manifestation of posthuman; a substitution of one definition of human for another. The posthuman for Hayles does not mean the end of humanity it instead means a new method of conceptualising the human. A way of thinking of the human as something other than an automatous self executing it’s will through individual agency (p. 286).