engleski

Postdigital Humans: Taking Evolution in Own Hands

This chapter provides a brief overview of implicit and explicit references to human beings in postdigital literature. It identifies a range of viewpoints, approaches, and fields of inquiry which have shaped postdigital thinking over the past twenty years and establishes theoretical underpinnings for inquiry into postdigital humans. Building on the understanding of humanity as a normative category, the chapter moves on to explore three ‘performance standards’ for inclusion into humanity: life, consciousness, and behaviour. The concluding part synthesizes philosophical approaches and postdigital theories and builds a postdisciplinary understanding of the postdigital human. Postdigital humans may exist in various carbon-based and non-carbon- based forms, and the exact demarcation between postdigital humans and postdigital non-humans is a constantly moving target. However, postdigital theory is more concerned with in-between configurations and bio-machine entanglements from which postdigital humans can be made. Postdigital theory can contribute actively to studies of human beings with its convenient positioning between the analog and the digital and its radical postdisciplinary approaches. However, the central tenet of postdigital theory reaches beyond the question: Who is a postdigital human? It focuses on inquiry into humankind’s active contribution to own evolution, and poses questions such as: What kind of postdigital humans do we want to become? What kind of future do we want for our postdigital children?

postdigital, human, posthumanism, critical theory, philosophy, cyborg, self-designated evolution, natural evolution, life, consciousness, mind, Turing test

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