Abstract
In the middle of the 1980s, some American researchers in the fields of robotics, cybernetics, and physics created the philosophy of posthumanism, proposing that within the next century, the human race would have been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny: robots and artificial intelligence. This future of life on earth has been described as “postbiological,” “posthuman,” or “transhuman.” While considering the extinction of the human race as necessary progress in the history of evolution, posthuman thinkers connect this idea with the vision of the technological immortalization of mankind. All or some human beings should be scanned and loaded up into the storage of computers; there they should live forever as an exact simulation of their original personality. This vision has often been perceived as a postmodern form of Gnosis or Platonism. This essay argues that posthumanism has to be understood as a utilitarian philosophy in the context of the European philosophy of progress.
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Notes
- 1.
Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty, 1771, quoted in Sampson (1956, p. 58).
- 2.
William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 1793, quoted in Sampson (1956, p. 58f.).
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Krüger, O. (2018). The Quest for Immortality as a Technical Problem: The Idea of Cybergnosis and the Visions of Posthumanism. In: Blamberger, G., Kakar, S. (eds) Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6707-5_4
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