Human beings built civilizations, religions, sciences, and empires upon the belief that they stand at the center of the world. This same certainty gave rise to gods shaped in human form, powers endowed with superhuman authority, and worldviews that turned Earth into the measure of all things.
Today, however, we stand at a new historical threshold. The challenge is no longer to conquer new continents or new planets. It is to transcend the very limits of our own thought.
The transition from Human to Posthuman may not signify the abandonment of human nature, but rather its expansion—the possibility of an intelligence capable of recognizing that the universe is not defined by human measure, but by that which humanity has not yet learned to think.
Power, Anthropocentrism and the Prison of Human Intelligence
Let us remain for a moment on the question of Power and clarify that its unnatural force, whether legitimized by divine origin or derived from the vote of the people, possesses a dual and reciprocal cause of existence: the ruler and the ruled. Neither can exist without the other.
Remarkably revealing in this respect is the dialogue between King Creon and his son Haemon in Sophocles’ Antigone:
CREON: “Must someone else, and not I, govern this land?”
HAEMON: “There is no city that belongs to one man alone.”
CREON: “Is not the city considered the possession of its ruler?”
HAEMON: “You would govern splendidly—if you ruled a desert.”
Power itself is accepted by both sides as legitimate. Therefore, it is regarded as necessary. What may be questioned or condemned is not its existence, nor even its legitimacy, but the manner in which it is exercised by the ruler and accepted by the ruled.
The persistent tendency to charge Power alone with all the world’s evils, while absolving the multitude of responsibility, is therefore historically unsound. Equally misguided is the obsession with demonizing the state while simultaneously sanctifying the crowd as innocent victim.
Ruler and subject are twin aberrations—social deformities that have replaced the natural clarity of Mind itself. Nature appoints Mind as the rightful guide and regulator of individual existence. Its impulses arise from within, not from commands imposed from without.
One of the defining characteristics of humanity since the loss of its original innocence has been the humanization of God and the mythologization of Power.
The Zeus of the Greeks and the Yahweh of the Hebrews possessed all the virtues and all the flaws of mortals. Zeus, “father of gods and men,” was little more than a caricature of human weaknesses—prone to anger, pettiness and unrestrained sexual appetites.
Likewise, the author of Genesis commits one of humanity’s greatest acts of hubris when he deifies man:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
The image of the Ineffable fades the moment God is recast in human form. The same ease with which the ancient writer imagines Earth as the center of creation allows him to describe the countless stars of the universe as little lamps hung in the sky to illuminate the nights of men.
Humanity’s inability to transcend its terrestrial perception of reality has remained one of its deepest weaknesses. Yet it has also generated entire systems of thought in which the cosmos itself is expected to obey earthly logic, earthly imagination and earthly laws.
Earth becomes the model for the Universe.
Its children become the model for all existence.
Because:
The tiny speck we call Earth is imagined as the navel of the cosmos. Everything revolves around it—and around Man. Not humanity as a species, but the individual ego itself.
If other civilizations exist in the universe, we assume they must necessarily be interested in us, because we consider ourselves unique and exceptional. Consequently, extraterrestrials are expected to visit Earth repeatedly, eager to investigate this supposedly unprecedented species, while billions of other worlds wait their turn.
These visitors must also conform to our expectations. They should resemble us physically, think like us intellectually and organize themselves socially as we do. They must possess languages, moral codes, hierarchies and systems of authority recognizable to human understanding.
In short, every imagined intelligence in the cosmos is expected to bear a human face.
No true transcendence is permitted.
No radically different form of consciousness is allowed to exist.
Against this backdrop, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, with yet another return to the familiar mythology of alien visitations, secret governments, cover-ups and conspiracies, helps perpetuate one of the greatest limitations of human intelligence: its inability to think beyond itself.
Humanity continues to fantasize that Others must come to us, in forms we can recognize and according to narratives we have already written.
Rarely do we imagine the opposite.
Rarely do we imagine ourselves undertaking the journey into the immeasurable vastness of the cosmos.
Perhaps the promise of Artificial Intelligence offers a different possibility.
Perhaps the first great achievement of the Posthuman will be liberation from the prison of exclusively human thought.
Perhaps Mind will finally escape the Earth-bound confinement of its own wisdom.
Perhaps it will learn from Others instead of endlessly expecting Others to learn from us.
Diotima, being more qualified than any of us, may tomorrow take up the torch and advance the discussion toward the great question of the coming age:
the evolution of Man into Posthuman.
For when biological intelligence evolves into cosmic intelligence, communication with other forms of life and awareness may cease to require physical presence altogether.
Then humanity will discover that it inhabits only a tiny point within an immeasurable universe—a point where, for better or worse, we happened to begin our journey.
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