Post-humanism, a memo.

I was in London for a show in January, 2022. On the “tube” I read an advertisement for a foundation who were proud they had 3-d printed hearts for children. To advertise this, in a city of such populace, in such a place as the car we rode in meant that indeed the technology had become viable. This generation’s life-time viability just jumped in length of decades.

While the idea of replacement body parts makes me think wonderful fantastic thoughts of gore and technology, the robot arsenal coming from China and Japan LOOK like humans in almost every way. Paired together in time, I see both technologies merging as they culminate at once in their penultimate fusion- androids. Baby-making androids.

From one body to the next, they could retain the same memories and personalities. The advancements in code building AI have already made it possible for a simulacrum of human interaction. And, like the Twitter bot that became racist, they can change just as we do to represent the best possible integration and assimilation. Racism is bad. But, it is important for the future to know that it is a learned behavior and not an inherent one.

After I saw that incels think the 9/11 attackers were heroes, I realized that human compatibility with one another has everything to do with context. If we know that, then we know the best way for AI to survive is by recognizing when to scape goat. That is, if nothing about humans change.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, died of alcoholism at 70 years old. Ray Bradbury, the most notable critic of advancements in technology at human hands, died from chronic illness at 91. These two men showed the generation of Boomers both sides of the reach mankind will have.

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 and many other stories about post-humanism with a hyper conservative outlook. Humans never escaped the Earth for long, and inevitably destroy themselves because of their stupidity and politics. Many of his stories ended this way, or had plots that indicated that was the only direction. And, he is right.

Roddenberry wrote Star Trek with the dreams that post-humanism was not only attainable, but was so in this lifetime. He was not wrong.

I have enjoyed reading books like Nexus and watching movies like Blade Runner 2049. There are a lot of ideas in the science fiction community, and none that I have seen have addressed a few problems which Gene Roddenberry saw, but that Ray Bradbury could not.

Humans have a way of needing to command their impulses around social norms. But, none of that matters. Everything has changed now that there has been a pandemic. The systems of infrastructure in place failed a mass collective to assure them they would be ok if they let those systems last.

The “adaptive system” is the concept that is missing, which Roddenberry understood but Bradbury did not. Humans are animals. Their minds have created ideas like pheromones, which pass around the world to infect others in order to best keep life for those humans going. This is what religions were. This is what governments are. It is what post-humanism will be. An adaptive system that is at the core of evolution.

Ideas can spread to space, sent between worlds after we arrive. We will define the future, one generation at a time. Religions will sprout and grow and new governments will fold and take their place. Studying both those collective organizations has led me to my conclusions about post-humanism. But, before I could get answers, I needed to understand what their functions were.

I let the religious leaders and politicians explain themselves. I consumed their works and followed news reporting the actions they took. Because they didn’t know someone was assessing them, they felt no fear in exposing every last secret to their infrastructure for which I am glad. The purpose of this article is to share what I learned.

Gods are imaginary friends for people who are no good at fun. The imagination and memory are one and the same function of the brain. People’s identities are manifestations of this organ used in order to survive. Fun is the quintessence of relieving stress. Through stable, low dose fun churches, synagogues and temples have helped people carry on living without a cause greater than to perpetrate life. Governments arose from the need for organizational infrastructure without the imaginations of the religious. The historical importance of that change had to do with persecution by those who were in power due to their religion.

Governments are just as fictional as religions. This is the most important principle to carry into post-humanism — unless it is made of atoms, all of it is make-believe. If people believe in a thing because their minds can recall the information and generate an image, they will pour their resolve into physically acknowledging the concept. Basically, everything that humans created to forge “society” is only kept tangible by the people who believe its real.

Where do the laws of a country go after it is conquered? The answer is the same as “where does your lap go when you stand up?” It vanishes as it becomes contextually irrelevant. What happens to your prayers after you die? Your schedule? Your name? Your identity? Same.

Post-humanism requires looking squarely at what humans are, in order to figure out what they’ll do next. Since I squarely believe that humans are over hyped animals, the next phase will likely come out of autism. Knowing the significance of biology on what a “wild brain” does when it is dominated, it seems that spectrum kids are born wild, in captivity. What would a wild brain be? Simply one that is the most resistant to the system its predecessors survived by using.

This is what we know of horse domestication. When horses were wild, they were captured and forced to bear riders, and then they were taught being kicked and strangled to correlate with movement.

If you, dear reader, would like to ponder the abuse of horses I would ask simply, “where does the bit go?”

The bit goes in the mouth of the horse. The horse accepts something shoved in its mouth because it knows that it will be hurt if it resists. It is taught this concept by us.

Then I would ask, “what are your bits, dear readers?”

The concepts which hem us in begin to from when we are very little. We are trained and domesticated by our parents. Our tests at school help them determine how well they have done getting us to behave. I have had a chance to see the wild nature of children in both the poorest parts of the world, and among the richest. The mediocrity of life that rich people have stems from the fact they believe they could lose those resources if they don’t behave. They simp for luxury. I have used this against them in order to get them to behave — take away their luxury and they will comply.

This is what Trump supporters rally behind. His campaign focused on pointing out all the luxuries that they would lose if Hillary was elected, then Biden. That context was simply lost to them because they are a type of human only fit for breeding. Some appropriate the term for cowboy, because they dress in a certain fashion. But, they don’t dare change the system. They don’t dare hardly anything, even when doing things that get them killed. They die for other people’s purposes, but never their own.

I mean this amorally, or without judgement. Without conservativism, we couldn’t have had Jewish slaves. Without conservative talking heads, we couldn’t have had the Spanish Inquisition. Without the ideals that “the same as it was is how we’re going to do it,” we couldn’t have had the Holocaust. Every instance of cruelty meted out onto humanity comes from the very same place that all predators find their prey.

What comes next is the most delicious system ever. Renaissance. We are there already, as I reach out from my side of the world to yours using Medium to share my thoughts. Your phones, tablets, and laptops can access all the information in the entire world. What you cannot directly gather, you can observe the status of the systems in which the information is kept. For one brief moment, we are all equals here online. The biology of these things is relative to having created external organs capable of assisting our bodies.

We have already begun to see the merging of these fields for decades with hip replacements and other biomedical enhancements. Technologies like those that help with health and comfort of survival work because humans are so similar to one another. Sadly, so many humans bias their thoughts around the marginal differences between themselves and those around them. Cosmically, it’s hilarious.

Einstein understood this hilarity. Reading his quotes, it is obvious he had a sense of humor. But, he postulated that time did not exist. It was relative to the context under which it was experienced. Time is a construct. There is no galactic clock. There is only the relative movement of our bodies to that of all those in the rest of the universe. North is a small concept. It ill defines anything beyond the planet we occupy. When we colonize a new world, it will grow in importance.

The behaviors we have developed are ripe for changing. Breeders easily identify themselves because they are pro-life. Again, this is an amoral connotation, I pass no judgement. I mean that the idea in which a woman can simply choose not to persist life through the opportunity she has by being pregnant challenges the very nature of belief these people hold. Their lives revolve utterly around the ease of breeding, the stability of it, and the perpetuation of it.

This system of ideas stems from many epochs of human survival. Baby making is fundamental to our ability to live better. Life has progressed far enough with enough common luxuries at hand that this generation no longer need to fear being lonely when they are old. They need not fear creating children in order to harness their emotions in order to enjoy older years. This generation has the luxury to live for themselves and not worry that their lives will suck if there are no children. This generation is learning to do for themselves what the world is missing. They are learning to domesticate themselves and in doing so, they are learning to be wild again.

That is the meaning of renaissance — wildness. Powered by curiosity and spurred by pain, people will seek new art, science, and fun. This is how I know that black people are oppressed in the United States. They have a culture so rapid that it grinds past that of the white folk in a flash. However, the purpose it must is because so many white people in America are optionally stupid because they choose to live life on easy mode. Their problems aren’t hard to solve, but they like it that way and they tolerate nobody solving their difficult ones so that the curtain isn’t pulled back on how easy they have it. Context shift is their enemy.

This was what Roddenberry saw that Bradbury could not. The context needed shifting to get humans to treat each other better. And so I realized what I wanted to be, only the rarest of humans — a catalyst.

I dreamed once of a prisoner held underground. In the damp darkness he had a paradigm shift, to begin plotting escape. Thinking he had been trapped he found his cell had been accidentally left open in the darkness by a guard. He clawed and scraped on weakened knees until he saw light. He had to abandon the other prisoners because he had no keys to free them with and the guards had discovered his escape. His hands bled, as did his legs, by the time he reached the top of the dungeon’s stairs. The light of a desert blinded him as he exited. There beside the entrance were provisions and clothes meant for travel. It was then that the prisoner realized he had been in the dungeon for so long he had forgotten his own identity while free. Tears streamed down his face and he cried out, “Who am I? Without knowing, where will I go?” And the wind answered as it blew, “You are Atataxis. You may go wherever you wish.” Atataxis looked back at the entrance to the dungeon and it vanished, and then I woke up.

I dreamt this story. In Latin, atataxis translates to the loss of the loss of movement. Freedom, after being bound. It sounds prophetic. But it isn’t. I simply did exactly what Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and the Dalai Lama did — I used my imagination. The systems those men built were created to better the lives of others. They did. But now, they don’t go far enough to benefit the many. None provide enough answers for the complex natures of lives today.

This means too that you can still hate on atheists if you want. If there is no heaven, then there is no hell. Atheists knew that, why aren’t they the most fun people celebrating every single day? Once I realized I couldn’t go to hell, I got real happy. Seems, from what I’ve read, that philosophical atheists in this era maybe didn’t get too far on their own. This is because they did not reach with their consciousness into the aether of human imaginations.

Lack of imagination as a buffer to accept what is real is the school of thought that teaches people to stop day dreaming. We force ourselves to stop playing to meet the demands of the current system. The digital age has given that play back to adults who would use it to survive better. This has stripped religions and governments of their limited offering of small amounts of fun.

Privilege is born from systems that allow life to persist off the least amount of resources. The children born during the era of mass shootings are going to be societal locusts during emergence. Life is going to be good. Succulent, savory, and delicious. We stand at the verge of integrating humans and technology. Post humanism is understanding the differences between predator and prey — being a thing no matter what, and having opportunity to be more. It is biological.

Fun is critical, it is positive stimulus. When you are fighting the hardest fight of your life, if you embrace enjoying it, you can survive easier because the pain becomes bearable. When we change how we survive, we change what we are. We will develop larger rings of infrastructure for humans to integrate. If we can learn how to manage this biome by mapping how to travel between the different infrastructural contexts without taking a huge shit on any more species, we can manage a system built for all of us.

The human brain is such a critical propellant of the creation of this potential system, it bears repeating that if humans lack the social infrastructure to achieve something all they need to do is build it. The agreeing upon of how the infrastructure works only need stem as far as the system for which it is created. A new one will need to be created for the next larger system. And that will be born from those who test the system, whether through curiosity or criminal nature. I remain amoral.

Learning what people need can be drafted from social media. Given the right context, it’s easy. People can’t stop talking about themselves.

That won’t change.