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“When system boundaries are defined by information flows and feedback loops rather than epidermal surfaces, the subject becomes a system to be assembled and disassembled rather than an entity whose organic wholeness can be assumed.”

–N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman

The point Hayles makes above is still valid. Our philosophical if not religious and political notions of agency, self, and entity have slowly been shifting as our technologies change over the past few millennia. The Self was once a fixed attribute demarked by religious authority bound to various machines of moral and philosophical lineages that are now defunct. Our era of nihilism and post-nihilism is marked by this shift as we’ve begun questioning the notions of essence and concept in the idea of the human. What we’ve termed the post-human is bound to this change in technology and information at the core of our philosophical and scientific move into artificial worlds.

The organic metaphors that guided most of Nineteenth and early Twentieth century thought culminating in such thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead’s and John Dewey’s philosophies of organicism in the 1930s shifted into the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner. Along with the rise of information theory and cybernetics came the question of humanity itself. If we are mere bits in an informational system built of shifting paradigms made of mathematical theorems and philosophical concepts rather than the deep mysteries of anthropological historicism and its organic deep histories, then what is the ‘human’.

After the fall of the endgame of existential and analytical thought in the sixties philosophy proper became a mere parlor game in the house of thought only belabored by ghosts of a former age. For better or worse philosophy would take a back seat to the sciences and technology. We live in the age of pragmatic thought that is instrumental through and through. The marvels of the artificial intelligence have become the central hyperstition of our age self-evolving through a myriad of forms that merges our heritage of cybernetics of the 1950s with the advanced quantum realities of the machine dreams of the sixties and golden age science fiction.

Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov and so many others of this era not only predicted what we’re living through now but as well showed us the madness that would ensue as we late humans fought to save our heritage. Sadly, we will be replaced by something more intelligent and interesting in the coming era. We alone are giving birth to our replacements through our need to create new technologies. Technology once served humanity, but the roles are slowly being reversed and we have begun serving the very tools that once helped us survive in the wilds. We’ve become the servants of our own technological prowess, giving birth to advanced forms of technology that will in the coming decades further the ancient dreams of reason we once cherished as our own. We will survive for a time but as machine and intelligence merge it will become truly apparent at these new lifer forms based not on organicism move into the new frontier of galactic travel and inter-planetary systems. We as organic creatures will come to realize that living in space or on hostile planets will be something too difficult to master and we will send our machinic children in our stead.

The future is theirs, not ours.