To Be Fully Human

There is a narrative that is gathering steam that I disagree with profoundly.

It is a narrative that suggests that humanity’s endpoint is not biological in physiology; is not Earth-based in geography; is not emotional in nature; and is not mortal within time.

It is a narrative that opens up possibilities of a multiplanetary, immortal, silicon-based, logical intelligence that can persist long after the last biological, unaugmented human being dies.

This narrative and efforts to accelerate its reality would be rational if we were first to establish that Earth is beyond saving, and that we’ve already somehow achieved the limits of our humanity in our current state, and there is nothing left to do to prefect or improve or optimize the human form, whatever those adjectives mean.

But I don’t think this is the case. We haven’t established that we are at the pinnacle of anything and that our planet is beyond redemption.

In my mind, the post-human rush is fatalistic; it concedes our existence without an attempt to become fully human.

We can’t claim to be fully human. We haven’t mapped out what we are, where we come from, or why we are the way we are. The fundamental questions that members of the homosapien species ask themselves have yet to be answered. And in the face of that, there is a narrative emerging that the entire species can just be abandoned in favor of a disembodied intelligence that can traverse the cosmos.

But we haven’t established that our embodied conscious beings, the emotional state of our species, grief (which only makes sense in a world where you and your loved ones are finite and mortal), whether these are qualities and constraints that are meaningful in some larger sense, or valuable in some larger sense.

I think we can transcend our weaknesses, but I don’t believe that this automatically means that homosapiens must become something else entirely to evolve.

We need to evolve so that we can be fully human. So that we can operate not from constant fear and anxiety, but from a place of clarity, love, and empathy.

We are not yet fully human, and I would caution us against assuming that there is nothing left for us as a species to work towards other than becoming something else as quickly as possible.