"After the Human explores how the strategies and methods of scientific as well as humanistic inquiry are converging to construct a relational view of the world. It evaluates Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory, information theory, cognitive neuropsychology, and evolution alongside the history of modern western philosophy, arguing that presumptions such as human exceptionalism and individualism are not only out of sync with scientific knowledge but also root causes of the critical issues facing the world--climate change, machine intelligence, ideological political oppositions. How to think beyond anthropocentrism and binary oppositions--human/animal, sacred/profane--and acknowledge ourselves as entangled parts of larger ecologies is the aim ofthe book. The distinctive character of the book is its wealth of scientific insight; the opening chapter reveals the complex worlds of dirt, water, air, and fire and how humans have deformed them beyond recognition. Extraordinary advances in technology, with their promise of furthering a global village, have been derailed by economic individualism and hierarchy, prefigured in the atomism of Descartes and Newton. Not until Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg introduced relativity and quantum mechanics--less than a century after Hegel first proposed his dialogical worldview--did a relational account of reality begin to develop. The study of the natural world revealed a micro-universe of relations in which organisms and environments constantly adapt to one another; as Lynn Margulis puts it, "life is a verb," webs and networks of intelligences and emotions communicating within and across species and nonbiological life forms including AI. We have only to change not the world but how we see ourselves in it"--
The world is on fire and time for avoiding impending disaster is rapidly running out. This catastrophe has deeply entrenched foundations: a belief in human exceptionalism and human mastery over the Earth. Accelerating technological changes ranging from genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to biobots, neuroprosthetics, and artificial intelligence are creating new worlds in which human beings will either be radically transformed or become extinct.
After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future. Mark C. Taylor calls for replacing human exceptionalism with a theory of radical relationalism, an account of the world in which everything is interrelated and codependent. People, in this telling, are not isolated individuals separated from each other and set apart from the complex world they are destined to dominate but integral parts of a vital web, where differences enrich each other and nourish the greater whole. Ranging from the grounded worlds of dirt and soil to the most abstract realms of quantum ecology, After the Human reveals the alternative intelligences and transformative possibilities that provide hope for life beyond our perilous moment.
After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future.
