Humanism or Posthumanism (#edcmooc)

I'm sorry. I have no idea of who you are and here I am thrusting some nonsense under your nose. An explanation seems required: In the first week of my E-learning and Digital Cultures course, the folks said "Blog!" and I thought "Aye!" 

I'm now in the last week of the course and after multiple attempts (that were like trying to get porridge in a sock without a spoon) I gave up. Then came a lazy day at work today, and somehow the following got written. Alas, I have no idea what the following is. It certainly doesn't seem very bloggy. It does have the advantage over previous attempts of having an end in addition to a beginning, but it resembles nothing so much as a bunch of essay notes from a dangerously erratic mind.  I dare publish it here only with the vain hope (the hope of vanity) that someone will read the notes, and the certainty that no-one would have read the essay.

[And good Lord! What awful formatting tools you bloggers have at your disposal!]

Humanism or Posthumanism  (#edcmooc)

Human behaviour is plastic. To some extent it can be changed by 'external' forces. 

1. External forces come in many flavours: biological, social, linguistic, economic, technological, and others.
1. Analyses that incorporate only one flavour of external force become overly deterministic. Constraints on determinism emerge from the interplay of the varying flavours. (Technological determinism occurs here) 
2. Change is ongoing and history often (or always) matters. (What happened it the past affects what happens in the future.)
1. Change is a process.
2. Change can only be fully understood by combining perspectives from multiple time scales: evolutionary, socio-historical, ontogenic, last week, now. 
3. The processes of change are often (or always) bi-directional. (Technology changes human behaviour, at the same time as human behaviour changes technology.)
4. The processes of change are often (or always) multi-flavour. (Any aspect of human behaviour may be changed by many flavours of external forces.)
5. The different flavours of external forces, simultaneously change each other. (Economics changes technology and social relations, while technology changes social relations and economics.)

Humans and the processes that affect change in human behaviour form an integrated complex system.

1. A very complex system. Failure to grasp the scale of complexity is a major issue in science: genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology...
2. All elements of the complex system are ultimately instantiated in matter, but describing them in terms of matter may be insufficient to capture their behaviour. The essential nature of sub-systems may appear to be entirely independent of their material substrata. Representational, informational, content may be the pertinent level of analysis.
3. Similarly, explaining causality in terms of the material substrata (bottom up) may be insufficient to capture the behaviour of a system. It may be more relevant to explain causation in terms of bottom down processes. It may be that cause and effect are incompletely distinguishable above the reductionist threshold.

From this perspective, it becomes increasing difficult to disentangle something uniquely human from the interplay of determined/determinant forces. If man creates technology and technology creates man at what point can the line between them be drawn? What is human agency if that agency is embedded in and partially determined by technology? And is technology itself an agent, if its agency can only be expressed through human activity?

One cannot change one element of an integrated complex system without changing other elements. 

1. At the extreme: each and every change, (and each and every aspect of that change) in one part of the system has effects in other parts of the system.
2. But from which perspective could we determine cause from effect?
3. If we remove the distinction between cause and effect, one can remove any element of a system without loss of information. A change in any sub-system would be perfectly described by corollary changes in other sub-systems.
4. Humanity could be written out of the system and re-described in terms of changes in the interrelated sub-systems. (Posthumanism occurs here.)
5. Any sub-system could be treated in this way.
6. Does this fail to describe the totality of the system adequately?

From the above: any sub-system can contain information about other sub-systems. A sub-system can represent a change in another sub-system. 

1. But to whom can it represent change? To itself? Perhaps.
2. But does it know that it is representing this to itself? Probably not.

Collectively, we humans create systems of our representations. 

1. We invent numbers, words, and images; mathematics, language, cinema.
2. We invent these tools to extend our capacities for representation. 
3. We deploy them to better know, to limit and control, the sub-systems that impinge upon us.
4. But our tools escape us. They contain their own ineluctable logic that adds complexity to the very systems we use them to control.

And so we create metasystems to know the new systems we have created, and to know ourselves within the systems, through them, and beyond them. 

1. And meta-metasystems, and meta-meta-metasystems: an eternal cycle of knowing, and changing, and knowing again.
2. But how can this recursion end?

When we talk together about love (or clocks). You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean. And you know I know you know what you mean... And if we didn't. We wouldn't understand each other.

1. Somehow. Magically? We collapse the recursion into a moment of pure knowing.
2. Can other systems collapse the recursion? Can they understand? Can they truly know? Probably they don't have the magic just yet.

Humans have collaborated over millennia to be able to represent states of the system to themselves, and to metarepresent the changes implicit in that very act of representation. They can suppose future states of the system and they can suppose the paths towards them.

In those suppositions is a choice that we must not be afraid of. We can choose to disentangle the web of interrelationships and inter-determinations that is the world around us. We can choose to understand the consequences of the technology we build, the values we hold, and the choices we make. And we can choose to nudge (or shove) the world in the direction we desire.

If we choose to do nothing, the forces of economic, technological, and corporate determinism, (and the few that they profit by them) will continue to tear apart our collective institutions and our belief in our shared interests, until they undermine our very ability to intervene in the system in a coherent manner.

Humanism or posthumanism is not an intellectual debate about modern society. It is the choice that modern society has before it.