The Posthuman Fable. Questioning The Transhumanist Imaginary

The Posthuman Fable. Questioning The Transhumanist Imaginary

New Industrial World Conference, Paris 14 December 2016

Pieter Lemmens, PhD
Institute for Science, Innovation and Society
Radboud University Nijmegen

Introduction

After having criticized a certain posthumanism for its total neglect if not disavowal of the real stakes involved in the emergence of the so-called transformational technologies already in What Makes Life Worth Living (Stiegler 2013, 112), Bernard Stiegler has now opened a full attack on what he perceives to be the movement of transhumanism in his most recent, and arguably most apocalyptic book Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou? Picturing it as a dangerous and irrational technocratic discourse promoting an oligarchic agenda of total technological control over societies and individuals that will inevitably lead to the destruction of any life of the mind, he identifies it with the entropic-nihilistic trend toward total automation and computation of the social fabric typically characterizing the nefarious schemes of today’s ultra-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists and argues for a critical philosophical, i.e., organopharmacological offensive to combat it (Stiegler 2016, passim).

Although I fully agree with the necessity of countering this trend insofar as it indeed characterizes transhumanism, I nevertheless want to point out that this movement is much more pluralistic and diverse than Stiegler’s dark and rather one-dimensional depiction of it suggests, containing - despite its many dubious and troubling aspects - also more progressive strands of futurist thinking and speculating. Some associate transhumanism with Nietzsche’s idea of the Overman (Sorgner 2009) and others have even demonstrated its affinities with Marxism (Steinhoff 2014). It sometimes even considers itself to provide an alternative to the current reign of nihilism, offering a new Great Cause for humanity’s future by opening it toward the larger cosmos (Chu 2014). Most transhumanists consider themselves to be ‘technoprogressives’,

positioned on the left side of the political spectrum (Hughes 2014, 140). It is undeniably true that the rightist libertarian strand has gained dominance over the last decade, due largely to the engagement and intense funding and lobbying by high-tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as well as the growing influence of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University, yet this highjacking of their agenda by the ultra-libertarians and neo-reactionaries of today’s Silicon Valley is highly contested by many figures identifying with the transhumanist movement as well. James Hughes for instance, executive Director of the transhumanist Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and author of the book Citizen Cyborg (2004) deplores this recent development towards an oligarchic capturing of the transhumanist imaginary and suggests the technoprogressive factions should oppose this by allying themselves with other progressive and emancipatory movements (ibid., 143).

When it comes to the future of exo- and endosomatization, the transhumanist project originally conceived is not so much driven by the pursuit of total technological control over society, I would argue, but most immediately by the prospects offered by the suite of new and emerging technologies known as NBIC technologies for individually and collectively exploring the possibilities of redesigning and reprogramming of the human body and mind and of eventually opening up the path to what is called ‘conscious auto-evolution’, which might one day yield socalled ‘posthumans’. In the longer run and at a more ambitious level however, and this is what I would like to point out in this intervention to contrast it with Stiegler’s perception, the transhumanist project seems to be inspired by the dream, if not motivated by the perceived necessity of one day creating a trans- or posthuman successor to the current human, biological and earthly embodiment of what it reveres as ‘intelligence’, in light of the knowledge that our earthly abode is finite and that the future existence of this ‘intelligence’ depends in the final analysis on ‘re-creating’ it in some technological form that is capable of surviving independently of the earth’s conditions. In many other cases the transhumanist project also seems motivated by the fear of this artificial superhuman intelligence gaining autonomy and overpowering the all-too-human, all too vulnerable and frail biological intelligence from which it originated, as in the case of the so-called singularity scenario that features prominently in the transhumanist discourse but that I cannot go into here unfortunately.

Seeing the human as the highest yet transitional stage in the local process of cosmic complexification or negative entropy, ‘as a work in progress’ in the words of Nick Bostrom (2005), transhumanism aims to pursue the process of exosomatization beyond the earth and

beyond the human, ultimately imagining an autonomous form of exosomatized artificial intelligence fully independent of (and probably discontinuous with) its humble human origins and far surpassing it - and as such capable head off planet and embark upon the cosmic adventure before the explosion of the Sun renders the earth uninhabitable. Megalomaniac if not outright crazy as it may sound, it was Jean-François Lyotard who argued in the late eighties in his book The inhuman that it was such a ‘postmodern fable’, as he called it, that inspired those who were at the front of technological innovation at the time and that indeed it was this process of negative entropy that ultimately animated all the global technoscientific Research & Development frenzy famously designated by Heidegger as enframing [Gestell], despite all the earlier ‘humanist’ legitimations of it.

In this thoroughly melancholic, ‘postmodern’ book, Lyotard offered a series of objections and reservations regarding the dehumanizing and in fact ‘inhuman’ nature of what he called the ‘techno-industrial system’ or simply ‘the system’ of technological and scientific development that was overtaking the globe as a seemingly irresistible drive since the crisis of modernity and the collapse of the grand meta-narratives have left humanity in that state of abandonment that Stiegler describes as disorientation in the second volume of Technics and Time. He criticized this ‘inhumanity of the system’ (Lyotard 1991, 2) not based of some notion of humanity to be protected against its dehumanizing effects, as any card-carrying humanist would do, but by invoking and defending an altogether different notion of the inhuman, a ‘positive’ and we could possibly say more Heideggerian and psychoanalytic understanding of the inhuman as the ‘infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage’ which recognizes that what is actually ‘proper’ to the human is ‘its absence of defining property, its nothingness, or its transcendence’ (ibid., 4) and that as such ‘human’ means ‘to be inhabited by the inhuman’ (ibid., 2). The inhumanity of the system, Lyotard wrote, suppresses and crushes this other, we could say ‘human inhumanity’ that he elaborated in all kinds of ways throughout the essays in the book.

This system, which Lyotard also referred to in the book as the ‘big technoscientific monad’ (ibid., 199) or the ‘megalopolis’ (ibid., 194), is in reality none other of course than the capitalist techno-industrial system that increasingly subjects all of humanity to its imperative of performance through research and innovation. Yet Lyotard denied that the ultimate nature or motor of this system can be explained in social and economic terms. With Heidegger, he sought to understand it rather ‘ontologically’ or ‘ontohistorically’ as the realization of Western metaphysics, interpreting the reign of capital as 'the shadow cast by the principle of reason on

human relations’ (ibid., 69). What is most interesting for my purposes here is that the ‘physicalist ideology’ Lyotard attributed in this book to the technocratic elites, their servant scientists, engineers and intellectual paladins in the 1980s to legitimize the march of technoscientific ‘development’ or ‘progress’ is identical to the one marshaled by many transhumanists today to justify their projections of the future of humanity. It is a legitimizing discourse Lyotard characterized as ‘a postmodern fable’ in his book Postmodern Fables from 1993 (Lyotard 1999, 83ff) but that he recounted already as ‘the hypothesis of development’ in the first chapter of The inhuman, entitled ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ (Lyotard 1991, 8).

It is my impression that Stiegler’s critique of transhumanism resonates in many respects with Lyotard’s critique of the ‘inhuman’ nature of what he called the ideology and metaphysics of technoscientific ‘development’ in The inhuman. And it also seems to me that transhumanism, as perceived by Stiegler but more typically in another sense that I would like to lay out here, is very much a latter-day exponent or better a more explicit and more advanced manifestation of this phenomenon as diagnosed by Lyotard in this book. And again, it is the same concern with respect to this phenomenon, first theorized as the danger inherent in enframing by Heidegger and today - in my view - re-interpreted as the generalization of proletarianization by Stiegler, which also animates these thoughtful, prophetic, increasingly confirmed and thus increasingly urgent meditations of Lyotard on the emerging ‘inhuman condition’, although Lyotard indeed did not perceive it as proletarianization.

What most crucially distinguishes this ‘postmodern fable’ from the traditional, metaphysical ‘grand narratives’ famously theorized by Lyotard the postmodernist is its lack of a ‘subject’, or at least of a ‘human’ subject, which is replaced in this new narrative with an ‘inhuman’ protagonist, one that interestingly also plays a central role in Stiegler’s recent writings, and that is the process of complexification or what is also called negative entropy (ibid., 5, 70). Whilst Lyotard distanced himself from this term as belonging to the ‘general, positivist hypothesis’ characteristic of the ‘physicalist ideology’ criticized in this book, Stiegler has taken up this term in his critique of the contemporary successor of this ideology. In this fable of development, Lyotard writes, ‘it is not mankind which is the issue, but differentiation’ and he noted that in it ‘the interest of humans is subordinate to that of the survival of complexity’ (ibid., 6, 7). As such this new narrative lacks a finality, some idea or goal that animates or motivates it. It is a blind

process only driven by a purely material, efficient dynamic of complexification and the increase of capacity and flexibility (ibid., 7).

Apparently seeing no alternative for this development and considering it henceforth as ‘a fact of life’, as it were, Lyotard proposed to renounce any hope of revitalizing an emancipatory counter-project and to settle for a ‘politics of resistance’ against the ‘inhumanity’ of this development (ibid., 7). As we know, Stiegler is highly critical of what he calls this ‘depressive, anti-inventive and anti-alternative discourse of “resistance”’ that is characteristic not only of the late Lyotard but of all so-called poststructuralist thought, including Derrida’s (Stiegler 2015, 82). Stiegler instead calls for a renewed politics of emancipation but one that first of all understands itself as a politics of invention and struggle against proletarianization (ibid., 175). It is this latter phenomenon, not recognized by Lyotard as the central characteristic of the socalled postmodern condition, that is associated in Stiegler’s writings with the notion of entropy.

This postmodern fable of what could be called ‘endangered complexification’ is indeed taken very seriously within the posthuman fable of transhumanism today as I would like to point out. The human appears in this fable as the most complex and most intelligent outgrowth so far of the evolutionary process of complexification or negative entropy that is life and that was initiated on Earth some 3,5 million years ago as a matter of pure cosmic coincidence. This process is conceived in purely mechanistic terms, involving only efficient causality and the principle of natural selection and lacking any meaningfulness. It produced our wonderful brains and developed its linguistic capacities which allowed eventually for the appearance of what philosophers call ‘the life of the mind’, i.e., of thinking, reasoning, questioning and of experiencing and producing meaning.

Whatever those philosophers may passionately defend and cherish as the foundational and transcendental nature of this thinking, however, we must understand, the fable says, that it ‘will have been nothing else than a covert form of earthly life’ (Lyotard 1991, 9). And here the fable brings in its ultimate motif: the earth as the material support and condition of possibility of this ‘life of the mind’ will not last forever since the cosmic body that ultimately grants it this possibility, the Sun, will explode in approximately 4,5 billion years - and annihilate the earth as a result. This means the end of intelligence, pure and simple. Unless, that is, humanity decides to prepare for this event, and that is to say on its own terms, which is to say: by relying for its own salvation only on the laws of the transformation of matter and energy that underlie the

process of complexification. And these are not symbolic but purely operational, to use the terms of Gilbert Hottois, to whom I will return in a moment.

The ultimate challenge for humanity thus conceived boils down to ‘the job of simulating conditions of life and thought to make thinking remain materially possible after the change in the condition of matter that’s the disaster’ (ibid., 12). Lyotard suggested that ‘this and only this is what’s at stake today in technical and scientific research in every field… […] Whatever the immediate stakes might appear to be: health, war, production, communication, For the benefit of humankind, as the saying goes’ (ibid.). Here Lyotard of course suggests some kind of Hegelian ‘ruse of complexification’ operating behind the apparent phenomena, albeit not a rational and emancipatory one but a blind thrust. Yet it must be noted that some contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and cosmologists like Brian Swimme have begun to perceive in this complexification process an inherently creative, even sacred force or so it seems, ‘laden with agency, value, and meaning’ (Kauffman 2008, 12), to be recognized as such if we only manage to break away from what Kauffman calls ‘the Galilean spell’ (ibid., 131) of computationalist reductionism erroneously projected upon this creative force of emergent complexity.

The current material formation of thinking, Lyotard wrote, the organic hardware or biological wetware of the human body that serves as the material support for the logical and symbolic software that ultimately ‘counts’, is not appropriate for the inevitable exodus of this thinking as the temporal pinnacle of the process of complexification. Thus the problem for the current technosciences was to develop a hardware independent of the conditions of life on earth (Lyotard 1991, 13) or more precisely to ‘manufacture hardware capable of “nurturing” software at least as complex (or replex) as the present-day human brain, but in non-terrestrial conditions’ (ibid., 14). As for the software, this was the principal concern of today’s artificial intelligence research.

Lyotard mostly directed his critique to the way this ‘software’ was being conceived among AI researchers at the time, correcting not only their all-too simplistic assumptions about the nature of ‘thinking’ and emphasizing not only the deep connection of human thought with its organic embodiment, but also showing - speaking with the voice of a ‘she’ - how all genuine thinking is profoundly experiential, sensitive, receptive and affective or desiring, yes also intrinsically sexualized, and thoroughly implicated and involved in its natural, cultural and historical

environment, one from which it suffers the pain yet also receives the joy that constantly animates it, thereby adding a layer or a dimension of ‘complexity’ that cannot be accounted for in purely mathematical and computational terms but that needs to be taken into account for conceiving of any artificial, post-solar substitute that might be truly analogous to the full complexity of what human thinking in its real earthly ‘incarnation’ is. If this real complexity, which includes thinking’s sexualization, is ignored, Lyotard wrote, ‘the pilot at the helm of spaceship Exodus will still be entropy’ (ibid., 23).

To re-iterate, I contend that today’s transhumanism, at least in its most elevated and arguably most exemplary variety, is equally motivated by just such a vision, i.e., by a similar if not identical ‘posthuman fable’, as I shall dub it, although I readily admit that a lot of actual artificial intelligence and human enhancement research today serves rather base and most likely destructive economic, i.e., capitalist and military goals, thereby only increasing what Stiegler has called cognitive proletarianization. In my view the most eloquent and sophisticated philosophical defense of this ‘posthuman fable’ that underlies much of the transhumanist imaginary is the work of the Belgian-Wallonian philosopher of technology and language, and transhumanist avant la lettre, Gilbert Hottois, a student of both Simondon and Ellul who has claimed that the decisive transformation of our age is a radical change in our condition from ‘symbolic transcendence’ to ‘technical’ or ‘operative transcendence’, also referred to as ‘dark transcendence’ since it is essentially opaque to the symbolic, i.e., the logos (Hottois 1984, 20). It apprehends and addresses the human not traditionally anymore as the animal symbolicum but rather naturalistically and operatively as a species technica open to a principally boundless technological transformation - and as an ultimately cosmic, not earthly creature (Hottois 2002, 2).

If there is one contemporary author who, in my view, has articulated the real meaning and the true stakes of the postmodern/posthuman fable animating transhumanism in the most profound and lucid way, it is Hottois. He is without doubt the most thoughtful and powerful advocate and spokesperson of this ‘nihilist narrative’ and he provides a far more positive, hopeful and promising picture of it than Lyotard, although he recognizes and acknowledges the latter’s melancholy and resistance as perfectly reasonable, considering that he was one of the great guardians of the philosophical logos in the late twentieth century.

Hottois of course does not talk about a fable but simply refers to ‘the technosciences’ or the ‘process of technoscientific development’ and his central message is that these are in their very ‘essence’ radically different from philosophy as well as from the symbolic and cultural nature of humanity more generally, thereby taking a position that is more or less diametrically opposed to that of Heidegger, for whom, as we know, the technosciences represent the completion or realization of the project of Western philosophy, its ultimate fulfilment. For Hottois on the contrary they represent the complete other of philosophy and this is because, in his view, they are purely operative and this means that they are thoroughly $a$-symbolic and therefore also aontological and a-ethical (Hottois 1996, 211-12). And as such they are in a profound sense alien to the human as the zoon logon echon or animal symbolicum. Thus they could be characterized as transhuman or posthuman.

This distinction between the symbolic and the operative, as pertaining to the physico-chemical realm of pure efficient causality through and upon which the technosciences operate, is the central distinction in Hottois’ work and it is a distinction he treats as an opposition. For him, the technosciences - and in particular those that allow for the intervention in the material, i.e., biological and neurological basis of the human organism - have opened a completely new domain of possibility for dealing with the human condition. So new and unprecedented in fact, that they ultimately allow for the overcoming of this condition. They open onto a new form of anthropic life, not by criticizing the older symbolic-cultural lifeforms of the animal symbolicum but by putting this lifeform into question in a wholly new way: operationally, deconstructing it in its very material constitution (i.e., physiologically, genetically, neurologically, etc.) and not symbolically anymore (ibid., 109). And this puts the very symbolic nature of the human condition as such (and so far) into question, according to Hottois, whose work can be seen as a testimony and affirmation of this ‘being-put-into-question’ of the ‘natural-cultural human’ which is the symbolic, logo-theoretical and ethico-political human - by the operativity of the technosciences (ibid., 194). Against this backdrop, Hottois encourages philosophers to break with what Hans Jonas once called ‘the image of man’, which is exactly the image of naturalcultural man, and to break with the exclusive primacy of the symbolic answer to the human condition (Hottois 1984, 24).

Hottois is a fervent advocate of the full affirmation also by philosophy of this ‘operative turn’ of the human condition and in his view man as animal symbolicum - first of all philosophical man - should not aim to criticize the technosciences (what he deems impossible anyway) and

even less try to master it and guide or direct its course. Instead, he should more humbly confine itself to what he calls ‘symbolic accompanyment’ of the technosciences, and accompanyment that should assume ‘a free relation’ to it as he writes with an obvious reference to Heidegger, free that is from any committment to whatever symbolic authority and undertaken with the aim to preserve and guard precisely the operative openness of the technosciences, for this seems to be Hottois’ prime concern as a philosopher of technology: to preserve and take care of the openness and the freedom, a purely operative, symbolically impenetrable openness and freedom, of what we might call the ‘operative horizon’ or the realm of the possible opened up by the technosciences. And to safeguard it from its possible closure or annexation by whatever form of symbolization (Hottois 1996, 108).

Hottois insists that the development of the technosciences, in their exploration of the operatively possible, should proceed free form the imposition of any form of collective symbolization, i.e., without guidance from any idea or ideal or any collective project. Although he admits that symbolization is necessary, it should be as open and ‘weak’ as possible. This view seems to be radically different from Stiegler’s emphasis on the sustained vital need for a symbolic, psychosocial adoption, a double redoublement (Stiegler 2009, 7) of the process of technical becoming, although Hottois writes that technoscientific development has to be seized symbolically each time anew, yet without blocking its course. In this context he also warns for the current ‘pragmatic-hedonistic blocking’ of technoscientific development evident within consumerist capitalism and enabled first of all through cybernetics, as he rightly observes (ibid., 38; Hottois 1979, 312).

The fundamental ‘question’ or more accurately ‘problem’ posed with respect to ‘the human’ under this new ‘operative’ and ‘cosmic condition’ is not symbolic anymore. This is an important point. The horizon of the species technica is not that of the meaning of being in the Heideggerian sense anymore. Instead, as Hottois has phrased it most dramatically, it forces us to seriously ponder the issue ‘What will become of the human within one or ten million years?’ (Hottois 1996, 211). This ‘unimaginable question’ exceeds any symbolic - be it dialectical, phenomenological or hermeneutic - conception of time, which is therefore rendered impotent. It projects ‘the human’ onto a purely operative realm of possibility which can only be explored via the technosciences. And it is only through the latter, Hottois claims, that we are granted any chance of ensuring the survival of the mind, of freedom and of the possible beyond the earth’s biosphere and into the larger cosmos, which is our ultimate cosmic duty. And this entails the

progressive development of our technoscientific power since only the technosciences allow us to confront what he calls the ‘cosmic wall’ (Hottois 1979, 245). Only through them can we act upon the material, biophysical processes that ultimately support the mind, including its fragile symbolic existence. Only they ultimately grant us the possibility of carrying-forth the torch of intelligence beyond its earthly cradle.

We should thus fully welcome the naturalization and operationalization of the anthropological difference, also as ground of the ontological difference, and break with the exclusive primacy of the symbolic, which Hottois considers to be in fact just an ‘anthropological parenthesis’ between our earthly bio-evolutionary past and our cosmic techno-evolutionary future (Hottois 1996, 104). It is the transhumanists who are the most prominent advocates currently of this ‘operative turn’, I would argue. Given the prospect of the ‘death of the Sun’ and in view of our ultimate cosmic destiny, they claim, we should fully affirm the transformation of the ‘drift of transcendence’ in which we are implicated from the symbolic to the technico-operational - a transformation that seems to be inevitable anyway, or so it has been suggested recently by the American author and Wired editor Kevin Kelly, who understands techno-evolution (or what he calls ‘the technium’) similar to Hottois as not only continuous with but also analogous to what he refers to as the ‘exotropic thrust’ behind bio-evolution and even claims to know What Technology Wants, as the title of his popular 2010 book suggests (Kelly 2010, 63).

Although I can only provide one examplary case here and will have to postpone a more elaborate exposition to a later date, I claim once more that much of what goes for transhumanism today is animated by some version of this postmodern, and let us say rather science-fictional though in the end not unrealistic fable of the human as a temporary vehicle of the process of complexification that contingently emerged on the surface of this planet and will inevitably be supplanted in the future (though this is highly speculative of course) by a posthuman, for the moment machinic and cybernetic successor that will be able to continue the adventure of ‘thinking’ beyond the earth and ultimately into the vast reaches of the cosmos.

And on reflection, Stiegler also inherits certain aspects of this fable in his most recent writings, at least insofar as he also interprets the current situation of humanity on its earthly abode in terms of what Lyotard describes as ‘a conflict between two energetic processes’ (Lyotard 1991, 47): on the one hand that of entropy, which ultimately drives all material processes, and on the other that of negentropy or complexification (ibid., 22) which is a local and contingent process

that combines energy to form the differentiated, complex or highly developed systems (ibid., 47) that we know as organic beings and since the emergence of the technicized lifeform that is ‘the human’ as organo-logical beings.

What is neglected by both transhumanists and Lyotard, Stiegler might contest, is exactly this organological, and therefore pharmacological nature of anthropic complexification. Stiegler would also admit, as Lyotard does, that ‘the human’ is not the inventor and motor ‘but an effect and carrier of this negentropy, its continuer’ (ibid., 22), and that technoscientific development is not an invention of human beings but on the contrary human beings are rather an invention of this development. And he would even grant that ‘the hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy’ yet he would nevertheless insist that it is not only about physical energy but also libidinal energy and that is to say about the libidinal play of entropy and negentropy. Thus when Lyotard concedes ‘that it isn’t any human desire to know or transform reality that propels this techno-science, but a cosmic circumstance’ (ibid.), Stiegler would nonetheless insist on the ultimate importance of the libidinal or the libido sciendi for all techno-scientific development and more generally on the libidinal economy propelling all noesis (Stiegler 2015, 8). What I would like to emphasize here is that it is precisely this libidinal and symbolic dimension of noesis that is totally neglected in all of the transhumanists’ phantasms about exosomatization.

Some transhumanists of a more progressive bent have been redressing the posthuman fable recently in emancipatory terms or at least in terms of a new vision and ideal for a transhuman future, a new transhuman purpose of cosmic proportions. One rather megalomaniac - or is it megalopathic? - example is the book Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential, published in 2014, by the Chinese-American author Ted Chu, praised not only by transhumanists like James Hughes but also by the American Heideggerian Michael Zimmerman, who hailed it as ‘a contemporary transhumanist reprise of Nietzsche’s ideal of the Overman’ and designated it as ‘the most important book in favor of transhumanism since Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near’ (Zimmermann 2014, 85).

This treatise, which also mobilizes ancient Eastern and Western wisdom traditions, proposes a new cosmic destiny for a transhumanized species that is capable of embarking on an interstellar quest. Seeing humans like Alfred North Whitehead but also Teilhard de Chardin as ‘transitory creatures of cosmic evolution’, it advocates current humanity to ‘think big’ and follow the

‘cosmic impulse’ that created us and which, according to Chu, ‘does not serve the narrow, conventional human quest for comfort and “happiness”, but aims for something far greater than our species can fully understand’ (Chu 2014, xvii) and that is the emergence of what he calls ‘the Cosmic Being’ or ‘CoBe’, a transhuman entity that ‘will succeed us, evolve far beyond our biological limits, and accomplish things we cannot even dream of’ (ibid., xvii). It is our new technological capabilities, of course, which finally allow for venturing into this new cosmic frontier.

Chu aims to give human life a completely new purpose, one that far surpasses anything the human species has ever wished for. Referring to Nietzsche’s famous quote from the preface to the Zarathustra that ‘The time has come for man to set himself a goal. […] to plant the seed of his highest hope’, he writes in his own preface that he believes it is man’s calling to transcend his earthly, biological limitations and pursue his highest possible transcendental aspirations in reaching out into the cosmos as a technologically upgraded being. This would represent ‘a revolutionary jump in the growth of complexity and liveliness in the entire known universe’ (ibd., xix). We are about to close the ‘human era’ and open the ‘transhuman era’, enabled foremost by ‘the liberation from the constraints of our biological form’ (ibid., xx) through NBIC technologies.

Perceiving ourselves from the cosmo-physical perspective of complexification is hardly traumatic for Chu, contrary to what Lyotard claims. For it offers us a new Goal with a capital G, one that is far bigger than any of the historical goals pursued through what Lyotard has called the grand metanarratives. Alluding to Sloterdijk, we could argue that the problem for Chu is not that those ‘big stories’ were too big but that they were not ‘big enough’ but very provincial and modest in their aspirations and especially in their spatial and temporal horizons. We should strive for something much bigger and much more ambitious, for ‘a higher goal’ and for ‘a new covenant’ (ibid., 9) with something that far transcends us and that is the almost divine-like ‘Cosmic Being’ that our transhuman descendants can one day possibly become. This will require a ‘spiritual renewal’, Chu suggests, ‘one that calls for a new “cosmic faith” and a fundamental and potentially heroic elevation of human aspiration’ (ibid., 21) beyond the traditional goals of freedom, autonomy, peace, comfort, happiness, prosperity, etc., which he apparently considers to be largely achieved.

Interestingly, Chu’s transhumanism is not of the more ‘vulgar’ sort that one associates more with figures like Allen Buchanan, John Harris, Max More, Gregory Stock, Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg and the like, who promote the use of technology first of all to make us humans more healthy, beautiful, athletic, intelligent, creative, pleasant, etc. For Chu, the goal is not to create a ‘better life’ but a ‘different life’, a radically different one even (ibid., 31). And what is truly at stake is not so much humanity as its transhuman beyond, the speculative Cosmic Being roaming the interstellar expanses. As such it is ‘conceivably the entire universe’ that is at stake (ibid., 41). Also interesting to note in the light of Lyotard’s critique of AI in The Inhuman is that the ‘new mind’ of this Cosmic Being according to Chu should not just be a much more sophisticated representation engine but should also possess its own strivings and motivations, mimicking our highest aspirations and going even beyond them (ibid., 37).

Admitting that the law of entropy ultimately reigns supreme in the universe, Chu points out that local pockets of negentropy or trendings toward complexity must also be acknowledged as characteristics of the overall pattern of the cosmos. Referring to the work of complex systems theorist Stuart Kauffman, he posits that the spontaneous self-organizing tendency toward more complex forms operative in the earth’s biosphere but supposedly of universal validity can be understood as ‘the fourth law of thermodynamics’ (ibid., 102). From such a perspective, the universe appears as a well of negentropic potential or as ‘a “probability field” with an infinite continuum of possibilities ahead of us’ (ibid., 105).

It is up to us, as the current local pinnacle of the process of complexification, to unlock this potential, and we should take on that challenge from the visionary perspective of the Cosmic Being that we may once become. This would be the fulfilment of our highest possible calling. Ultimately, Chu claims, ‘human significance must be placed in the context of its future potential rather than its present existence’ (ibid., 133). For the ‘coming elevation of humanity’ we should therefore focus on our ‘our cosmic potential’ (ibid., 386) and envisage ourselves from a cosmic perspective as a ‘critical transitional being’ in the great cosmic adventure of complexification, a view that is neither sad (ibid., 389) nor just wishful-thinking but instead ‘a pragmatic perspective grounded in science and cosmic history’ (ibid., 390). It is this orientation toward the ‘bigger picture’, Chu claims, that can lift us out of the banal consumerism and provincialism of what Ernest Becker has called the ‘automatic cultural man’ (ibd., 396) of global mass culture prophesized by Nietzsche in the Zarathustra as the last man.

We might debate whether such bold and speculative hybristic transhumanist visions may count as rational strategies of adopting exosomatic evolution, or whether they will contribute to a negentropic and neguanthropic turn of the process of exosomatization, but I think we cannot simply disqualify them as nihilistic and regressive and purely obedient to the proletarianizing capitalist agenda of total algorithmic control of society. In Stiegler’s terminology we could state that, at least in their own self-conception, transhumanists like Chu aim to open up a new domain of consistence, a new idea of the human beyond the human traditionally conceived, and new ideals for elevation, new motives for ‘a life worth living’ beyond, for instance, Heidegger’s Hölderlinian ‘poetic dwelling on the earth’.

We might, and I think we definitely should contest their megalomania and point toward the greater and real urgency of becoming truly earthly creatures and invent a new, and that is to say caring and attentive technological modus vivendi on this planet, which should involve a careful ‘earthing’ or ‘re-earthing’ of technology instead of a technological exodus. We should subsitute this megalomania for what Peter Sloterdijk has called megalopathia, a sensibility for ta megala, for the great and insurmountable things, , since today’s ecological crisis, or the Anthropocene, is a megalopathic crisis since it burdens us with the issue of the future inhabitability of the planet (Sloterdijk 1993, 380-1). This is what should spur our intelligence, more than preparing for a cosmic exodus.

In the light of the current global ecological crisis that we’ve started to call the Anthropocene and which now threatens humanity with extinction long before it can even start to think about, let alone prepare for, its cosmic exodus, the expected ‘death of the Sun’ as the ultimate motive for our technocultural concerns seems rather pathetic. We have a much more urgent problem at hand now with the global ecological crisis and the possible destruction of the earth’s biosphere. In Stiegler’s interpretation, the Anthropocene is threatening humanity with the premature entropic collapse of its technoscientific adventure. And one of the reasons behind it, besides the indomitable march of global capital, is related as I would argue to the ideological triumph today of this naturalization and consequent operationalization of the anthropological difference - i.e., its reduction to the order of pure efficient causality or Wirksamkeit (Heidegger 2012, 32) - and ultimate dismissal of the ontological difference sensu Heidegger praised by Hottois and either explicitly or implicitly embraced among transhumanists.

With Stiegler, we should argue for the necessity of criticizing this reductive approach toward the anthropos, which amounts to a total neglect of what he calls the ‘necessary default’ as the condition of all noesis, from an organo-pharmacological viewpoint, as one that surely endorses the technologization of the anthropological (and ontological) difference yet nonetheless demonstrates the impossibility of its complete naturalization and operationalization as presupposed in the cognitivism and computationalism informing most of today’s research in cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence and brain-machine interface research. Though we might very well ally ourselves with the concern for the ‘transhuman’ future of noesis, freedom and openness that I think sincerely motivates not just a figure like Hottois but also much of today’s transhumanists, we should reject and criticize the naturalistic-operative turn behind the ‘transhumanist imaginary’ as part and parcel of the nihilistic-entropic tendency Stiegler rightly observes and replace it with a techno-critical ‘organo-pharmacological turn’ that emphasizes the fundamental role - and that is to say as a fundamentally ambiguous one - of the technical pharmakon in all its accidentality in the process of noetic complexification as irreducibly linked with the necessary default, which is gravely endangered in the current disruption due to the failure of what Stiegler calls ‘double epochal redoubling’, i.e., the symbolic appropriation of the process of technical change, resulting in what he describes as organological ‘denoetization’ (Stiegler 2016, 152).

The most important philosophical concern for Stiegler with respect to transhumanism, I presume, is the threat it poses to what in Heideggerian terminology could be expressed as the openness or ontological freedom of being-there and what Stiegler himself calls the noetic insofar as it is conditioned upon the original default as a necessary default. And the form this threat takes is the submission of all technological innovation, i.e., of all exosomatization as the very driving force of anthropogenesis itself, to brutal market forces and the competition of all against all ruled by purely computational criteria, or under the nihilistic dominance of what Lyotard has called the ‘performativity principle’ (Lyotard 1984, 50), or in his linguistic vocabulary the exclusive reign of the technical genre, only interested in efficiency, and the economic genre, only preoccupied with ‘gaining time’ (Lyotard 1988, 177), and considering everything else, foremost genuine questioning, as a waste of time (ibid., xv).

Transhumanism, Stiegler argues with reference to Google’s supposedly transhumanist agenda of total digital control of noetic life under ultracapitalist conditions through reticulated artificial intelligence aims at the elimination of all defaults, starting with those of language, and this

means of all language users. This will annihilate the default that conditions all noesis and all desire (Stiegler 2016, 60-1). Such an imposition of profit-driven calculation on the totality of social communication indeed ‘destroys the improbable, i.e., desire, affection, attachment, identification, singularity, individuation and the feeling to exist psychically and individually’ (ibid., 76), turning the human condition into an ‘inhuman condition’ (ibid., 55), Stiegler warns. Also, the strive for perfection he attributes to transhumanism ‘eliminates the default that is noesis’ (ibid., 61).

And as he already showed in the chapter on the pharmacology of the question in Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vecue, it ultimately threatens to effect ‘the elimination of every question’, thus organologically accomplishing nihilism (ibid., 153) or in other words concretely realizing what Heidegger named ‘the epoch of the total lack of questioning’ in his Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger 1999, 76). In that respect, transhumanism represents the consolidation of what the later Heidegger called enframing - das Gestell - and more precisely of the danger - das Gefahr - which for him formed the deepest essence of enframing, ultimately erasing the free essence of man as being-there (Heidegger 1977, 32). Whilst the American bioconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama famously called transhumanism ‘the world’s most dangerous idea’ since it threatened to destroy a human nature he perceived to be the basis for human dignity and the anthropological condition for the liberal-democratic citizenship he endorsed (Fukuyama 2004), Stiegler more or less seems to suggest with Heidegger that its danger lies in the threat it poses to the ontological, or in Stieglerian terms organological freedom and openness of ‘the human’ or better ‘non-inhuman’ - or what he refers to in his most recent writings as the figure of the neganthropos, a figure opening up the Neganthropocene as the inverse of the Anthropocene, ushering in a wholly new epoch of knowledge and a new science of the human as a neganthropic event: neganthropology (Stiegler 2016b, 14).

Coming back to the ‘physicalist ideology’ diagosed by Lyotard and Hottois’ defence of the naturalization and operationalization of the anthropologos, I want to finish with some thoughts on what is called mind uploading or Whole Brain Emulation, which is one of the favorite topics of transhumanist speculation about the future of exosomatization. One proponent is the extropian thinker-entrepreneur Max More who is probably most explicit among the transhumanists in perceiving ‘the human constitution’ exclusively in biological and ultimately physicalist terms. As a biological creature, More states in his adolescently sounding ‘Letter to Mother Nature’ from 1999, the human is ‘glorious, yet deeply flawed’ and 'in many ways a

poor job’ (More 1999). In this letter he therefore announces the technological ‘amendment’ of our allegedly natural human constitution, boasting about improving our neural organization and capacity, reshaping our motivational patters and emotional responses to our own wishes and pursuing a general mastery of our own biochemistry. What is striking in reading More is that he apparently perceives existing human capacities as wholly organic in nature, without considering for a moment, or so it seems, what Stiegler calls their organo-logical constitution, i.e., their deeply technological character and technogenic origin, and that also means their fundamentally historical and culturally derived and conditioned ‘nature’.

The reason behind this is not difficult to fathom: it can be explained from More’s materialist reductionist, in the sense of physicalist, understanding of human nature and in particular the human mind. For More and practically all other transhumanists ‘our thinking, feeling selves are essentially physical processes’ (More 2013, 7) and most of them subscribe to what is called functionalism in the philosophy of mind, i.e., the idea that the kind of physical process in which this thinking self is instantiated is irrelevant; the matter doesn’t matter as it were. This functionalist view of the mind also underpins all fantasies of mind uploading, a favorite intellectual pastime among transhumanist philosophers. It reduces mental states to causal relations and these in turn to functional properties that can be rendered as patterns of information (software) and instantiated in any suitable material substrate, biological, mechanical or cybernetic (hardware). And this will ultimately enable our cosmic exodus. As transhumanist William Sims Bainbridge writes: ‘humans will realize that they are by nature dynamic patterns of information, which can exist in many different material contexts, some of which are suitable for travel to the stars’ (Bainbridge 2008, 211-12).

Apart from the fact that the information-matter dualism implicit in this thinking wholly disregards the crucial significance of embodiment, as Katherine Hayles has pointed out in her book How We Became Posthuman (Hayles 1999) we can argue with Stiegler that such a view completely ‘forgets’ or neglects that thinking and feeling in the ‘human’ sense, i.e., in the sense of the noetic and the libidinal, are irreducibly organological phenomena that can as such only be understood from the intimate coupling between the brain and the technical artifacts through which it is transductively related all the time and that the mental states More believes to be reducible to functional states realized as patterns in the brain that can be extracted from it and re-instantiated, ‘losslessly’ as it were, in any other material medium, are in fact conditioned all the time by the concrete material artefacts that are the necessary external supports for the brain

as the (only) partial, organo-logical seat of ‘our thinking and feeling selves’ and that thus cannot be abstracted from.

More here falls prey to the same fallacy that characterizes all of cognitive science or what is also called cognitivism today as such, as Stiegler has shown through an organological critique of Alan Turing’s idea of the universal machine back in 1996 already in Technics and Time 2, where he writes that ‘Cognitive science […] ignores the fact that human knowledge is technological in its essence, that there is no possibility of knowledge without artificial supports for memory’s inscription, and that the concrete characteristics of these supports, as organized inorganic matter, constitute all cognitive human operations’ (Stiegler 2009, 163-4). What is totally neglected by More, and I would argue in all speculations about mind uploading or Whole Brain Emulation, the most famous one probably being that of Hans Moravec in his book Mind Children (Moravec 1988), is the essential, indispensable component of the artificial in human thought, a component whose concrete characteristics or in other words its grammatological profile is not taken into account. Like all cognitivists he forgets, to quote Stiegler again, ‘the originary role of the prosthesis in thought’ (Stiegler 2009, 164) and neglects the fact that the human mind exists and operates only in permanent conjunction with technical artifacts as its necessary supports.

Speculations about what are called ‘substrate independent minds’ or SIMs abound in the transhumanist literature and these are all without exception inspired by a neurocentric or braincentric conception of what a mind and what human thinking is. And the brain, again, is thereby consistently understood from a physicalist and computationalist perspective, which means that it can be simulated on a computer in principle. Ralph Merkle for instance starts an essay on mind uploading with the argument that while the brain is a material object, and the behavior of material objects is described by the laws of physics, and these can be modeled on a computer, the behavior of the brain can therefore be modeled on a computer’ (Merkle 2013, 157). The obstacles of actually creating a simulated mind on a silicon substrate instead of a biological one are considered to be purely technical in nature, as engineering problems related to how finegrained the copying process of neurological tissue and ultimately molecular structure of the brain needs to be and how much information storage, computing power and energy input is needed for a ‘good enough’ computational equivalent of the mind of a human person.

On the basis of some speculative calculations, Merkle comes to the conclusion that what is needed qua hardware is a supercomputer with a memory of about $10^{18}$ bits and a computing capacity of some $10^{16}$ operations per second, fed with a highly accurate software representation of our nervous system (ibid., 163). It is only the primitive state of current technology in his view that prevents us from realizing it now but cryogenic technology offers the hope of suspending one’s freezed brain until uploading becomes a realistic option in the future (ibid., 164). What is completely overlooked here of course is that the human mind, let alone the whole embodied and factically and socially existing individual, cannot be understood apart from its organologically constituted and conditioned existential embedding in a technosocial milieu.

I have no time to discuss more transhumanist views on exosomatization but what characterizes nearly all of them is the adherence to a physicalist metaphysics that conceives of human noesis in terms of neurocentrism, informationalism, functionalism and computationalism and that is all-too-blissfully unaware of its organological, and that is to say libidinal and thus existential and consistential nature. It is this organological openness, unrecognized among transhumanists, which makes human noesis a philosophical quest, in that Heideggerian sense of an open-ended, historial ‘event of appropriation’ [Ereignis] that is fundamentally not of the order of ‘presence at hand’ [Vorhandenheit] to use Heideggerian terms. To suppose, as transhumanist of the first hour Nick Bostrom does in his recent book Superintelligence, that ‘one of the many tasks on which superintelligence […] would outperform the current cast of thinkers is in answering fundamental questions in science and philosophy’ (Bostrom 2014, 315), only demonstrates a profound ignorance of what human noesis as a mode of being actually is. It is the ontological and organological poverty behind the kind of ‘thinking’ that animates this book, praised as it is by the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Max Tegmark, which genuine philosophy should severly criticize.

In closing, I would like to conclude by saying that the battle around ‘cognitive enhancement’ through exosomatization as propagated by transhumanism is indeed one of the crucial conflicts of our time and that its stance in this must be criticized indeed, but not in the way it has been done mostly so far by what are called ‘bioconservatives’, like Leon Kass Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, Bill McKibben and even continental philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and Hans Jonas, whose either metaphysically or naturalistically informed notions of an alleged ‘human nature’ that should be preserved at all costs fail to acknowledge the fundamental

openness of so-called human nature as well as the constitutive role of technology therein, and can as such much too easily be dismissed by the transhumanist crowd.

In general, it is my impression that the philosophical debate around cognitive enhancement through exo- and endosomatization, dominated largely by an analytic brand of philosophers predominantly interested in ethical and to a lesser extent (bio-)political questions, has been rather superficial up til now if only because it lacks a thorough theoretical grounding in a profound and up-to-date philosophical anthropology or should I say, after Peter Sloterdijk, radical-historical anthropotechnology (Sloterdijk 2017). In that respect, I share Stiegler’s concerns and very much welcome his insistence to take serieus the need to confront the transhumanist challenge and enter into a critical debate with it, armed with the weapons of a new techno-critical reason and thus based on a genuine philosophical critique, in casu from the perspective of an organological and pharmacological understanding of the human or better the ‘non-inhuman’ as the technical and noetic form of life that we ourselves are and are always becoming, either for the better or the worse.

It is obvious that for Stiegler, transhumanism represents a powerful ‘adversary’, maybe even a figure of ‘the enemy’ which needs to be combatted - in thought that is - since it is in conflict with what he rightfully perceives as in need of the most powerful defence today and that is the future of the openness and ontological freedom of ‘the human’. As such I absolutely agree with what he perceives as the negativity and the disturbing and outright dangerous nature of the characteristics he associates with transhumanism. Yet I am convinced that these do not apply to this movement tout court and I am sure that most representatives will not easily recognize themselves in his admittedly pejorative descriptions, which present it as a rather univocal and one-dimensional enterprise. But this is certainly not the case in my opinion, despite the pertinence of many of Stiegler’s observations. It is also in itself a movement that is pervaded by antagonistic tendencies as I have hoped to convey, to my own amazement by the way since I agree with Stiegler that in the final analysis it mostly distracts from the real issues involved in the current phase of exosomatization within the age of the Anthropocene, which does not announce the transhuman but instead calls for the neguanthropos.

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