Principia Posthuman: an assertion-free posthuman philosophy

Although a definition of philosophy is hard to come by, and practitioners may be either loth to define it (sacrilegious to the field’s pervasive intentional obscurantism) or fill tomes with its consideration (Deleuze’s What is Philosophy? is one of the more recent examples), one purpose of philosophy would certainly seem to be serving as a tool for structuring thinking about almost any topic. In particular, the future is a welcome venue for more standardized tools for structuring thinking. Just because the future has not yet occurred, and linear and probabilistic forecasting is limited, does not mean that there could not be rigorous means of thinking about it.

In fact, whilst thinking about the future from a philosophical view, points arise which suggest that the current nature of philosophy may be limited and inapplicable to many future conditions, and will need to be extended and re-thought. For example, much of philosophy is built upon concepts like language, the self, and subject-object differences while it is not at all radical to envision a post-lingual, post-self, and post-subject object future. There are already starting to be more profound communication structures such as body language readers and holographic thought maps that could supplement and replace language as the only (and hopelessly narrowband and mediated) communication mechanism. The self can be seen as merely the current meatsphere holding tank for an individual brain in a future which might include a variety of biological and electronic copies, with different portions permissioned out to groupmind projects. Subject-object differences fade too with the controlled manipulations of nanotechnology and perspective-extending sensors.

Humbly proposed by a pseudonymous Mary Posthumanis then, is the need for a Principia Posthuman, a new thought paradigm that realizes just as ancient philosophy and theology were not enough and gave way to existentialism, that modern, post-modern, post-post-modern, neo-post-structuralism, post-subjectivity, etc. thinking is currently insufficient as a guidepost to the different possible flavors of posthuman future, and that a radical Posthuman Principia will be needed which apprehends post-Marxist economics, post-existential metaphysics, and a model-free, assertion-free, wholistic, noSQL philosophy.