Posthumanism Quotes

“What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.”
― N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

“Prayer… panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind.”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“Somewhere out there, a higher
form of sadism won the first round.
Well, screw that. I'm not ready to be
pwned.”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“By definition, posthumanism (I call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind transfer, or rather 'mind migration,' for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“EVEN RANDOMNESS IS WITHIN A SET OF PARAMETERS; THRESHOLDS...”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“Cyberhuman minds will process information thousands of times faster, so if you have extended yourself in cyberspace so much so that you can be rightfully called a cyberhuman, your thinking has now accelerated to such an extent that one calendar day may last decades or even centuries of 'subjective time.' Imagine how this new generation of cyberhumans would perceive the unenhanced part of human population - the slower thinking creatures of the physical world would look almost static to them, perhaps like houseplants to us.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us.”
― Indra Sinha

“A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is - he assigns to himself his task and prescribes must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversable.”
― Nikolaĭ Fedorovich Fedorov, Philosophy of the Common Cause

“To admit an absence of causality for the unbrotherly state leads not to peace and brotherhood but merely to playing at peace, to a comedy of reconciliation which creates pseudo-peace, a false peace which is worse than open hostility because the latter poses a question whereas the former prolongs enmity by concealing it.”
― Nikolaĭ Fedorovich Fedorov, Philosophy of the Common Cause

“I would rather call evolution an "emergence myth" than an origin myth: it's an ongoing, nonlinear story in which past, present, and future all communicate with each other.”
― Tom Idema, Environmental Posthumanism in Literature and Science: Stages of Transmutation

“Bionic technology, though certainly a form of creativity, also seems to be a kind of madness.”
― William S. Haney II, Cyberculture, Cyborgs And Science Fiction

“Adam and Eve had nothing on Killock and Cai. Apples were for amateurs. Sons eating fathers: that was a truly forbidden feast.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“God's transcendance or immanence will only be solved when humans in their togetherness become an intrument of universal resuscitation, when the divine word becomes our divine action.”
― Nikolai F. Fedorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task

“By using the mass of the Earth and transforming it into a conscious force, the united human race will give to the telluric force, controlled by reason and feeling - this is, by a life-giving force - domination of the blind force of other celestial bodies, and will involve them in a single life-giving force of resuscitation.”
― Nikolai F. Fedorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task

“But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It Signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.”
― N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

“The new post-Singularity system will inherit many of today's structures but at the same time will develop new traits beyond our current human comprehension. The ability of future machines and posthumans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to the global community of hyperconnected digital minds.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“Do kraja boravka u bolnici, nisam više video doktorku Helen Remington, ali sam, dok sam ležao na praznom odeljenju, neprekidno razmišljao o sudaru koji nas je spojio. Izmedu mene i te ožalošcene mlade žene javio se snažan osecaj erotske privlacnosti, gotovo kao da sam podsvesno želeo da nas dvoje u
njenoj materici ponovo zacnemo njenog mrtvog muža. Ako bih ušao u njenu vaginu, tu na odeljenju za rendgensko snimanje, medu metalnim ormaricima i belim kablovima, nekako bih prizvao njenog muža iz mrtvih, stvorio bih ga iz spoja njenog levog pazuha i hromiranog postolja za rendgenski aparat, iz sjedinjenja naših genitalija s fino izradenim poklopcem za objektiv.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“I cannot shake the conviction that life is (usually) worth living, and that we should continue to create the conditions for intelligent life to experience beauty, create art, discover how the world works, and continue to set and satisfy goals that presuppose a complex form of intelligence. It is at this point that our intuitions bottom out. If you think that life is pointless, given that we will leave no trace in 20 billion years, it is hard to know how to convince you to believe otherwise. An obligation to reproduce, no matter how weak it is, cannot exist unless there is value to the future experiences intelligent creatures will have.”
― Jonathan Anomaly, Creating Future People

“In ten thousand years, we will be beasts or we will be gods. There’s not much middle ground.”
― Bert-Oliver Boehmer

“Do you remember the face of the cashier who scanned the barcodes of the yogurt you bought at the supermarket two weeks ago? No, you do not. And do you know why? Because that is not work for humans. It is legalized slavery.”
― Simone Puorto

“Prometheus did not create fire out of nothing, for it already pre-existed in the natural world. He merely stole it from the Gods and taught men how to kindle it. Thus, man is at once natural and supernatural: natural because he operates within the given world, and supernatural because he can bend that world to his purposes.”
― Simone Puorto

“A good digital worker must first and foremost carry out those business tasks where the human touch brings no real added value, rather than seeking to replace humans altogether.”
― Simone Puorto

“I am a man?" Why not say, "I am Alphonse," or "I am a wholesaler," or "a crook," or "a mammal," or "a philosopher," or "a proud animal"?”
― René Daumal, Pataphysical Essays