Post-Human

Human beings have come a long way since the cavemen era, but just as we continue to strive in technological  advancements the younger generations are taking a huge hit. Not only the young but also most adults have come to a point where it is necessary for them to stay close to their phone and/or cannot find it in themselves to leave the internet. It is true that these factors facilitate our lives but these objects also take over our lives. In N. Katherine Hayles' book, How We Became Posthuman, she talks about the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and how they found a new way to look at human beings, which was as 'information-processing entities' who take in resemblance of intelligent machines. She defined the term humanism as having an identity and the freedom to flourish one-self into something greater. I would say that humanism is the ability to feel remorse and the ability to be unique unlike everyone else's mind set. She also set forward viewpoints on the posthuman, such as it would 'privilege information over materialistic objects' and that the posthuman 'controls humans so that they can be formed into intelligent machines.' I would have to agree with her and say that the posthuman is the extinction of the human race and what ever takes over after, will have total say on what to do with our remains. These terms differ in the fact that one is in the era of human beings and the other is after the humans are gone. I feel that I am posthuman to the extent that my life has been a sense of repetition in one way or another. I always have to wake up early in the morning either to go work or go to school, I have to eat everyday in order to stay alive, and there are so many other people that do the same thing I do it is like we are all a society of zombies headed in the same direction, doing the same thing. It is like if my life is scheduled already and there is no irregularity in it to shake things up. So when Hayles' says in Chapter One of her book "We do not see a world (out there) that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see", it made me think about my regular lifestyle and everything out there in need to be discovered. With so much potential and resources, and all we have come to is robots trying to become us. But it is true, we only stick to what we are told to do, already enacting the lifestyle of robots because we never choose to search outside the box for other information or something else outside of our standard, boring, ordinary life.