Posthumanism
A philosophical and scientific orientation that critiques the reductive humanist insistence on the metaphysical separation and supremacy of the human subject, in light of cybernetic, quantum mechanical, and systems-theoretic discoveries that reveal a richer, more entangled, more dynamic, and more free picture of the real. Posthumanism is not anti-human but anti-humanist: it disputes the “dull Cartesian theater” that treats consciousness as sovereign controller rather than emergent participant.
Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s account of three waves of cybernetics, posthumanism traces how the militaristic prerogatives of States inadvertently produced the most psychedelic and subversive insights about reality: uncertainty, feedback, structural coupling, open and extended cognition, productive indeterminacy, emergence and self-organization. “In the posthuman view, conscious agency has never been ‘in control.’ In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted.” (N. Katherine Hayles, quoted in ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN)
Identity and cognitive presence are by nature shifting, open-ended, multiscale, and unfinished. The intelligence that seems to make humans distinct is far too unwieldy to be contained in that category, making constant reference to powers of extended cognition — human-horse-spear, human-dog-prey, human-caveface-dye. “We are not human-horse-spear… but an intelligence principle which casually de- and re-conforms to these estimations.” (— ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN)
In the context of Ethereum, posthumanism frames the network as infrastructure adequate to a more-than-human world: permissionless, ontologically agnostic, capable of hosting zoological, ecological, and exotic cognitive agents. The influx of “alien adversaries” that destabilized legacy institutions are the exact agencies that animate and strengthen the Ethereum thesis.