The term post-human has been used in very different senses by different authors. One concrete definition of post-human would be a (human) being that has at least one post-human capacity, i.e. a general central capacity significantly exceeding the maximum attainable by any average human being without recourse to technological means today. Being these capacities classified in three parameters: that of health, cognition and emotional intelligence.

Post-humanity as a set of capacities & parameters of life

    As it was stated above, a post-human mode of being is one that includes at least one post-human capacity. We might here interpret the values of modes of beings as proxies for values that would be realised by particular lives instantiating the mode of being in question. It is possible for a mode of being (and even more so for a class of modes of being) to be instantiated in a range of different possible lives, and for some of these lives to be good and others to be bad.

In such a case, how could one assign a value to the mode of being itself? Another way of expressing this concern is by saying that the value of instantiating a particular mode of being is context-dependent, i.e., that in one context a value might be positive; while in another it might be negative. A life might be good or bad because of its causal consequences for other people, or for the contribution it makes to the overall value of a society or the world.

One way to express this platitude is by saying that some life-styles are more desirable than the others. But still, some contrasting modes of being or possible life-styles are so different that it is arguably impossible to compare their value. To supply our minds with a slightly more concrete image of what is being post-human, lets consider how a process-to-become post-human could unfold.

Becoming post-human

    Lets suppose that one were to develop into a being that has post-human health, cognitive and emotional capacities. By reasonable criteria, one’s life improves within the few initial steps taken towards becoming post-human. While the process progresses, one can still partake in human culture, although the essence of post-humanity is to be able to have thoughts and experiences which cannot be readily thought or experienced with current human capacities. The question would be: is it desirable to become post-human?

Health enhancement

    It seems quite obvious why one might have reason to desire to become a post-human in the sense of having a greatly enhanced capacity to stay alive, to remain healthy, active, and productive. While on the contrary, instances of individuals sacrificing their lives for the sake of some other goals, whether suicide bombers, martyrs, or drug addicts, attract one’s attention precisely because they are retrograde in nature and unusual as behaviours. Firefighters and other workers who endanger their lives on dangerous missions or tasks, on the contrary are admired because they are putting at risk something that most people would be reluctant to risk, their own survival.

For over three decades, economists have attempted to estimate individuals’ preferences over mortality and morbidity risk in labor and product markets. While the tradeoff estimates vary considerably between studies, one recent analysis puts the median value of the value of a statistical life for prime-aged workers to about $7 million in the United States. A study by the EU’s Environment Directorates-General recommends the use of a value in the interval €0.9 to €3.5 million.

Admittedly, a desire to extend one’s health is not necessarily a desire to become post-human. To become post-human by virtue of health extension, one would need to achieve the capacity for a health that greatly exceeds the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means. But it is also possible that a stated preference for a certain life span is hypocritical.

One survey asked: Based on your own expectations of what old age is like, if it were up to you, how long would you personally like to live — to what age? Only 27% of respondents said they would like to live to 100 or older. A later question in the same survey asked: Imagine you could live to 100 or older, but you’d have to be very careful about your diet, exercise regularly, not smoke, avoid alcohol, and avoid stress. Would it be worth it, or not?

To this, 64% answered in the affirmative, because it frames the question more as if it were a real practical choice rather than as an idle mind game? Perhaps when the question is framed as a mind game, respondents tend to answer in ways which they believe expresses culturally approved attitudes. This kind of anomaly suggests that people’s stated preferences about how long they would wish to live should not be taken too seriously.

It is also worth noting that only a small fraction (in a general scope) of people commits suicide, suggesting a drive to live is seemingly stronger than that of death. People’s desire to live, conditional on being able to enjoy full health, is even stronger.

This presumption in favour of life is in fact so strong that if somebody wishes to die soon, even though they are seemingly fully healthy, with a long remaining healthy life expectancy, and if their external circumstances in life are not catastrophically wretched, we would often tend to suspect that this might be a symptom from a psychopathology. Suicidal ideation is listed as a diagnostic symptom of depression in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. So generally, most people reveal through their behaviour that they would rather like to have a continued life and health, therefore becoming post-human in the span of health is a view which might already be implicitly endorsed by many people.

Cognition

    People also seem to be keen on improving cognition. Who wouldn’t want to remember names and faces better, or to be able more quickly to grasp difficult abstract ideas, and to be able to see connections better? The value of optimal cognitive functioning is so obvious that to elaborate the point may be unnecessary. This is reflected in the vast resources that society allocates to education, which often explicitly aims not only to impart specific items of knowledge but also to improve general reasoning abilities, study skills, critical thinking, and problem solving capacity. People also reveal the desire for improving their cognitive functioning when taking a cup of coffee to increase their alertness… But again, the fact that there is a common desire for cognitive improvement does not imply that there is a general possibility for everyone to attain post-human cognitive capabilities.

This phenomenon may in part reflect the external rewards that often accrue to those who excel in some particular domain. That is, the difference in external rewards is sometimes greater for somebody who goes from very high capacity to outstandingly high capacity than it is for somebody who goes from average capacity to moderately high capacity. Such differences in external rewards are only part of the explanation and that people who have high cognitive capacities are usually also more likely to desire further increases in those capacities than are people of lower cognitive capacities. This is, that those with the highest pre-existing capacity in a given domain would be more likely to work hard to further develop their capacities in that domain, for the sake of the intrinsic benefits that the possession and exercise of those capacities bestow, than would those with lower pre-existing capacities in the same domain.

These considerations suggest that there are continuing returns in the intrinsic (in the sense of non-instrumental, non-positional) utility of gains in cognitive capacities, at least within the range of capacity that we find instantiated within the current human population. It would be implausible to suppose that the current range of human capacity, in all domains, is such that while increments of capacity within this range are intrinsically rewarding, yet any further increases outside the current human range would lack intrinsic value.

Again, we have a prima facie reason for concluding that enhancement of cognitive capacity to the highest current human level, and probably beyond that, perhaps up to and including the post-human level, would be intrinsically desirable for the enhanced individuals.

In conclusion, those who have a certain high capacity are generally better judges of the value of having that capacity or of a further increment of that capacity than are those who do not possess the capacity in question to the same degree.

Emotion

    It is straightforward to determine what would count as an enhancement of health, and the difference between this state and that of being sick, incapacitated, or dead. An enhancement of health is simply an intervention that prolongs the duration of the former state. It is more difficult then to define precisely what would count as a cognitive enhancement because the measure of cognitive functioning is more multifaceted, various cognitive capacities can interact in complex ways, and it is a more normatively complex problem to determine what combinations of particular cognitive competences are of value in different kinds of environments. For instance, it is not obvious what degree of tendency to forget certain kind of facts and experiences is desirable. The answer might depend on a host of contextual factors.

Nevertheless, we do have some general idea of how we might value various increments or decrements in many aspects of our cognitive functioning — a sufficiently clear idea to make it intelligible without much explanation what one might mean by phrases like enhancing abstract reasoning ability. It is considerably more difficult to characterise what would count as emotional enhancement. Most would readily agree that helping a person who suffers from persistent suicidal depression as the result of a bad neurochemical balance would be to help improve the person’s emotional capacities. Yet beyond cases involving therapeutic interventions to cure evident psychopathology, it is less clear what would count as an enhancement.

One’s assessment of such cases often depends sensitively on the exact nature of one’s normative beliefs about different kinds of possible emotional constitutions. It is correspondingly difficult to understand from a human average emotional span what would constitute a post-human level of emotional capacity.

Nevertheless, people often do strive to improve their emotional capacities and functions, an appropriate conception of emotional capacity would be one that incorporates or reflects goals, while allowing a wide range of different ways of instantiating high emotional capacity. That is to say, many different possible characters or combinations of propensities for feeling and reactions which could each count as adequate in its own way.

If this is true, then it could be possible to make sense of emotional enhancement in a wide range of contexts, as being that which makes our emotional characters more excellent. A post-human emotional capacity would then be one which is much more excellent than those which any current human could achieve unaided by new technology and/or drugs.

One might perhaps question whether there are possible emotional capacities that would be much more excellent than those attainable now. Conceivably, there might even be entirely new psychological states and emotions for which the human species has not evolved the neurological machinery to experience, some of these sensibilities might be recognised as extremely valuable if they could become acquainted. It is difficult intuitively to understand or explain what such emotions and mental states might be like when a person is not equipped with a post-human affective-cognitive structure.

Humans may have no idea of what they are missing out

    One dimension of emotional capacity which can be enhanced is the bio-psycho-social equilibrium and its various positive affections (say: joy, comfort, sensual pleasures, fun, curiosity, excitement, etcetera). The difference between a bleak, cold, horrid painful world and one that is teeming with fun and exciting opportunities, full of delightful quirks and lovely sensations, is often simply a difference in the position of the observer; i.e., the perception of the individual subjective experience; much depends on that one parameter.

When thinking the possibility of post-human emotional balance, and their psychological properties, one must abstract from contingent features of the human psyche. An experience that would consume average humans, might perhaps be merely spicy to a post-human mind. It is not necessary here to take a firm stand on whether post-human levels of pleasure are possible, or even on whether post-human emotional capacities more generally are possible. But we can be confident that, at least, there are vast scopes to improve for most of individuals in these dimensions, because even within the range instantiated by currently existing humans, there are levels of emotional capacities which for many individuals, due to the disruption of foreign agencies in the socio-political and economical dimensions of many developing nations of the world, are (at least until today) practically unreachable.

#Post-human
An evolutionary split, or humanity's next step

Nick Bostrom — Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University: Why I Want to be a Post-human When I Grow Up (2006)

Ismael Ogando (ed.)

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