exeunt note 1

What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. .. First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological or- ganism, robot teleology and human goals."

Hayles seems to be writing with a good deal of ambivalence here - on the one hand she is excited by the possibilities of this posthuman reading, but on the other hand she is suspicious of any rhetoric of disembodiment and cautious about how restrictive definitions of personhood that might be convenient for certain centralized authorities could be reinstantiated in a posthuman ideal, especially if it looks uncritically at the distinction between material and virtual.

The passage brings to mind two strands of thought:

• What sits behind Vitalik's persistent use of the term "we"? He isn't referring to any special group (Ethereum community, Canadians) but is rather referencing "the human species." One could argue that this should be taken at face value, and further speculations lack practical import, but the question remains: practical by what standard, to what end? If it is a practice without end, an infinite game, then we certainly have time to iterate and expand on the human, elaborate our concept of it, be it an informational pattern, a supposed image of god, a (meta?)cultural or linguistic community, or finally a type of capacity that bleeds into and through other categories, whether in the extended or sovereign cognition of machines or the "other" cognition of other living things. In other words, we might consider the "we" at play as a provocation that can be explored for what degrees of freedom - and for what novelty - it offers.

• Is information, after all, embodied or virtual? I am compelled by the idea of a virtual realm of pure possibility (a morphospace) that creatures slowly eclipse and make real through technological improvisation, but I feel Hayles' insistence on embodiment (and the atmosphere of feminist criticism that it comes from) puts urgent ethical color to this mythological vision. Is there an empirically and analytically rigorous path forward to an account of the materiality of information? I'd direct the conversation to Sara Imari Walker on this point. (-Exeunt)