Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

Chapter 3: The Post-Man Already Always Rings Twice

C H A p T E R 3 T H E P O S T - M A N A l R E A D y A l w A y S R I N G S T w I C E THE FuTuRE TImES “Today” I received this strange news item, but it had no address on it, so I am passing it on to lucky you. By post-man I will have meant (mostly) posthuman. And he (so to speak) rings twice. At least. The first ringing is literal and refers to what comes after humans in evolution. The first ringing announcement that the posthuman has arrived has to do with speciation, guesswork, machines; with loose predictions that fall off a cliff of accuracy as we extrapolate physically nonextrapolatable trends into the future.The classic example of such a trend is the graph of human transportation modes over time. I discovered this in John Platt’s futurism class at Harvard, which I audited in the 1980s (after 1984, before 2001). Extrapolated, the hyperbolic curve of increasing velocity made by peripatetic pedestrian philosopher, horse-drawn carriage, automobile, airplane, and rocket ship does not take long to exceed the speed of light, a progression that is impossible under Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Another example—more pertinent and potentially horrible—is an extrapolation of human population growth. I committed the “fact” of total world population to memory in grade school. It was three billion. Now it’s more than doubled. We know from the fossil record and observation of bacterial growth in petri dishes that the greatest species abundance sometimes occurs in generations immediately prior to population collapse. The first ringing of the 42 f R O M “ p R O T O z O A N ” T O p O S T H u M A N posthuman is thus linear or literally futuristic, and as such speculative, most readily explorable by the science fiction imagination. Unfortunately for us as humans, the majority of fictive posthuman realities are characterized by the total absence of Man, except of course as the imaginer. (I mean “Man” in the old, general, sexist sense of the term.Of course, some futures include men without women and women without men.In some futures there will be only women,cloned lesbians more satisfied and less ecologically destructive without the Y chromosome .Perhaps they will replicate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disembodied pectoral muscles for white breast-meat in annual Thanksgiving to their triumph. Nonetheless, my meaning of posthuman is inclusive.) THE FuTuRE uNTImES The second ringing or meaning of the posthuman is for me both more interesting and more accurate with regard to the posthuman, the afterMan . Because I take it as axiomatic that linear time may be (sometimes is) an illusion, the second, nonlinear or metaphysical aspect of the posthuman operates not in the science fiction future but in the present.Logically , of course, the future is a construct. As Saint Augustine of Hippo reportedly said, “I know what time is until you ask me.” The future is always to come; we never get there except in our imaginations, as with the past. It is always now. Mystics and ecodelic-ingestors sometimes report the experience of seeing time “end-on,” although the word experience here is inadequate insofar as it connotes precisely that duration in linear time that is being called into question. Alan Watts has stressed that while ecologists, biologists, and physicists know that the organism and the environment are not two things separated by a subject–object relationship—but are rather a single process, a unified field—they don’t necessarily feel that this is so. This argument is similar to the idea that time is possibly illusory or insubstantial, a conclusion that can be logically arrived at by, say, asking you to point in the direction of the future . According to Benjamin Whorf, the Hopi locate time behind them, because it cannot be seen. The past is solid, visible, because we can see what happened (think of “hindsight”); the future is liquid, open, black, and frightening, but wonderfully full of potential. Outside time, such differences blend or further differentiate. Glossing Martin Heidegger in T H E p O S T - M A N A l R E A D y A l w A y S R I N G S T w I C E 43 a footnote, Jacques...