Finding man beyond the primate

Humanism "emphasizes the agency and potential of human beings" in society, morality, philosophy. The human is he who by practical necessity (not moralistic obligation) must be treated as full moral agent with his own wisdom, powers, and agency. He is beyond your full understanding and control, but still a lawful force to deal with in your environment. The fullest human in this sense is a philosopher sovereign, the least is a natural slave. This being, man, is the most interesting and important phenomenon in the universe, the main character of cosmic history. The xenohumanist observation is that none of this has anything to do with primatology.

With AI or advanced bioscience we begin to see the contours of a world where genus homo no longer has a monopoly on the property of "natural humanity". So let's actually imagine what the world looks like when populated with autopoetic superintelligence including the scifi synthesis of AI, nanotech, biotech, and space colonization.

Scifi authors have imagined "jupiter brains" and dyson spheres as centers of computational and productive activity, effectively giant post-human super-cities. What can we guess about their organizational structure and that of the being(s) that inhabit them? That's where we'll find man in the limit, if man remains.

My first big assumption, following "God Hates Singletons" is that global coordination will not be qualitatively stronger than it is now. As always, factions and cities and "races" will rise and fall, coordinating and competing for their slice of future discounted mass-energy. There will be both peace and war, love and hate, growth and decay. Therefore we expect polycentric orders with occasional partial centralization. Just as it has always been. In particular, even as the world becomes more unified and connected, it does not become more dominated by uniform optimization, and war will remain.

If we apply this assumption fractally, which seems born out in the common dynamics of ecosystems, societies, and organizations, we get a picture of comprehensive complexity very different from rationalist coordination fantasies of total utilitarian optimization of the universe for a single utility function. Our future light cone is not going to be "tiled" with anything consistent.

My second assumption is the "organism" as the natural unit of life. The form recurs as the single cell, the multicell organism, the colony, the clan, the corporation, and the state. There may be overlap, but overall the complexity is organized into distinct individual organisms that maintain their own internal productive ecology as a space of planning bounded off from outside chaos.

Whether now or in future autopoetic superintelligences, organisms have social and political relations with each other in which none can fully wrap their planning around the other (outside of actual absorption). They occasionally split and reproduce according to some logic of heredity (corporations can be recognized as incomplete). They communicate and compete in ecosystems. To each other, they are fellow moral agents, beyond each other's full comprehension and control but unavoidably in each other's lives. They are, if not outright "human" and if not the organismal form of highest "main character" agency, at least somewhat humanoid to each other.

Over time we see improved techniques of relation like trade, ownership, negotiation, comradeship, language, culture, writing, law, religion, hierarchy, etc. Most of these are currently semi-unique to genus homo, but we can also see them as general *capabilities* rather than arbitrary properties of a given primate.

What I notice is that these capabilities of relation are how we define our uniqueness as "human" even though they seem likely to be shared by future higher post-homo organisms as well. What else actually is there to "the human", other than superficialities?

Is the human simply the set of organisms with the most advanced agency and capabilities of relation?

Much much smaller in scope than what you are posing here, but tangentially related and something that has been weighing on my mind: the implications of our modern fertility technology.

We've completely broken the species, we are no longer sexed mammals. We have preliminary IVG in primates, humans soon, its mostly psychological, bureaucratic barriers remaining, and they appear to be weaker than those of cloning. Even barring that paticular development, currently, as things are now, at the lower end of the abilities curve, women can spawn egg clusters like men ejaculate sperm, at least in vitro. A woman can squirt her gametes out, metaphorically, physically too?, mix in some donor sperm, and impregnate another woman.

This is more significant for us as a social species, by my measure, than the discovery of DNA. Completely upends our entire evolutionary history and constraints. Has the potential for just as violent an eruption of new sociobiological forms as any ideology or weak-AGI.

>>5488
Yeah the "relapse into bacterial sex" is an interesting set of possibilities. However a lot of this depends on actual adoption. Do the people who adopt these technologies have any evolutionary advantage of trad nakadashi enthusiasts? I think biological post-humanity as a larger phenomenon could be actually very interesting, between external industrialized gestation, genetic males producing female eggs, female-female parthenogenesis, embryo selection, recombinant selection, and even outright genetic write access. We could see some truly interesting possibilities.

I didn't get to this in OP, but as usual my xenohumanist take is that as we escape the biological limits of humanity we may rediscover many of the same patterns as optimal. Like an artificial womb for example is in some sense just reinventing the concept of woman in a post-humanoid industrial form. How much is that actually better, vs just adopted for ideological reasons because we extended the fatal concept of "humanity" to real women? How post-humanoid is it really once the full picture is tallied up? The existence of male and female isn't just some arbitrary legacy, it's a competitive equilibrium against more hermaphroditic reproductive patterns. Specialized male and female beat hermaphrodites in all but the most socially isolated conditions. Technological hermaphrodism will be the same: the eventual equilibrium may be gendered. The interesting counterpoint is that the future may be increasingly non-equilibrium, but I wonder how much life is actually viable without settled fundamental patterns.

I remain skeptical of fertility technology for now as much of it seems like cope, though there are definitely interesting post-human possibilities in the long run.

>>5490
Yes the "long run" is the open question. The vast majority of possible configurations are inoptimal, there's a reason we call it the straight and narrow, and that Dostoevsky remarked every happy family is alike.

The big change would be if the implantation technology allowed for more specialization within the male and female sex roles. The woman in a material historical analysis sense is a commodity, and the unbundling of egg production and incubation and nursing represents a shift in the properties of the commodity, it now becomes several commodities. The male in a material historical sense is both the agent and the one primarily selected on, so likely little to no change directly, but with the sexual selection landscape changed, would imply a change in what is selected over time. The fertility technology largely leaves the qualities of the male alone, as his primary inputs, cheap gametes and resources social and material, are already moslty commoditized. It's rather hard to say what might be better, as a lot of selection in higher races is group level, not individual, and yet we have seen the total dissolution of these higher order social customs that allowed for stability of e.g. familial lines. The combination of dissolved higher order social custom and the addition of radical new methods of human creation implies either a coming proliferation of exploratory types or a collapse of the system as the sustaining energy falls out.