Dr David Roden
Posthumanism and The Disconnection Thesis
5 October 2011

The computer scientist Virnor Vinge’s idea of a technologically led intelligence explosion (Vinge 1993) is philosophically important because it requires us to consider the prospect of a posthuman condition succeeding the human one. What is the ‘humanity’ to which the posthuman is ‘post’? Does the possibility of a posthumanity presuppose that there is a ‘human essence’, or is there some other way of conceiving the human-posthuman difference?