Beyond Humanity

Humanity is not the pinnacle of being, it is a pinnacle of being.

Too much mysticism has been piled upon the idea of humanity, even Nietzsche's ubermensch is a much too philosophical construct to be of any use.

Evolutionary perspective gives a simple and powerful way of looking at what it means to be human and whether there is something beyond it, something better.

From this point of view, being human and the collection of ideas known as humanity is a case study, a historical and cultural chronicle of a species and the characteristics of its phenotype. Being human means having genes that are a subset of the human genome and conforming to the phenotypic consequences of having said genes, most importantly, having a primate body, a rich consciousness, a set of evolutionary adaptations ranging from food preferences (or lack thereof) to mental routines and mating strategies.

So what's beyond this? Quite simply - a genome that is larger than the human genome (not necessarily gene-wise, but chemical-function-wise). A hypothetical set of genes that accomplishes what the human genome does, but just better - faster, more reliably and/or abundantly.

What the human genome does accomplish, however, is open to discussion. For me the most important characteristics are what make us the unique and ruling life form on the planet: intelligence and the accompanying phenotypic phenomenons of culture and extra-bodily artifacts such as infrastructure and art; ethics, and computation.

Thus going beyond being human would, for me, involve surpassing a certain threshold in  at least one of those areas. An entity that can cognize about more concepts than some average number of concepts a person cognizes about has reached beyond being human. An entity that can recognize ethical implications in more than evolution has yet allowed an average human to do has reached beyond being merely human. An entity that computes faster or more data than the human mind is, in the most basic way - human 2.0.

Being beyond human is, perhaps, a far more common occurance than it it commonly believed. Losing one's humanity may not need mean something bad; in fact, abandoning humanity is the only way to reach something better.