This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my Spirit said: No, we but level that lift, to pass and continue beyond. ~ Walt Whitman If it walks like a man, quacks like a man, and photosynthesizes like a man, then it's a man. "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change." -- John K Clark (johnkc@well.com) "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. I am rooting for the machines." --Claude Shannon If cyborgs know about anything, they know about parts. Spare parts, parts and wholes, prostheses, replacements, enhancements. How do you make sense of all these pieces? After the disaster, when things fall apart, cyborgs know how to stitch themselves back together. --Diane Greco Seriously, if the extropian dreams come true, we'll pretty much be memetic organisms--we'll exist as long as someone (including ourselves) is interested in us. --Nancy Lebovitz "Our destiny was apparently to be the human atoms critical to the transformation of Homo Saphiens into galaxy-roving bodhisattvas, the culmination and quintessence of the highest aspirations of star-coveting humanity." -- Terence McKenna from «True Hallucinations» Homo sapiens? You need to upgrade. God made man, but v. 3.2 is better My personal bet is that humans like us never get beyond Mars orbit in person -- but our minds will be exploring the nearer stars before the 21st century is out. -- Charlie Stross The computer is the bridge that will carry man on his journey from animal to god. ~ from Man's Journey, Nikolos Daru Ede Does it really make so much difference if our children are made of silicon and steel? Hal Finney We are building our successor, and we're almost finished. -- Dan Clemmensen Sothis No more a thing I knew... transformed - transfigured Transcended... in an endless progress cycle DNA metamorphosis... of the dying cells Into something that will last... last forever Immortal... my soul... alone under... The cracking skies... on trembling Earth Closing the eye... of blinding Sun WHO AM I? - a question... already answered I am who I am... no less, no more Destined to be... never to extinct Remaining after... everything dies Remaining... a Dog Star's Son... beyond the Sun For ever... and more Vader, de Profundis (1995) http://la.ists.pwr.wroc.pl/~coven/music/lyrics.tgz/profundi.html I want to be assimilated. I want to be borg. Machines will not destroy humans; humans and machine will become one. -- Crist Clark We seem headed for our own starbirth, drawn to it just as inexorably as those grains merge, accelerating toward it just as surely as the merging accelerates. The attraction is massive, relentless, unstoppable. When our starbirth comes, some of us will no longer be truly human; and things we now call machines will no longer truly be machines. -- Gregory J. E. Rawlins The posthuman extends his/her possibilities through conscious design. --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995). She was not incapable of human feeling; it was simply too mild for her to notice. It had become a second subconscious, a buried, intuitive layer below her posthuman mode of thought. Her consciousness was an amalgam of coldly pragmatic logic and convulsive pleasure. -- Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Maybe technology eventually turns them into something that wouldn't call human. But that's a choice they make -- a rational choice. -- Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix But though it is possible that in the early stages a surgically transformed man would be at a disadvantage in capacity of performance to a normal healthy man, he would still be better off than a dead man. -- Bernal, _The World, The Flesh, The Devil_ We stand between the earthloving beast and the cool, hot electronic angel. We will feel the dirt in our blood and the sun in our eyes even after they are gone or just memories. Even after we'll have no blood and no flesh eyes. Dirt and sun made us. We won't forget. -- Roger Atkins/Greg Bear Last one to become a monolith is a lump of protoplasm! The issue of using genetic engineering to "improve" the fetus will potentially become much more highly charged than the controversy over abortion. It may not be an exaggeration to say that it will become the most difficult moral and social issue that the human species has ever faced. Genetic engineering is not just another life-enhancing technology like aviation or telecommunications. Its continued development and application may force us to redefine the parameters of life. ("Post Human," Adbusters Quarterly, Winter 1994, p. 21) It is my belief that as technology progresses, the confusion regarding the underlying question regarding abortion -- "What is a person?" -- will get worse. I predict that in the near future (the lifetimes of people already born), people will have to face xoxs (clones with identical memories to the original), uplifts (animals whose intelligence has been increased), cyborgs (human brains encased in mechanical devices), androids (intelligent robots in human-shaped bodies), AIs (artificially intelligent computers), and uploads (human minds uploaded into computers). When I asked Eric Drexler (author of Nanosystems , about how we should react to such entities, he said, "We should give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them human." -- Tihamer Thoth-Fejel 'I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess' -- Donna Haraway Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization. -- Bruce Sterling one creature ascends beyond the world of darkness... into something else. -- Anne Corwin Moreover, a Chain of Being is extremely instrumental if you do self engineering. Let your previous self(s) evaluate you. The sun will darken. It keeps me awake, since I’m immortal. (it is considered Seriously Bad Table Manners trying to convert the Rest of the Universe into Self. (Nonself into Self. The ultimative act of cannibalism. Critters would like it.). It might not like it, and bite back. Big teeth. Piranha soup.) Eugene Leitl The Transcendental Temptation is Great. "One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh." -- Arthur C. Clarke's _Profiles Of The Future_ (originally published in 1958) >H: a kind of consciousness pearl, concentric mother-of-pearl aragonite consciousness layers around the tiny H originator grain. It is still there, but who thinks about the initial grain of sand or encapsulated parasite if one sees a large, perfect pearl? -- Eugene Leitl But Lieserl, how are you feeling? That's what we can't tell.

"You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel --"

Enhanced.

No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone a few inches behind eyes made of jelly.

She was supremely conscious.

What was her consciousness? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and in the past.

Even in her old, battered, rapidly aging body, she had been conscious, of course. She could remember a little of what had happened to her, or in her mind, a few moments earlier.

But now, with her trace-function memory, she could re-live her experiences, bit by data bit is she wanted to. Her senses went far beyond the human. And as for inner perception - why, she could see herself laid open now in a kind of dynamic blueprint.

By any test, she was more conscious than any other human had been - because she had more of the mechanism of consciousness. She was the most conscious human who had ever lived. -- Stephen Baxter, Ring ------------------------------------------------------------ I beheld the vague, shimmering outlines of titanic entities rippling in the distance. Their sentience I could sense immediately; their power and purpose ruptured all human scales. I could no more comprehend the scope of their existence than an amoeba could look back up a microscope and fathom the human mind. "Are they Gods?" I asked. "Your descendents," said the Caterpillar. "Several million years hence." I adjusted the focus to my present time. Before me I saw the human family, all 6 billion of us, and I saw quite clearly that we were poised on the edge of an evolutionary event as signficant as the Cambrian Explosion. There would be no "Homo superior." There would instead be hundreds, maybe thousands of new species evolving out of the current human population. The segmentations were already appearing; within 100 years, it would be impossible to speak of "one human race." We would diversify. Some of us would remain on the planet.... Others would move offworld. Some would go to live on the Sun. Others would migrate to places nearby but invisible. Some would open holes in the fabric of spacetime, and step through doorways where no doors were previously known to exist. I watched the phantom futures lap over each other like waves; none constant, none fixed, all of them melting and solidifying in a swirl of probability and potential. Humanity's future was uncertain, but this much I knew: any action I took would ripple out across the eons to have enormous impact. Entire posthuman civilizations millions of years hence would rise and fall on the choices made by me, now, in the present. Evolution, I realized, is not an impersonal force. You and I are participating in it at this very moment. You and I are the butterflies, flapping our wings, only dimly aware of the hurricanes we're setting in motion. And not one of us is insignificant. Patrick Farley, Chrysalis Colossus ------------------------------------------------------------