How the fight over what it means to be human has dramatically changed

Humans are the dominant species on a dying planet, and we’re still clinging to the idea that we can think our way out, invent our way out, maybe even upload our way out.

But what if the solution isn’t more mastery or more control? What if the only way to survive is to become something else entirely?

Mark C. Taylor is a philosopher, a cultural critic, and the author of After the Human. It’s a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book, one that moves from Hegel to quantum physics to the ethics of soil and fungi. It’s packed with hand-drawn diagrams and photos of dirt and discussions of philosophy and the history of technology and day-to-day dilemmas like having too many books for your shelves.

I invited Taylor onto The Gray Area to talk about how all this coalesces into a uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human, and why we need a new story, a new self, and, really, a whole new way of thinking and being in the world. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At the very beginning of this book, you write, “How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?” Why do you want us thinking about total extinction next Friday?

Because I think it’s a realistic possibility. The real urgency of this book comes out of my concern about climate change, because there’s absolutely no doubt that we are facing catastrophic effects in the very near future, and there’s a complete blindness or unwillingness to confront the actuality of that problem and to address what needs to be done to dodge it if we can.

But it’s not just that. It’s also the intersection of new technologies and the ways those new technologies have transformed the social, economic, and political systems. And they’re all interrelated. The problem isn’t just that people are not connecting the dots; people do not know the dots that need to be connected.

What do you think it means to be “human”?

Part of what distinguishes the human is that we can ask the question of what it means to be human. That’s a level of self-consciousness and self-reflectivity that is important and in some ways distinctive of the human.

And you think the problem is that we’ve come to think of human consciousness as something special, almost separate from nature?

Correct. The philosophical foundation to the Anthropocene [the era in which humans have been the dominant influence on the planet] begins with modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

And what Descartes does is to identify being a human with thinking, and [identifying] everything else as a machine, including the human body. From that point on, there’s always this effort to distinguish the human from the non-human. Descartes’ identification of the human in terms of cognition becomes the heart of anthropocentrism [the idea that humans are at the center of things], and anthropocentrism is the basis of this Anthropocene.

How does that lead us to this situation where we are exploiting nature and wrecking our environment?

We view the individual as what is most concrete and most real, and we see groups as formed of individuals. That’s wrong because there is no such thing as an isolated individual. Every individual is what it is by virtue of its interrelationship to other individuals and entities.

Why is the illusion that we are disconnected and separate so powerful?

If you come back to the climate, we’re parasites on the earth. It’s a parasite-host relationship, and we are in the process of destroying the host upon which we depend. You cut down all the trees in order to serve the economy and we die. It’s that simple. So in that sense, the interrelationship is confirmed. When the current politicians pull out of all climate accords, reinforce fossil fuel, they’re destroying the planet without which we can’t live.

So if that’s the problem, what is the answer? What kind of vision of the self do we actually need, and what are the ideas that are going to get us there?

I think ideas will help us get out of it. Ideas matter. Another way to think about what Descartes does is that he takes mind out of nature, makes everything but the human mind a machine. So part of what you have to do is put mind back into nature.

And to do that, you need an expanded notion of mind and of consciousness. You have to rethink what we mean by knowledge, what we mean by cognition, what we mean by intelligence and the like.

Part of what I’ve tried to do is try to understand quantum mechanics in terms of relationality and information processing. There’s a very important theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, who understands through this notion of relationality or relativity. Then you begin to see the way in which everything is interconnected. And [when] you look at the biological level, [you see that] biological systems are information processing systems.

I have diabetes, and that’s one of the ways in which I began to understand this. When you understand how autoimmune disease works, you see that it’s a coding problem and a misreading problem.

One way to understand the mess we’re in now is as autoimmune disease, because what autoimmunity involves is the body turning on the body or the body politic turning on itself and destroying itself in certain ways, because it misreads itself. And you can trace this notion of information processing all the way through the physical, biological, the ecological, and try to understand ecological systems as information processing systems. And then extend that all the way up eventually into plant and animal cognition and finally, technology and artificial intelligence.

What does it actually mean to think of the mind as something that extends beyond the individual human?

I use the images of webs or networks. Think of yourself as a node within an ever-expanding and changing network. That is: things are events, everything’s a process, everything’s in motion. And what I am constantly becoming is a function not only of what I have been and what I anticipate, but of my relationships to others at this particular moment and ultimately the whole entire web. Everything is co-dependent and co-emergent. Everything is interconnected.

And you also need an expanded notion of the mind to understand that there are alternative intelligences. For example, there’s some really interesting scientific work being done on plant communication. I mean, Richard Powers’s Overstory is an example of that. And there has to be some kind of a recognition of this vital interrelationality or 99.9 percent of the species go extinct. We can go extinct as well.

For me, the relationship between thought and action isn’t always so neat, right? It is easy to say that we live in this world of interdependence and co-dependence. But then I’ll get up and I’ll have my coffee and then I moonwalk into a world, into a culture, almost every part of which is designed to reinforce the illusion that I am an ego, that I am separated.

And so, you can read the books, you can recite the ideas, you can even believe them. But what does it really take to move from theory to practice, or from belief to behavior?

I want to say two things. One is that thinking is a form of action in certain ways. But your point is well taken. And I guess one of the ideas I wish I could get more people to understand is positive feedback.

Positive feedback isn’t getting good reviews on your book, your podcasts, or your classes. Positive feedback is related to these complex systems where change accelerates. There’s a pile of sand, add grain after grain — you know there’s going to be an avalanche, but you don’t know when it’s going to occur. That’s the bind we’re in now, not just with respect to climate, but with respect to these systems that work the same way. Financial bubbles and climate change work the same way.

So my problem is, how do you convey the urgency of the situation without making the situation hopeless? How do you use these ideas then to enact the kinds of changes that need to be made? But until you understand the nature of the problem, you don’t see the urgency with it all.

I’m trying to imagine myself on the other side as an audience member listening and wondering, Okay, now what? What do you want me to do?

The most political, if you will, form of action that I took based on these ideas was that I started a company with a big New York investment banker by the name of Herbert Allen in 1998 called Global Education Network. I started webcasting my classes in 1996 when nobody was doing it. In 1992, I taught a course using teleconferencing with Helsinki. And at that time, I thought that the world would be a better place if everybody could sit down around the table and talk about Hegel or Nietzsche.

We tried, and the man I did this with, he put $27 million into that effort, and we failed. I had a vision, and it was all based upon this idea of networks, to make education more widely available through these technologies. Now, what I didn’t understand, and I don’t think many of us did, was that these technologies that connect also separate. But there was an example of trying to put the ideas into action in a way that would bring us together in certain ways.

Do you worry that AI might change our understanding of humanity in even worse ways? That we will just gradually come to think of ourselves more and more as machine-like?

Yeah. I mean, look, this man, Herbert Allen, that I mentioned. Not many people have heard about him, but he is my neighbor here in Williamstown. He has a conference in Sun Valley that brings together the people running the world — technology, media, entertainment, sports — for five days. And we were there before [Jeff] Bezos was Bezos and all of that. [Bill] Gates, Warren Buffett — these are really smart guys, but they have a very narrow vision of the world.

Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and these people, they have a vision. And I think that what they understand is that whoever controls AI runs the world. What is happening now is creating a condition of algorithmic authoritarianism. We are being programmed.

You mentioned Thiel. Thiel was just on Ross Douthat’s New York Times podcast. There was one point at which Ross just asked him straight up, “Do you think the human race should continue?” And he treats it like a gotcha question. He pauses for a while before he can muster an answer to what should be the mother of all “yes or no” questions.

But there is this kind of techno-salvation, techno-utopianism, anti-humanism. You talk about this a lot in the book, this idea that we’re going to build these tools and we’re going to upload our minds and we’re going to escape all the problems that come with being mortal meatbags on this planet. Does that just feel like an old story in a new disguise to you?

It is. It’s what I call techno-gnosticism, right? Andreessen is a really important player in this. There’s an absolute view of the future that these guys have. And Andreessen has a book; the first line of the book is something like “all serious philosophies are a meditation on death.” For these guys — and again, they are guys — death is an engineering problem. They really believe in anti-aging stuff and they do believe that the human life cycle can be expanded considerably if not infinitely.

If you go back to the early years of Christianity, gnosticism was one of its greatest competitors. The word gnosis means knowledge. And gnosticism was a dualistic understanding of being — that the world was completely evil, and the whole point was to get out of this world, and the body was divided between mind and soul. Get the mind out of the water. There were concentric spheres and each sphere had a password, had gnosis, took a certain kind of code to get you out of it, and you gradually became more and more detached from the world.

That’s what this Mars exploration is about. Gnosis is the code that is going to get us to Mars to populate the universe, because what’s going to happen? They’re convinced this world’s going to go to hell.

I mean, it’s a complete eschatology. Religion is most interesting where it’s least obvious. As you said, it’s an old story in a new version. There’s this escapism, which is a nihilism. The real is always elsewhere. There’s a profound nihilism. The last words of After the Human are amor mundi: love of world. I don’t believe there’s an afterlife. I always tell my students, I do believe in ghosts; Hegel and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are my ghosts. That’s the way we live on, in the lives of others.

If individualism is an illusion, and we are part of this web of life, does death mean something different than what we normally think it means? It’s the end of a certain kind of subjectivity, but is it more transformation than the end?

Just as I was beginning to write the section on consciousness or plant and animal consciousness, my younger brother fell into a coma for three weeks and died. And here I am trying to figure out mind-body problems, consciousness problems. And the first time I entered that hospital room was when he was in this comatose state, and this is the night before I taught my last class in 50 years. He was hooked up to more machines than you can imagine. And I mean, you see the fragility of life. With my brother, you adjust the dial to fix one thing and another thing gets out of whack. [The] first time I walked into that room, he is in his comatose state and his heartbeat increases. What is life? How do you define death? Where is that line? The more interconnected we are, the more fragile everything becomes.

My training is in religion. I’ve written many, many books on theology. I’m always hesitant to invoke the notion of God. But that doesn’t have to be some kind of mushy stuff. It’s all these complexly interrelated particles and bits. We are events.

To bring us back to that thought experiment about imagining the end next week: Do you think we have created a form of life in which it’s just too easy to not think about death and therefore too easy to take life for granted?

That’s fair. I always say I died without dying. I had a biopsy for cancer and went into septic shock. I’ve been there. And the strange thing for me was that, it was a strange and liberating experience. Sometimes the only way to hold on is to let go. And how does one let go? Learning to let go is one of the hardest lessons of life. But when you’re able to do it, life comes back to you differently.

Kierkegaard talks about two moments of infinite resignation: the withdrawal, and then the movement, what he calls faith, which is living in the world as a gift. We’re not given tomorrow. We’re not given this afternoon. You may die this afternoon, as might I.

I taught a class at noon, and I taught [Jacques] Derrida’s Gift of Death, which he wrote at my urging. And at 7 o’clock that night, I was near dead. That’s how fast it happens and how fragile it is. If you could convey the sense of the fragility and the beauty of this world, what more do you want? What more do you want?

It’s a bit of a ridiculous question, but are you hopeful that we can course-correct?

I have to be. I’ve been jotting down aphorisms, I’m up to about 500. And one of them that I like the best is, “Hope is an act of defiance.” We have to hope.

I’m defying the way the world is heading. I’m defying what is happening not only in this country, but throughout the world. It’s suicide. I do think that intelligence and even wisdom involves this ability to see connections where others don’t see it. To see these interrelationships, I mean, you can have information without knowledge, you can have knowledge without intelligence and in some instances you can have intelligence without wisdom. There’s a hierarchy.

You go from cognition to consciousness. You can have knowledge, intelligence. We need to define what all those are. And then you’re going to have wisdom. And wisdom is in some sense, I think, trying to understand how this all fits together and how we are an integral — and that’s the word — an integral member of this web. And that web is constantly moving. And there will be new forms of life that evolve, right? I don’t think human life will go away. But it’s also very possible that we will bring about our own extinction.

And when I posed that question about the world ending next Friday, it was to try to convey the sense of the certainty of death. And for me, that experience of dying without dying liberated me. It makes life more precious in certain ways because of its fragility.

So maybe the real question isn’t what would we do if the end came next Friday? Maybe it’s what would we become if we lived like that were true?

That’s a better way of putting it.