Error: The following dependencies failed to build:
libevent openssl zlib
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

Sultan

I cannot see why there should be any confusion about what I say about trans- as opposed to posthumanism. As to the ‘transgression’, I think that transhumanism from its basic assumptions relies on the mind/body dualism, at least inasmuch as its reductionist conceptions rely on it. That is not to say that you have to reject e.g. neuroscientific approaches (mind that there is also a reductionism between the dualist poles in favour of mind or spirit).

As far as my vague impression of Young’s work goes (I only had a peek at his blog and some other ressources on the web) it seems to me, though, that on the systems level ‘cultural’ phenomena indeed get reduced to functions on a more reactive level.

Nothing against functionalism, but maybe we should think more about system properties that do not e.g. model cognition as recognition, but rather inquire corporeal and interactional preconditions. One reference point for me is Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, another the work done in cognitive and social neuroscience by persons as Michael A. Arbib (“Crusoe’s Brain” and “Towards a Neuroscience of the Person”, In: Russell, Murphy, Meyering, Arbib: Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).

Also, there is much confusion about a cybernetic, as well as a Deleuzian, notion of machine. Putting the difference to transhumanism in sketchy terms might amount to this: I try to investigate the human condition as it might have been for some time already. Ideas in the context of distributed cognition, cognitive artifacts, materiality, corporeality, affect, or an other which forms one point in an action–perception loop try to find out about something that would not depend on an actual ‘cyborgisation’, and that maybe got lost due to the cartesian tradition, information theory, and digitisation. Ideas like processuality, ‘real’ movement etc. also connect here. As far as I understand, transhumanism is based on the very idea of a mind–body dualism, a reductionist notion of both the body and mind, as well as a state of subjectivity enclosed in itself (so that it might as a complete whole be transferred to a robotic body).

Also, the ‘post-human’ is used as a term by transhumanists. However, there is some info out there on the difference, as well as this book of which I’ve only read three chapters so far, which I would recommend however: Catherine N. Hayles, How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999.