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The world is on fire and time for avoiding impending disaster is rapidly running out. This catastrophe has deeply entrenched foundations: a belief in human exceptionalism and human mastery over the Earth. Accelerating technological changes ranging from genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to biobots, neuroprosthetics, and artificial intelligence are creating new worlds in which human beings will either be radically transformed or become extinct.
After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future. Mark C. Taylor calls for replacing human exceptionalism with a theory of radical relationalism, an account of the world in which everything is interrelated and codependent. People, in this telling, are not isolated individuals separated from each other and set apart from the complex world they are destined to dominate but integral parts of a vital web, where differences enrich each other and nourish the greater whole. Ranging from the grounded worlds of dirt and soil to the most abstract realms of quantum ecology,
After the Human reveals the alternative intelligences and transformative possibilities that provide hope for life beyond our perilous moment.
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Hors d’oeuvre
1. Elemental
2. Lost World
3. Relationalism
4. Relativity
5. Entanglement
6. Information in Formation
7. Quantum Ecology
8. Minding the Body
9. Infinite Conversations
10. Strange Loops
11. After Life
Notes
Index
About the author
Mark C. Taylor taught at Williams College and Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty books, including most recently A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, with Jack Miles (Columbia, 2022). Taylor lives in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is creating a philosophical sculpture garden named neΧus.
Summary
After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future.
