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Paper short abstract

From the perspective of some AI- and transhumanism-related movements, the cultural self-making of humans (anthropopoiesis) extends to the digital dimension, even beyond human existence. The paper discusses how this should imply a rethinking of the anthropopoietic concepts of personhood and death.

Paper long abstract

Anthropopoiesis (Remotti 2000) is the fabrication of human beings by human beings: a process of cultural self-making that is added to the biological becoming over which individuals have no control. Anthropopoiesis encompasses all those interventions acting upon the human body that inscribe it with a cultural mark. Its most extreme forms can include post-mortem cultural practices applied to corpses that constitute the final attempt to define humans as humans, reproducing and renegotiating the boundaries of personhood.

From a transhumanist perspective, this (cultural) self-making inevitably extends to digital and technological forms, even beyond human existence. Data and information can be considered as (digital) human remains existing prior to death, which not only participate in an almost infinite perpetuation of anthropopoietic operations, but in their aspirations may also be used to bring the dead back to life, often detaching the return of existence, and personhood itself, from the physical (biological or biomechanical) body. The most daring dreams of some transhumanist movements (e.g. Terasem, Perpetual Life, Turing Church), no matter how improbable may be, draw upon narratives of a future of messianic expectation where everything will be possible. Transhumanism- and AI-mediated beliefs in technology involve, in fact, (1) mythopoietic processes; (2) customisability, subjectivisation and reproducibility of the digital; (3) social/subjective terminal mediated attitudes.

The paper discusses whether, while asking technology to save us, these movements are also defining a new anthropopoietic dimension of death and personhood or just dislocating the anthropopoietic agency onto secondary agents endowed with presumed (or implicit) eschatological powers.