Much posthumanist, nonhumanist or antihumanist discourse is motivated by a methodological commitment to materialism. This is so notwithstanding the question mark over what the more detailed commitments of materialism actually are, e.g. whether matter is prior to or dependent upon the form of objects. In other words, whether matter is fundamentally things or stuff, or somehow both. Putting the analysis of materialism aside, there is general agreement that a thoroughgoing commitment to materialism renders the human mind or soul as just another material system, which then motivates the rejection of any kind of human exceptionalism.
This material continuity of the mind that motivates much contemporary opposition to humanism can be broken up into at least two aspects. The first is that the course of mental operations and processes that take place in the human mind are completely explainable in terms of material, causal interactions, often incorporating processes and networks that extend far beyond any particular human’s skull or skin. The second is that mental states that are about or represent the world beyond any particular human’s skull or skin are reducible to a network of causal interactions and potentials that similarly extend far beyond any particular human’s skull or skin, or alternatively (a la Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) that discourse about representation needs to be replaced by discourse about such networks and/or social practices. Though, Rorty placed more emphasis on social practices than the new materialists who prioritise the continuity between nature and culture.
Call the first claim that of mental determination by the material environment (material determination view), and the second claim that of mental constitution by the material environment (material constitution view). The material determination view alone is sufficient to undermine human exceptionalism. I accept it, but not the material constitution view. There is a reason that theorists who deny mental representation have their work cut out when convincing us that we have inherited a false folk psychological theory along the lines that we represent the world beyond our skulls. Conceivable scenarios seem to inform us to the contrary.
Suppose that you are searching for a lost pendant and you approach a drawer in which you have suddenly remembered placing it not long before. Just before you open the drawer, you have the tentative expectation that the pendant will be there. It is difficult to explain away the intuition that there is something about the way you are constituted in such moments that more or less specifically models a way that the world is. The strength of this intuition comes from our apprehension of a fact of the matter as to whether or not what we perceive in the moment of revelation corresponds with something remembered about our immediately prior conscious state, i.e. before we had perceived anything that could determine the matter.
This sense of vindication when facts accord with expectation, and disappointment when they do not, presents as an objective recognition no less than that of an object being recognised as the same object from one moment to the next. However, the expectation of an object is experienced in the absence of the expected object, and any sense of vindication upon revelation implies an apprehension of the possibility of disappointment, ruling out that the correspondence is dependent on the object being there. This gives rise to the distinction between an object’s presentation and representation. Such experiences of vindication or disappointment are even more compelling in cases of creation, rather than discovery, in which neither the perceiver nor anyone else has perceived the object before the moment of creation. Any recognition, then, could only evidence a correspondence between the object as presented and represented.
This intuitive picture assumes the commensurability of what we experience subjectively of ourselves, on the one hand, and what we can experience of ourselves and others as the object of experience, directly or through instrumentation, on the other hand. This is rejected by materialists who practice what Daniel Dennett calls heterophenomenology, i.e. taking into account only what can be learned from the third-person, objective perspective. However, the heterophenomenological approach draws an arbitrary boundary between objective and subjective poles of our experience in deciding what to rule in and out of a posteriori knowledge (knowledge from experience). After all, physical bodies, readings from instruments, and introspected expectations are all equally interpretations of an individual’s stream of consciousness.
It is understandable that materialists would seek to explain representation away, as it has proven very difficult to explain intentionality (mental representation) in terms of the causal resources available in a purely material or physical system. That is why I described intentionality (mental representation) as the second hard problem of our inner mental life, in this previous post, along with the first hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, or the what-it-is-like of experience. However, one cannot simply ignore aspects of experience that do not fit with a theory.
Until these hard problems can be addressed adequately, I will remain a mind/body dualist, rejecting the mental constitution view, but one who accepts the mental determination view, which suffices by itself to render humanity functionally continuous with other non-human systems, and thus refute human exceptionalism deriving from anything intrinsic to our being.
Theocentric Posthumanism 