Post-Humanity.

Last night watched Don McCullin film following his career as a photographer of humanity in war situations. Each and every individual was traumatised irrespective of winners or losers, army or civilian. Set against this backdrop of fragmented decomposing bodies it seems I have a trick of comfortable suburban existence. We have as a species through ingenuity built comfortable nests. As a bird might through sticks and discarded feathers we have through ingenuity of substances and atoms. Yet though we have evolved the capacity to understand we cannot survive the life conditions of any other animal. Change places with a newt, a gorilla, a beaver, even a mouse and we wouldn’t last the week out: we don’t have the fur, the feathers, the cold blood. We formed tools, tamed fire because we couldn’t survive without them. And today my survival depends on massive complex understanding. As a species it’s something we’re very proud of. Going back a bit, evolution has progressed in discrete step from rocks to soil to plants to animals to humans, each able react in a more complex way with its environment. Where animals left behind the static life of roots humans have left behind the mercy of their climate, their pray and predators alike to be cocooned in the outcomes of knowledge, which at its root is imagination. With imagination and a thousand millennia we have arrived at 2013. Don McCullin’s photographs show we have imagined the unimaginable just as much as its benefits. And with imagination our minds have been able to make many realities, the past, the future, the value of money and a capacity to ‘read’ into the minds and motives of others. Our reality is no longer the ground beneath our feet but a daydream world of illusions manufactured in the isolated nether regions of our own brain. Our wonderful imagination is leading us towards a post-human species not of this earth, but that exists in an illusory space created by the firing of synapses; a space where fear makes powerful men crave more power, wealthy men wish for more money and creative men desire more control. These imponderables of dissatisfaction are the substance of synapse space, the roots of the tree of knowledge that was evident 2,000 years ago. There is a no more interesting time to live than when one’s species is faced with a decision between reality and illusion.