A posthuman is a human descendant who has been augmented to such a degree as to be no longer a human.
As a posthuman, you may have a greatly expanded capacity to feel emotions and to experience pleasure and love and artistic beauty. You will not need to feel tired, bored, or irritated about petty things.
Hmm...you may not need to feel bored or irritated, and you may choose not to...but what about other posthumans? Is it possible that some of them might decide they enjoy feeling irritated by petty things or that being cruel gives them a thrill?
This is still very much an open question: just because posthumans are vastly superior to humans in intellect and in other ways, does it necessarily mean that they will be benign and gentle? You and I will be, no doubt, but what about all the rest? We may find ourselves challenged by the need to relate in a new way to beings that, like us, are nearly omnipotent, and that are also nearly insufferable.
UNIMAGINABLE EMOTIONAL RICHNESS
UNIMAGINABLE EMOTIONAL RICHNESS
According to futurist and philosopher Nick Bostrom, "We can't imagine how wonderfully good life will become (if things go well) when we succeed in overcoming many of our current biological limitations through technology. Material abundance, clean environment, etc., are not that bad—but the really profound thing is when we improve ourselves.
"When we finally abolish aging and disease, when we expand our minds, when we step off the hedonic treadmill and get to explore new realms of well-being and emotional richness—don't think you can intuit what these things will be like 'from the inside' because we have little clue."
So, because we are still on the inside looking out, it's impossible for us to accurately perceive the experience of posthuman psychological well-being. But perhaps this poetic imagery can offer some clue of what is in store for us:
"It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better . . . and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you . . . so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startling cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the start of the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story."
(from "Excession" by Iain M. Banks)
A hyper-amplified state of emotional richness might be reached in a couple of ways. The first is the old-fashioned way, through the achievement of peak experiences and deeply nurturing relationships. It's easy to believe that when we can do all the things we most love to do, when we can be wherever we want, whenever we want, and with whomever we want, and when our lives are filled daily with wondrous and rewarding activities, then we will feel great, almost all the time.
The second way is through modifying brain chemistry, similar to what is already being done today. When people take prescribed medications such as Prozac or Zoloft, what they are doing is subtly adjusting the chemical action within their brains. This does not mean their brains are being fooled into feeling the way they shouldn't. Conversely, it means that blocked neurochemical pathways are being opened up so these people can feel the way they would with standard brain chemistry. (This is a bit of a simplification, but it's essentially accurate.)
As a posthuman, you will be in thorough control of your neurochemistry, among other things. You will have complete ability to monitor and adjust your emotions. Never again will you need to feel unaccountably depressed or alarmingly resentful. You can still be unhappy when it fits, of course, such as when others are suffering or when your posthuman lover decides to leave you, but you will also be able to wholly exult in the ecstasy that life will so often bring.
A seemingly interesting point to ponder is how you, as a posthuman, might relate to other posthumans. Will the superior intellectual capacity that you and they share allow you to get along without difficulty? Or will conflicts of interest, contradictory priorities, or simple personality differences impede your ability to relate productively with them and peacefully share the posthuman landscape?
Given that you and the other posthumans will each have the power to utterly destroy the world, this is a vitally important question. So it makes sense for us to figure out now, if possible, how all posthumans can get along with each other, and with the remaining humans, in that near future day.
The problem is, we really don't have the faintest idea what it will be like to be a posthuman, let alone how their psychology will work. So all our ideas about relationships between posthumans are nothing more than speculation, and idle speculation at that.
The best we can do is prognosticate about the kind of society that might be created by (or for) the humans and transhumans who still remain, but that intellectual discussion is on another page.