What Does It Mean to Be Human Today?
Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees April 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1017/s0963180124000100 via PubMed
Summary
Human beings increasingly see themselves as products of data and algorithms, mirroring machines and elevating brains to subjects. This book counters such self-reification with a humanism of embodiment: corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom form the basis for self-determined existence, using technology as means rather than submitting to it. It offers an embodied, enactive account of the person—neither pure mind nor brain—applied to AI, transhumanism, virtual reality, neuroscience, psychiatry, and societal acceleration that fosters disembodiment.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The book defends a humanism of embodiment against reductionist naturalism, arguing that corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are foundations for self-determined existence that uses technology as means rather than submitting to it. |
Abstract
With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves "in the image of our machines," and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, the present book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses the new technologies only as means instead of submitting to them. The book offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism in various areas of science and society. As an alternative, it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. This general concept is applied to issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday life. The book thus applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to current scientific, technological, and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the twenty-first century.