When I read through your blog post, this sentence stuck out to me when I started to think of posthumanism. We're constantly affecting what makes us, us, but more so than anyone else we're entangled with our family the most. It may be hard to explain what makes a human a human, but you could probably explain the emotions, ideas, and actions that make your father, your father and what makes him special to you. We affect those closest to more than anyone else and in doing so, we have an affect on what defines your family, and compounded with everyone earth, you get a immensely complex mosaic that together makes up the picture of..well, us.

Was it only the fear of being changed? Could it be that we're too prideful or maybe even that we're just impulsive creatures? There seems to be a lot of human emotional and social issues at work. I think there is a definite revulsion the humans feel towards their captors at first, but as seen by other humans on the ship throughout Dawn, they would surely have gotten over it in due time. I think many were confused and when we're confused, we get scared, and when we get scared we make impulsive and near sighted decisions. If anyone had seen Lillith's abilities and had to foresight to assume any possibility of receiving the same power, they would have taken it, but this where the social nature of humans comes into play. Once we're in the in-group, we'll do anything to avoid becoming the out-group, even in circumstances of immense rewards, simply because we're too scared to be alone. Their pride in their own specie's power to triumph, their rash emotional responses, and their overwhelming fear of loneliness, ends up killing them and stagnating their species evolution/progression.

Freedom to the Oankali is like a leash, we'll lead you to want we want, but won't let you escape our bounds unless we say so. It certainly doesn't sound like freedom, but the closest these humans get to "freedom" is the simulated planet Earth on the ship. Many even belief that it is actually Earth. The Oankali and Ooloi are there, but when the humans run off into the forest, they leave them be. We see how that turns out, we're the Oankali restricting our freedom or were they trying to protect us from ourselves?

This is such a great, insightful statement. We tend to use human as a noun; as a person, which means it must have some type of definition, we can't call it a thing or a person unless we (think) we know what it is. You give a much better idea on it, that human is a characteristic that we give to various things, not always knowing exactly what that means, but at least knowing the "idea" of it. "Human", just like any part of language, only has meaning and importance because we as a society give it meaning and importance. This line shows that what we give meaning to doesn't always include the whole picture.

I think every human wants to come up with a comprehensive definition of "us". It's not a matter of intellectual furthering, its not a matter of conscience effort, it's a matter of introspection and critical analysis, with a healthy dose of psychology, in order to decode what we really are. I think these parameters are too stringent: Many species can think selfishly, all bodies with an adaptive or innate immune system will fight infection or fail and die from this pathogen, and relationships aren't specific to human. I think these are good superficial expectations of the human, but I think we're much beyond this layer of nuance. We have culture, we have social interaction beyond any other species, and we have a conscientious decision to further our species. We've become more collective than any other species on planet earth (barring insects, because there are trillions of them), but our collective decision has such a majority effect, that I find it imperative that we look at not only our actions, but our own definition. If we don't pay any credence to our definition, will come to a point where we do something so monstrous that we don't have a benchmark and consider "ok"?

As a biology major, I was also very interested in the ethical side of these experiments and liked to have another discipline to compare ethical dilemmas with. The "laws" of scientific research and experimentation are what make this comic, while very entertaining, an almost complete impossibility. There's a term used called beneficence and it goes hand in hand with a belief that actions taken by experimenters must be taken with positive, helpful, and achievable goals. This research would never have even gotten to human trials, since it couldn't get past research on, I would assume mice first, and then had disaster after disaster with monkeys, who in their right mind would allow them to go to human trials. The only way I could see this type of human experimentation occurring would be in a Nazi Germany type state, where ethics and oversight are of no concern. There's many other aspects of the study that are questionable, but I think you get my idea.

I found this part very scary as well, I mean look what happened to all the test subjects. Some had some good outcomes (that ended up bad further down the line) or had horrible malformations right after the treatments. Some people would still volunteer even knowing the horrible, horrible things that could happen. I liked this part too because it highlights a part of not only human nature (wanting to fit in and be with the in-group) but also the sociological perspective that influences us to go to such extremes for something I consider to be pretty petty in the long run. If we're looking for a holistic definition of the human, this is definitely an aspect that can not be ignored.

I also agree he wouldn't be on the ship. It wasn't genetic alteration, it was the fact that removing the half of his brain caused him to completely lack empathy. Then, with electronics to replace what lost, his mind became like a computer, soaking up information, categorizing and filing it, and then recalling it when the need arises. Which brings up a few good points. When you take the emotion out of the equation, what you perceive is free of cognitive bias. As far as our limited senses go, we're taking in the information as clearly as possible. The other point is that I, like many others, saw Siri has one of the most human, but taken with what I said above, he's essentially a walking computer. He's bordering on the least human, since at least the others, obviously omitting Sarasti, still have emotions (a somewhat distinctive trait for humans). Distilled down, he receives information , deciphers it to find out what it means. then stashes it away in his hard dri..I mean memory. Who sounds so human now?

I really like that you choose to point this out. So often older generations or some clickbait article wants to point out how we don't talk with each other as much and that we're turning away from meeting in person and just talking. People will always be stuck in their way of doing things and when something comes and changes the paradigm, they're up in arms. When the printing press was created, were people in an uproar that we'd rather stick our head in a book than talk to someone else? I think that we have to look at what the internet, specifically, allows us to do. It allows the dissemination of knowledge at an unrivaled rate throughout history, it allows collaboration on a unmatched scale, and it allows us to be in a million different places around the world without physically being there. Like you said, our electronics are extensions of us, they do not define us (yet), and they certainly aren't who we are. Great post and great job showing both sides of the argument.

I completely agree, the people of Transmetropolitan were controlled by the media, but we're just as equal victims as they are. Especially in a posthumanistic context, this scares the shit out of me. What happens when our media consumption goes beyond the screen? What happens when someone can fake an event, all with CGI? We could be spoon fed beliefs by these networks, and that becomes a belief that defines us? Or a falsehood perpetuated by the networks, that leads to an action that could change everything. Will our hastiness, anger, or ignorance define us? I really liked the blog and overall it raised some really salient points, but I thought it could have delved deeper into the influence media really has on us, that it might drive me to anger today, but what are the underlying ideologies they could also be pushing on us, without us even realizing it?

See I think, though not entirely, that Spider represents almost the opposite of how people act today. There's constant juxtaposition between him doing what we would consider "right", then immediately after doing something incredibly offensive. We're so used to lies, people being fake, and them dodging the tough questions, that I think Spider actually ends up being somewhat refreshing to us with his crass attitude, his fighting mentality, and his bare all honesty. These are all things we couldn’t live with on a day-to-day basis, but you can't help but cheer someone on when they stand up for their beliefs, especially when it's something that needs to be said. He’s everything that’s wrong in that future, yet I can’t help but feel he’s right most of the time.