Happy New Year all. I greeted 2017 with the Norovirus, so I guess you could say I’m not liking the omens so far. Either I’ll be immune when the shit starts flying in Washington or I’ll fold like a napkin.

I did have occasion to reread my interview of David Roden for Figure/Ground a while back, and I thought it worth linking because I believe the points of contention between us could very well map the philosophy of the future. I think the heuristic dependence of intentional cognition on ancestral cognitive backgrounds means intentional cognition has no hope of surviving the ongoing (and accelerating) technological renovation of those backgrounds. The posthuman, whatever it amounts to, will crash our every attempt to ethically understand it. David thinks my pessimism is premature, that ethical cognition, at least, can be knapped/exapted (via minimal notions of agency and value) into something that can leap the breach between human and posthuman. You decide.

Parental Advisory: Contains Grammatical Violence, Excessive Jargon, and Scenes of Conceptual Nudity.