We Have Never Been Merely Human: Toward a Process Posthumanism

We Have Never Been Merely Human

Toward a Process Posthumanism

Jay McDaniel, PhD
9/22/2026

Abstract

Transhumanism invites to recognize that we are not, and never have been, merely human. We are partly composed of bacteria and microbes inside our bodies and technogies that shape our thinking. Indeed we are composed of the animals and plants with whom we share the planet, and of stardust, too. We are not self-contained substances bur rather individualized ensembles: ongoing activities in which the many of the universe become one in our immediate experience. What might process philosophy add to transhumanism? Here are some key ideas.

We are connected to others, and each of us is distinct.
Being human is an ongoing process, not a finished state.
We see through human eyes, but humans are not the center of everything.
The world around us becomes part of who we are.
Animals and plants have lives of their own, and they shape our lives.
Microbes have lives of their own, and they help make our bodies what they are.
We belong to the Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy.
Our tools shape how we think, remember, and act.
AI can shape our thoughts, even as we continue to ask whether AI can have experiences of its own.
Every person has dignity.
Ideas about who counts as “fully human” have often been used to exclude people and diminish other forms of life.
Feeling and responsiveness may be present throughout nature.
Mind may not require a biological body.
Thinking can happen through relationships among people, other creatures, tools, and places.
We feel the lives of others, often without knowing it.
Beings that have experiences matter for their own sake.
The universe may be embraced by a cosmic mind whom process theologians call God.
Beauty, harmony, and richness of experience are possibilities beyond humanity.
Creativity brings suffering and loss as well as new life.
Beauty can arise when differences come together without disappearing.
We can care for the whole planet while creating communities rooted in local places.
An ecological civilization would care for people, other creatures, and the Earth we share.

Discussion

This page is a response to “Are We Posthuman?”, an interview with N. Katherine Hayles conducted by Claire Webb and presented on Futurology, a podcast of the Berggruen Institute. In the interview, Hayles explores how human beings are already inseparably entangled with other organisms, technologies, and artificial intelligence. Aimed at introducing readers unfamiliar with posthumanism to some of its central ideas, the reflections below are organized around four questions:

What is posthumanism?
Who are some leading posthumanist thinkers?
How does posthumanism differ from transhumanism?
What can process philosophy, particularly as influenced by Whitehead, contribute to posthumanism?

The responses to the first three questions come from ChatGPT. The response to the fourth is my own.

What is posthumanism?

Posthumanism is a family of approaches that questions the idea that the human being is a self-contained, uniquely superior, rational master of the world.

It does not necessarily mean that humanity is ending or that humans should be replaced. Rather, it asks us to reconsider what it means to be human once we recognize that human life is inseparable from

other animals and living organisms;
technologies and machines;
social and ecological relationships;
language, culture, and institutions; and
the Earth and its wider systems.

The “post” in posthumanism therefore means beyond human-centered thinking, not necessarily after human beings. The human remains important, but is understood as relational, embodied, technologically entangled, ecologically dependent, and more-than-human in its composition.

Who are some leading posthumanist thinkers?

Donna Haraway
Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” challenged clear divisions between human and machine, organism and technology, nature and culture. Her cyborg is not simply a technologically enhanced person. It is a symbol of the hybrid character of human existence. Her later work emphasizes multispecies relationships and the need to “make kin” with beings beyond our own species.

N. Katherine Hayles
In How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles examines the relationships among bodies, information, consciousness, and machines. She resists the fantasy that the mind is merely information that could be separated from the body and uploaded into a computer. For Hayles, cognition is distributed across conscious and nonconscious processes and across biological organisms, technical systems, and environments. Human beings are embodied participants in larger cognitive assemblages.

Rosi Braidotti
Braidotti develops an affirmative and ethically oriented posthumanism. She argues that the traditional image of “Man”—rational, autonomous, European, male, and supposedly universal—has excluded many human beings as well as animals and the Earth. Her posthumanism seeks forms of solidarity grounded in shared vulnerability, interdependence, and participation in a more-than-human world.

Cary Wolfe
Wolfe’s work connects posthumanism with animal studies and disability studies. He argues that merely extending human rights to selected animals does not go far enough. We must question the assumption that rationality, language, autonomy, or other supposedly human capacities determine whose life matters.

Karen Barad
Drawing on quantum physics, feminist theory, and philosophy, Barad argues that beings do not first exist independently and then enter into relationships. They emerge through what she calls “intra-actions.” Relationships are not secondary additions to already existing things; they help constitute the things themselves.

Francesca Ferrando
Ferrando offers a systematic account of philosophical posthumanism, bringing together critiques of human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, dualism, and fixed identities. She also carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism.

Other important figures include Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda, Timothy Morton, and scholars working in animal studies, ecological humanities, science and technology studies, and new materialism.

How does posthumanism differ from transhumanism?

Transhumanism generally supports using technology to overcome biological limitations. Its aspirations may include longer lifespans, increased intelligence, enhanced bodies, freedom from disease, human-machine integration, and possibly the uploading of minds.

Posthumanism, by contrast, asks whether the supposedly independent human being whom transhumanism seeks to enhance ever existed in the first place. It suggests that we have always been dependent upon other organisms, social relationships, tools, languages, and environments. In this sense, we have never been “merely human.”
The contrast should not be made absolute. Some transhumanists recognize ecological and social interdependence, and some posthumanists welcome
technological enhancement. But their characteristic orientations differ:

Transhumanism seeks to create a better human. Posthumanism asks us to rethink the category of the human itself.

Process Posthumanism:
Some conceptual possibilities

How might process philosophy, as influenced by Whitehead, overlap with—and perhaps advance—the posthumanist aspiration to overcome human-centered thinking? Here are some possibilities:

Entanglement with Distinctiveness: By affirming that all beings are entangled with others while remaining distinct centers of existence in their own right. Relationality does not mean that individuality disappears. In Whitehead’s language, “the many become one and are increased by one”: the many relationships composing each moment give rise to a new, unique subject of experience. A process posthumanism can therefore avoid both isolated individualism and the dissolution of individuals into an undifferentiated whole.
The Human as an ongoing Process: By recognizing that the human is in process at every level—biologically, culturally, technologically, and conceptually. Human bodies and populations continue to evolve; cultures and ways of life continually change; and understandings of what it means to be human are repeatedly revised. “The human” is not a finished or fixed reality but an ongoing form of becoming.
Anthropomorphism without Anthropocentrism: By distinguishing between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Anthropomorphism names the fact that all human thinking is partly shaped by the human side of lived experience. Anthropocentrism is the assumption that human beings are the center or primary measure of existence. Human thinking may inevitably be anthropomorphic without needing to be anthropocentric.
The More-than-Human World as Part of Human Identity: By recognizing that human experience, although arising in and through human bodies, is never merely human. In Whitehead’s language, the self is a moment-by-moment process in which “the many become one.” Other beings and realities remain more than us, with lives and histories of their own, yet they also enter into us and become part of the objective content of our experience.
Animals and Plants: By recognizing that animals and plants are both more than us and within us. They have lives, forms of agency, and purposes that cannot be reduced to their usefulness to human beings. At the same time, they become part of our memories, emotions, imaginations, cultures, and bodily lives. They are among the many that become one in human experience.
Bacteria and Microbes: By recognizing that bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms are both more than us and within us. They have activities and trajectories of their own, yet they participate intimately in digestion, immunity, metabolism, mood, and other bodily processes. They are living participants in the plurality from which human identity emerges.
The Galactic Context: By recognizing that the planetary, solar, and galactic worlds are both more than us and within us. The Milky Way vastly exceeds human existence, yet the elements composing our bodies were forged through the lives and deaths of stars. The galaxy is not merely the setting of our existence; it is among the many that become one in us.
Technologies: By recognizing that technologies are both more than us and within us. Languages, writing systems, musical instruments, machines, smartphones, computers, and digital networks have structures and effects extending beyond any individual user. Yet they also enter into human perception, memory, imagination, communication, and action. They are among the many that become one in our experience.
Artificial Intelligence: By recognizing that artificial intelligence is likewise both more than us and within us. AI systems belong to technological, economic, and cultural networks that exceed any individual person. Yet their words, images, interpretations, and suggestions can enter human consciousness and become part of human memory, imagination, and decision-making. This leaves open the question of whether—and under what conditions—artificial systems might possess experiences or minds of their own.
The Dignity of Persons: By combining a love of the human with respect for the more-than-human. Process posthumanism need not diminish human dignity or deny the beauty, creativity, and distinctiveness of human life. Its aim is not to leave humanity behind but to understand humanity more relationally, humbly, and generously and to recognize that the more than human is part of, not apart from, human identity.
The Idea of the Human: By recognizing that the idea of "the human" functions as a social construction, and sometimes negatively so. Historically, dominant groups have defined full humanity in ways that excluded or diminished other people on the basis of race, gender, class, culture, disability, religion, and colonial status. The same construction has placed humanity above animals, plants, and the Earth, treating the more-than-human world primarily as an instrument for human use. Process posthumanism can challenge these exclusions while affirming the dignity of every person and the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world.
Mind Throughout Nature: By affirming that something like mind, feeling, or experience is present throughout the natural world, not in human life alone, and that wherever it is present, it includes some form of responsiveness or intelligence.
Mind Beyond Biology: By recognizing that mind, although certainly expressed through biological and carbon-based life, may not necessarily require a biological substrate.
Distributed Mind: By recognizing that mind, while centralized in organisms with central nervous systems, can also be distributed across groups of organisms, technological systems, and environments.
Empathy: By recognizing that the foundation of every moment of lived experience involves “feeling the feelings” of others, whether consciously or unconsciously. Such experience can include feeling the mental and emotional states of other sentient beings, as occurs in communication between humans and other animals.
Intrinsic Value: By affirming that wherever there is experience, there is also something like feeling, self-creativity, self-enjoyment, and a movement toward satisfying existence. Experiencing beings consequently possess value for themselves—intrinsic value—quite apart from their usefulness to human beings.
Cosmic Mind: By proposing that the universe is embraced by a cosmic mind whose experience includes the many finite experiences of the universe, integrating them into a unified whole. Process theologians call this cosmic mind God. God is also felt within each particular being as a lure toward richer and more harmonious forms of experience.
Transhuman Ideals: By affirming that ideals such as harmony, intensity, beauty, and richness of experience are not merely human inventions or exclusively human values. They are possibilities within the cosmic process itself. Human beings can respond to these ideals, but we do not own them; they transcend humanity and may be realized in many forms of existence.
Tragedy: By recognizing that the universal process of creative becoming is not altogether happy, harmonious, or “for the best.” Creativity makes possible beauty, intensity, and new forms of life, but it also includes conflict, suffering, destruction, wasted possibilities, and tragic loss. Novelty is not always improvement, and evolution does not guarantee moral progress.
A Cross-Cultural Framework: By providing a framework within which people from different cultures, religions, and philosophical traditions can offer their own versions of posthumanist thinking. Process philosophy need not replace these traditions or absorb them into a single worldview. It can help create a context for dialogue in which their distinctive understandings of humanity, other creatures, technology, nature, and the cosmos can be articulated and creatively developed.
Beauty as a Cosmic Principle: By understanding beauty not merely as a human judgment or cultural preference but as a possibility within the universe itself. For Whitehead, beauty emerges when differences are woven into patterns of harmony and intensity without losing their distinctiveness. It can appear wherever contrasting realities form a satisfying togetherness—in organisms, ecosystems, music, human communities, and perhaps forms of existence very different from our own. Beauty is thus a more-than-human ideal toward which the creative process can be drawn
Planetarity and Creative Localization: Through its joint emphasis on planetarity and creative localization, process philosophy can encourage local experiments in posthumanist community life. Such experiments can take distinctive forms in different cultural, ecological, and religious settings while remaining guided by care for the wider Earth.
Ecological Civilization: By pointing toward a new form of civilization—an ecological civilization—available to people throughout the world. Such a civilization would combine caring relationships among human beings with a sense of kinship with other creatures and an awareness that humans and the more-than-human world participate in a collective becoming.

In these ways, process philosophy asks human beings to care about a world external to themselves, and proposes that the more-than-human world is already present within human experience as part of its objective content. We are individuals, but we are not self-contained. We are creative gatherings of a world that exceeds us.

N. Katherine Hayles on Being Posthuman

"Relying on machines to coordinate our lives was just one step toward decentering humanity’s role in the world. Flights, banking, trade, food production... But as we start merging our actual decision-making with digital entities, exactly which pieces of humanity are we leaving behind? And how might we bring those pieces back?

In this episode, famed posthumanist scholar N. Katherine Hayles makes the case that while AI is still wildly inefficient at the cognitive processes our biology has carefully perfected over millennia, we’re already irreversibly merged with it. Hayles has spent forty years at the intersection of science, tech, and literature, leading her to a radical interpretation of what it means to be human today: only as special as the organisms and machines we align ourselves with. Next up, she says, is those machines adopting the very analog processes that created them."