Jörn Grote writes about...

Human and Transhuman

“Lost in Thought” is clearly inspired by something most people will not know, something from Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine. In the last chapter she speculates about meme, free will and identity. She comes to the conclusion that our identity is created by competing memes in our heads, and that identity is just an illusion. Her conclusion is that — if we follow that trail of thought completely — identity doesn’t matter. “Lost in Thought” was an attempt to find a reason why identity matters to me, even if it has illusionary character.

It is also in some ways an anti-transhuman story, not in the sense that I’m completely against all transhuman ideals or ideas, but that I think that being human ultimately does matter, at least to me, and the thought of transcending and becoming something posthuman is not as interesting to me as changing ourselves and our surroundings with new technologies and finding out what being human means in that context.

Jörn

Thank you, Jörn. I think “Lost in Thought” is unambiguous, and I’m confident that readers will understand it as conveying the general ideas you outline here. Your explanation is an elegant grace note to a philosophical tale in the grand style.

Don