On a recent BBC World Service program (News Hour Extra, 12.18.15), a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era. “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human. None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degre…es of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity. Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed. Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.
Once the human genome was completely sequenced; once efforts to recombine DNA had become a reality; and once a mind-computer interface had been realized, there was never any doubt that a post-human era was coming.
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