THE REFORMATTING OF HOMO SAPIENS

Abstract This article addresses the perennial picture of the human as rational animal, the nexus of trends undermining the cultural legacy of classical humanism, and the so-called posthumanisms that embrace its dissolution. Against critical posthumanism, which aims to break with humanism entirely, and in contrast to transhumanism, which uncritically inherits certain features of humanism, I outline an alternative – rationalist inhumanism – which critically extracts the inhuman core of humanism by unbinding rationality from animality. I begin by re-examining the history of humanism leading up to the posthuman nexus, in order to highlight the features that can be repurposed by inhumanism. I then weave these features into an outline of a genealogy of reason, encompassing its genesis in, co-evolution with, and eventual liberation from the animal that is Homo sapiens.

W e don't know whether our ability to collectively represent ourselvesto say "we"emerged only once in cultural prehistory, or whether it is the result of a multiple genesis, appearing independently in different collectives at different times, enabling their members to divide and unite themselves into groups as the need arose. We equally don't know when this ability turned back upon itself, transcending any particular collective in the direction of an ideal, abstract community of we-sayers. 1 What we do know is that out of these multifarious, anonymous beginnings has grown an increasingly refined capacity for cultural self-consciousness in which we have substituted names for this most abstract "we"names which have progressively accrued descriptive and normative content as our need to understand and shape ourselves has grown. Whether we prefer "man," "mankind," or "humanity," the history of these words is the history of our capacity for cultural self-consciousness, and the question of whether and how to replace or repurpose them is the question of the future of this self-consciousness, and the conceptions of agency, selfhood, and value that are bound up with it.
If the concept of the human has a fundamental feature that remains more or less constant from anonymous pre-history to the modern era, it is the idea that humanity is something more than one species of animal amongst others. Western culture was founded upon myths that sever us from the animal order, reinforced by their formalisation in philosophical and theological accounts of the natural order, and consolidated by their elaboration in classical humanism. Although the concept of the human is articulated in various ways within this tradition, and these articulations evince various degrees of explicitness, it is the perennial picture of "man" as the rational animal that ties them together in distinguishing us from other animals, and the institutions of language and technology that constitute the characteristic marks of this rationality. However, although modernity has encouraged a rapid intensification of these characteristic differencesin literary modernism and industrial capitalismit has equally engendered a more gradual dissolution of the perennial picture.

THE REFORMATTING OF HOMO SAPIENS
This dissolution is marked by four interacting trends. Firstly, the natural sciences have progressively undermined the supposed uniqueness of our animality, by isolating the empirical study of Homo sapiens from the cultural understanding of the human. Secondly, the humanities have aggressively critiqued the purported universality of our rationality, by exposing the illicit privileging of masculine, bourgeois, and European forms of life implicit in the association of reason with Western civilisation. Thirdly, technological advancement has begun to compound these theoretical trends, by modifying and even threatening to re-create our cognitive capacities in artificial forms. Finally, environmental crisis has begun to catalyse the cultural consequences of these other trends by confronting our societies with the impermanence of the natural order underlying the residual vestiges of the classical worldview. It is this nexus of historical trendsthe socalled "posthuman condition"that demands a change in our cultural self-consciousness, forcing us to extricate our concepts of agency, selfhood, and value from their envelopment within the perennial picture, and thereby to develop an inhuman alternative to classical humanism and its modern remnants.
One increasingly popular approach to this problem is the project of critical posthumanism, which turns the existing resources of critical theory and philosophical anti-humanism upon the posthuman condition as a whole, with the aim of completing the auto-deconstruction of the humanities and their reconstitution as posthumanities. There are important differences between the forerunners of this position, such as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, and variations amongst its proponents, such as Rosi Braidotti, Katherine Hayles, and Cary Wolfe, but their shared focus lies in dissolving the defining metaphysical oppositions of classical humanism, such as those between body and mind, nature and culture, and even biology and technology, and thereby undermining associated normative hierarchies in the realms of sex, class, race, and even species. 2 In essence, critical posthumanism's response to the perennial picture is to unbind our animality from the constraints of rationality: affirming the agency of the non-human, dividing selves into swarms, and rejecting universal valuations. However, the generalised animality on which this is predicated almost inevitably demands metaphysical elaboration, 3 and it is for this reason that critical posthumanism forms natural alliances with actor-network theory, new materialism, and other neo-vitalisms that transform the surprising, stubborn, and selforganising features of material things into an inhuman agency shared by posthuman and non-human alike.
A similarly popular alternative to critical posthumanism is the project of transhumanism, which aims to explore the practical possibilities for self-enhancement provided by the posthuman conditionempirical modification of Homo sapiens and technological expansion of our cognitive capacitiesand to elaborate their normative consequences. There is even wider variation in transhumanism and its forerunners, including thinkers as diverse as Nikolai Fedorov, Vernor Vinge, Hans Moravec, and Nick Bostrom, but the key opposition between them and critical posthumanism lies in their retention and extension of elements of classical humanism in their visions of transhuman agency, disembodied selfhood, and the universal value of self-cultivation. 4 From the perspective of critical posthumanism, transhumanism is at best naive in hanging on to the constitutive metaphysical oppositions of humanism, and at worst hubristic in deepening them in the response to the collapse of the classical worldview. 5 There is undoubtedly some truth to these criticisms of transhumanism, but it isn't obvious that any attempt to conserve elements of humanism is doomed to either naivety or hubris. It may still be possible to locate an inhuman agency within the human as it was classically understood, rather than positing a metaphysical impulse traversing the non-human, through matter, animal, and machine alike. With this in mind, I propose in this paper to explore the alternative to critical posthumanism's response to the perennial picture, namely, unbinding our rationality from the constraints of animality: accounting for the distinctiveness of culture as a relatively autonomous system of linguistic and technological infrastructure, and explaining agency, selfhood, and value in terms of how our species has been formatted by and for this system. This strategy is far from unique, belonging to a nascent project of rationalist inhumanism developed in different ways by Reza Negarestani,Ray Brassier,and Benedict Singleton. 6 Nevertheless, the approach I will adopt here is distinctive in the way it frames the opposition between rationalist inhumanism and critical posthumanism. Most of the rest of the paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will re-examine the history of humanism leading up to the posthuman nexus in order to highlight the features that can be extracted and repurposed by inhumanism. The second part will weave these features into an outline of a genealogy of reason, encompassing its genesis in, co-evolution with, and eventual liberation from the animal that is Homo sapiens.

the history of the human
The foundational myths that shape the cultural self-consciousness of the Western tradition are the Judeo-Christian myth of the fall of man and the Greek myth of Prometheus' theft of fire from the gods. Both myths describe a prelapsarian state wherein all living things have a prescribed role in the normative order of nature, as represented by the divine will. The origin of man in each case has two moments: a moment of creation as merely one more animal within the natural order, albeit with a distinctive quality, such as a positive resemblance to the divine or a negative absence of innate animal capacities, and a moment of rupture as man is wrenched from this order, only to be related to it in a new way. In the myth of the fall, it is the acquisition of theoretical knowledge that wrenches man from the natural order, in so far as it is only on the basis of understanding that transgression becomes possible. In the myth of Prometheus, it is the acquisition of practical knowledge that wrenches man from the natural order, in so far as it enables him to subvert this order and to carve out his own place within it.
Of course, there are various other aspects of these myths that influence the development of humanism, from the sexual specificities of original sin to the persistence of the human ideal as "unmarked" by animal traits, but it is the primal generality of these ruptures that is most important: man is placed in a unique relation to the nature as a whole, with a capacity to understand and/or exploit any aspect of it, at least in principle. It is in the element of this generality that man truly resembles the divine, or has stolen something from it, and the subsequent theological negotiation of the relationship between God and man is essentially a matter of curtailing its scope, or of folding man's rupture with the natural order back into it, so that the range of his theoretical and practical capacities is circumscribed by his natural role. As such, the legacy of these myths is twofold: on the one hand, they frame the choice of language and technology as the characteristic marks of the human, in so far as these are the obvious manifestations of our distinctive theoretical and practical capacities; and on the other, they frame the relation between these capacities and questions of value, as established by their reincorporation into the normative order of nature.
It is Plato who is responsible for the most cogent reconstruction of the Prometheus myth, but this is only one way into his synoptic picture of the relation between man and world. 7 The crucial idea that Plato inherits from Socrates is that, in so far as thought is an art or technique, it has a normative dimension that is irreducible to social convention. His own brilliance lies in his commitment to thinking this normative dimension on its own terms, without grounding it in any antecedent order of nature, divine or otherwise. This is the real significance of the Idea of the Good in Plato's philosophy, which binds together the intelligible realm by providing a unified account of value as such and its division into epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic forms. Perhaps the great tragedy of Plato's thought is that, having established the autonomy of value by subtracting it from the sensible realm, he is then able to treat it as the ground of the sensible. Man can then be distinguished by his capacity to see through the sensible to the intelligible and thereby to think and act in accordance with its autonomous norms.
Aristotle revises Plato's metaphysics of value by reinstating the normative dimension of the sensible realm in a new and more systematic form. He establishes the teleological framework of final causation alongside the mechanistic framework of efficient causation, enabling the first explicit attempt to classify natureparadigmatically living thingsin terms of functions. This enables both the first distinct anthropology, or the explicit study of man as a living creature, and the first distinct theology, or the explicit study of the divine as the efficient beginning and the final end of the causal order. It is Aristotle's anthropology that is largely responsible for the perennial picture of man as rational animal, presenting a unified account of theoretical and practical reason, and identifying man's capacity to cultivate himselfto flourishas his distinctive final cause. It is Aristotle's theology that is largely responsible for the fusion of Greek and Judeo-Christian myths in the scholastic tradition, and its effective containment of the mythical rupture between man and the natural order, by enabling this order to prescribe the limits of human flourishing.
The emergence of classical humanism in the Renaissance is not so much about abandoning the core ideas of Aristotle as rejecting the religious monopoly on the study of human flourishing established under scholasticism. This intellectual monopoly was not entirely broken until the liberation of philosophy from theology enacted by Descartes and his modern successors, but this was preceded by a growing cultural drive to examine aspects of the human condition and explore associated possibilities of human flourishing. Moreover, it is in this period that the concept of the human accrues much of the detailed descriptive and normative content that will outlive its attachment to the religious worldview: the significance of human mortality, the specificity of human emotions (e.g., the virtue of romantic love), the structure of human social institutions (e.g., the nuclear family), etc., and in this process that particular features of European civilisation are implicitly converted into descriptive universals or normative ideals. Finally, it is this renewed concern with human flourishing that catalyses the growth of individualism in European culture a cultural trait and intellectual trend which will become ever more pronounced in modernity.
Descartes's distinctive contribution to modernity is not so much his metaphysical dualism creating a strict separation between mind and bodybut the conception of the mind on which it is based. There are three key features of this conception. Firstly, it focuses on the mind as the subject of theoretical knowledge, and sidelines practical questions regarding agency. 8 Secondly, it understands theoretical knowledge as consisting in internal representations whose correspondence to reality is understood in terms of mathematical modelling rather than pictorial resemblance. Thirdly, it treats the content and/or functioning of these internal representations as epistemically transparent to the subject that bears them. It is worth noting that these key features of the Cartesian account of mind have been subject to extensive criticism from research in empirical psychology and artificial intelligence (AI), and that critical posthumanism draws on these criticisms in advancing its own critique of humanism. 9 There are a number of ways in which Kant modifies Descartes's approach to make it less objectionable in these regards, but his distinctive contribution to the modern paradigm is the project of transcendental psychology, which effectively sublimates Descartes's metaphysics of mind. Whereas Descartes is concerned with the mere fact that the knowing subject possesses representations, Kant is concerned with the fact that it is responsible for their correctness. 10 This means that, rather than asking what sort of metaphysical substance something must be in order to possess these special mental properties, Kant is concerned with the normative status of counting as responsible, and the capacities something must display in order to have this status. Leaving the details of Kant's account to one side, its influence is twofold. On the one hand, the sublimation of the subject from substance to status establishes a crucial difference between the transcendental inquiry into the nature of knowing as such and the empirical inquiry into our particular cognitive capacities. On the other, his concern with theoretical responsibility motivates a parallel concern with practical autonomy that formalises the emergent individualism of classical humanism and becomes central to the political culture of modernity.
It is difficult to efficiently summarise the changes wrought by modernity upon the concept of the human, and to explain how they bring about the posthuman condition to which we are responding. For this reason, I am merely going to discuss the analyses of these changes that have had the most influence upon the discourse of posthumanism, namely, the interlinked accounts of the death of God and death of Man provided by Nietzsche and Foucault. For both of these thinkers, modernity is characterised by the gradual dissolution of the very idea of a natural order inherited from religious myth and formalised by the scholastic appropriation of Plato and Aristotle. For Nietzsche, this means that the religious concept of God's role as an ascetic ideal underlying the social systematisation of value had begun to be usurped by the humanist concept of Man, only for the latter's dependence upon the former to threaten the collapse of value, or cultural nihilism. 11 For Foucault, it means that the natural sciences had liberated themselves from the representational constraints imposed by the assumption of a normative order, reconstituting the human as a transcendental-empirical doublet torn between the normative legacy of classical humanism and the new descriptive programmes of linguistics, economics, and biology. 12 In predicting the death of Man, he is indicating nothing more than the inevitable dissociation of this doublet, as our implicit understanding of who we should be is forced to confront our explicit understanding of what we actually are.
I could tell a more comprehensive story of this slow demise, and the specific roles played in it by evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, cybernetics, and other disciplines. However, I'll return to some of these themes soon enough, and it is more important to end our history of humanism with Nietzsche and Foucault. The reason for this is that they see the twin deaths they describe as transitions in the evolution of more general phenomenatransitions which offer opportunities for increased self-consciousness. For Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal is only one form of value among others, and its passing opens the way for the re-valuation of all values. 13 For Foucault, the transcendentalempirical doublet is only one regime of selfrelation among others, and its dissolution opens the way for experimentation with technologies of selfhood. 14 More importantly, not only do these more general accounts of value and selfhood point beyond the human, but they are grounded in genealogies of the social forces that transform human bodies into subjects, agents, and selves. They each describe the ensouling of the body as the imposition and internalisation of a social role, and thereby suggest a way to combine Kant's transcendental psychology with evolutionary socio-biology in a genealogy of the inhuman. 15

the genealogy of the inhuman
Before leaping into this genealogy it is worth explicitly formulating both its philosophical aims and its methodological constraints. We are now in a position to see that our stated goal of unbinding rationality from animality is a matter of disarticulating and realigning the two halves of Foucault's transcendental-empirical doublet. This means explaining how the normative structure of reason can be autonomous and nevertheless be implemented by the causal structure of Homo sapiens and its techno-linguistic infrastructure. The major constraint imposed by genealogy is that we must be able to show how this implementation could emerge naturally in the socio-evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. This in turn implies that we must be able to show how the characteristic features we wish to retain from humanism theoretical representation and practical autonomycan be bootstrapped out of common features that the partisans of animality will find unobjectionable.
With these constraints in mind, I will frame my account as a genealogy of information processing systems. This has two obvious benefits. Firstly, the concept of information is the Rosetta Stone connecting the discourses of biology, psychology, and computer science, and enables us to draw on and respond to elements of each. Secondly, although information should not be confused with either meaning or representation, these notions can be understood in terms of information.

the informatics of animality
We will begin by considering the simplest information processing system common to biology and psychology: the drive. The simplest drives are reflexes that transform a given sensory stimulus into a specific behavioural response, but in general they can be understood as causal systems that take variable inputs and produce systematically correlated outputs. We tend to understand this systematic correlation in terms of a specific problem which it solves. For example, we can see the iterative growth of plant roots as driven by the need to optimise the search for nutrients and water. However, this does not mean that the information processing systems that constitute these drives represent the problems they are solving. In the case of plant roots, there is no integrated representation of the space they are traversing, nor the resources and obstacles it contains, but only distributed feedback loops formed by the hormonal signals governing branching and extension. 16 It is also important to understand that a single system can contain a multiplicity of drives that causally overlap, and that their behaviour can as easily conflict as it can converge. Drives can develop shared mechanisms for receiving environmental information and adjusting the environment in accordance with it without thereby forming an integrated system for solving a larger problem. It is only once higher level drives emerge that filter and regulate the competing impulses produced by the lower drives that we can begin to talk of their organisation. For example, the complex affective modulation of libidinal impulses carried out by the various components of the limbic system in most mammals. 17 However, the crucial evolutionary advances in the integration of disparate drives are the transition from sensation to simulation, and the transition from behaviour to control.
Simulation emerges when a system possesses a functional subsystem that combines information from its various drives into a single store that is made globally available to them more or less simultaneously. 18 This subsystem doesn't need to retain information about previous states of the environment, or to extrapolate information about future states, but only to tie together the information processing performed by the various drives with something like a common information format. It is on this basis that we can begin to see the system as possessing something like an articulated representation of its environment, which contributes to the problem-solving success of the various drives in so far as its elements correspond to things within that environment. Control then emerges when a system moves from integrated processing of sensory inputs to integrated processing of behavioural outputs, which requires the system to simulate itself and its behaviours as a distinct part of its environment. This primitive separation between self and world enables the system to move from modulating its impulses to selecting between the corresponding behaviours.
These capacities for simulation and control mark the emergence of psychology from biology, but it is important not to overestimate their informational role. On the one hand, they vary quite radically in character and complexity including the whole range of creatures with central nervous systems. On the other, they do not by any means integrate the whole range of biological information processing upon which wolfendale they superveneexcluding complex mechanisms of bodily self-regulation and simple reflexes hard wired into the nervous system.

the informatics of rationality
This schematic overview of the sort of information processing that characterises animal cognition now puts me in a position to suggest the crucial difference between it and the sort of information processing that characterises rational cognition. However, before saying anything else about this distinction, it's important to insist that the relation between the two is much the same as that between the biological and psychological dimensions of information processing just discussed: the rational comes in various forms, and it supervenes upon the animal without incorporating it in its entirety. Bearing this in mind, then, the difference which makes this distinction takes us back to the myths with which we began: it is the in principle generality of theoretical and practical reason that distinguishes it from animal cognition.
The information processing capacities displayed by animals have evolved to solve certain parochial problems, and this is reflected in their innate capacities to simulate their environment. This is no less true of Homo sapiens, whose neural architecture has been honed by millions of years of biological adaptation to excel at solving certain sorts of problemfrom fine manipulation and episodic recall to facial recognition and social signallingand to simulate an environment composed of a certain range of sensible items at familiar spatio-temporal scales. This is not to deny that our brains can be repurposedthat our imaginations can be stretched to visualise grand cosmic scales, strange quantum effects, or higher dimensional shapes our actual vision can't handlebut simply to insist that this is as much, if not more, a matter of the social structure doing the repurposing as the neurological structure being repurposed.
The frame problem posed by research into AI provides a useful way of making this point. 19 The problem is a difficulty faced by traditional symbolic approaches to AI based on linguistic models of theoretical and practical reasoning, and consists in the fact that the attempt to encode practical abilities to solve extremely simple problems in the form of means-ends reasoning (e.g., cooking an omelette) requires making explicit a seemingly intractable set of implicit assumptions about what information is and is not relevant to the task (e.g., that changes in the weather will have no effect on the denaturing of egg proteins). This is not an issue faced by simple animals that have evolved to solve relatively complex problems, or by humans whose neural plasticity enables them to learn to do the same, precisely because the cognitive heuristics they have adapted to the situation can't assess the consequences of information from outside their parochial frames. 20 What may initially seem like an unsurpassable problem for linguistic accounts of intelligence actually reveals the distinctive feature of language, namely, that in so far as its meaning consists in the functional role that sentences play in reasoning, or in the whole social economy of perception, inference, and action, there is nothing in principle constraining the extent of their possible theoretical consequences, or their potential practical relevance. 21 There is thus nothing preventing them from encoding information stored in any more parochial information format. This means that the in principle generality of theoretical and practical reason derives from the in principle extensibility of the social norms which encode the content of its representations. The real significance of language is the capacity it grants us to make explicit and selectively modify the heuristic frames implicitly embedded in adapted cognitive heuristics. This is to say that the distinctive feature of rational cognition is its capacity for re-framing problems.

technology and language
It now remains for me to complete my genealogy by describing how the intertwined emergence of language and technology has formatted Homo sapiens for rational cognition. The first step is reformatting of homo sapiens to acknowledge that social signalling and tooluse are displayed by a wide variety of nonhuman animals: for example, bees dance out vectors and distances to food sources, and crows fashion twigs into rudimentary manipulators. We must be careful not to identify language with the mere communication of environmental information between animals, or technology with the mere supplementation of innate bodily capacities. However, we must also recognise these as crucial pre-adaptations that make possible language and technology proper. I will now attempt to trace this path from proto-technology and proto-language to the complex cultural infrastructure of rational cognition. 22 There are various stages of animal tool-use: from the ad hoc exploitation of immediately available resources, through the deliberate crafting of permanent tools, to the establishment of techniques of usage and enabling forms of social organisation. It is at the latter end of this spectrum that we find Homo sapiens. However, the crucial proto-technological feature of such tool-use is the manner in which it enables early humans to break down practical activities into their component behaviours and resources, and thereby both to improve these components and relate them in new ways. This ability to identify, copy, and teach discrete chunks of behaviour allows a distributed signalling network to form within tool-using groups, which can effectively store a relationally articulated set of solutions to common problems. The propagation of practical innovations through this network then constitutes a sort of distributed social cognition capable of processing environmental information that their neural systems were not adapted to simulate. It is also important to recognise the role that the tools themselves play in storing and processing this information, by encoding and propagating practical innovations in a manner orthogonal to social signalling. This integrated system of tools and associated functional norms governing their use marks the real beginning of cultural evolution. 23 There are equally various stages in the development of animal communication: from the uncontrolled emission of context-specific signals, through the controlled co-ordination of simple co-operative behaviours, to the transmission of variable information in co-ordinating complex forms of co-operation. The complexity of Homo sapiens' capacity to communicatively co-ordinate co-operation grows in tandem with its relational organisation of the relevant activities, and becomes proto-linguistic at the point that words become tools with determinate roles within these activities. 24 This organisation thus provides the social scaffolding required for genuine language to develop, which only happens when these words become tools in a general linguistic practice capable of co-ordinating various specific activities. This general practice emerges in at least two stages: the abstraction of declarative sentences that compress information that humans can already simulate from imperatives and directives that feed this information into specific tasks, 25 and the abstraction of inferential norms governing the relations between these sentences from parochial capacities to update simulations in response to them. 26 There is obviously a great deal more that can be said about the structure of language, and how our grasp of these inferential norms is manifest in the process of making, challenging, and justifying assertions by providing reasons from which they can be inferred. However, a simple example of the way in which this enables our linguistic representations of the environment to unframe our innate simulations of it will have to suffice: the difference between weight and mass. Weight is obviously a ubiquitous feature of our environment that has an effect upon most physical tasks, and we have evolved to simulate the weights of objects and ourselves in order to factor them in to solving such tasks. Nevertheless, the frame governing our practical understanding of weight is fixed by our evolutionary confinement within the earth's gravitational field. By contrast, in so far as the concept of mass is defined by precise inferential norms governing its relation to the concepts of force and acceleration, it has enabled us to re-frame our understanding of weight and apply it to other gravitational contexts, as well as to mathematically decompose and calculate solutions to terrestrial problems too complex to be held in the human imagination. This is the case with all empirical concepts produced and refined by the natural sciences: their representational content has less to do with individual neural simulation than collective inferential modelling. 27 Finally, then, it is important to see that the emergence of technology proper coincides with the emergence of language proper. This is because language transforms our socio-cognitive store of common solutions into a range of possible means and ends available for practical reasoning, and extends this range further by enabling the representation of ends for which there are no established means: from the primeval desire for warmth and shelter on the open plain, to the Promethean dream of taming the nuclear fire at the heart of the sun. Far from subsuming the distributed socio-cognitive role of proto-technology, then, the development of explicit practical reasoning enhances it, catalysing an explosive growth in capacities for action whose eventual result is modern industry. The co-evolution of language and technology thus leaves Homo sapiens with a more or less integrated cultural infrastructure through which its innate abilities to simulate and modify its environment become dynamically extensible. 28 However, it is important to see that the increased adaptability provided by these new modes of cultural evolution drives corresponding changes in biological evolution: the path from Homo habilis, through Homo erectus, to Homo sapiens in its modern form is characterised by the reinforcement and enhancement of the morphological and computational preconditions of cultural adaptability. 29 This means that the gradual emergence of techno-linguistic rationality reformats the biology of the human species, in order that it can better reformat the neurology of human individuals. Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that the institution of rationality is irrevocably tied to these specific morphological and computational forms. The inhuman system that ensouls our bodiestransforming us into subjects responsible for our thoughts, agents responsible for our actions, and selves responsible for our own cultivation can ensoul entirely alien somatic forms. Nietzsche's re-evaluation of values and Foucault's experimentation with selfhood may demand a substantially similar information processing protocol, but they may equally take place on a substantially different information processing platform.

disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.