Out of time: The revolution underway in beliefs about being human

This is a book that seeks to take on the big question that is on many peoples’ lips at this time when so much is on turmoil. What are the beliefs we hold that shape what it means to be human? In some ways this question seems strange. After all, the way we think of ourselves has been fairly consistent for centuries, or at least since Rene Descartes set out a notion of humans as bodies and minds. This perspective implied that human have the ability to live in an entirely individualised manner, honing the skills of rational living alongside an inner life to which only we are privy. But we have entered what has been called ‘Liquid Times’, when the impact of COVID, climate change and technology disruption have forced us to rethink who we are, to reconsider our place in the world and more directly, to rethink what it means to be human. COVID has shown us our collective vulnerability, how we are so much closer to death than we choose to consider in our daily lives. Climate change challenges our notion about the future, indeed whether we collectively have one, not only for future generations but as younger people in particular wonder what their lives will consist of. And technology disruption encourages us to rethink the notion of the primacy humans often seek to occupy; if machines are now able to do so much that we thought we unique to us, then is our special position in the universe no longer tenable? The world as we knew it feels increasingly broken – but through this we can not only understand the mechanisms that have been shaping our lives for centuries but start to rethink what how we live in the new environment we find ourselves in. We can sense that revolution is often in the not always that which we might imagine, of street fighting and barricades but in the way we think, in terms of what is considered to be knowledge of beliefs of who we are and what being human involves. The frontline of this is often misinformation and conspiracy theories, many of the wider philosophical forces can be seen to be engaging in ‘proxy wars’ in this battle ground. And throughout the book we see the way that religious thoughts and ways of looking at life often permeate the beliefs of populations, suggesting that we never really brought into modern notions of being human and we are now starting to understand our lives are actually shaped by more transcendent explanations of what being a human is. Underpinning much of this is the ever-present question of consciousness – the ‘hard problem’ of being human that has shaped so much of our history. It will become clear through the books that is our beliefs about consciousness, above all else, that will shape our futures as humans. In this context the book aims to continue the centuries old philosophical tradition of throwing light on the issue of what being human involves. The point is to assemble perspectives on a range of topics that merit discussion and allow the reader to pull-out themes. On that basis the essays through this book offer inspiration for readers who can then use the thinking as provocations, finding new associations and linkages whether tenuous and tentative or more certain and perhaps empirically supported. This is no overarching grand theory of everything. That would surely not only be arrogant but also a fool’s errand. The point is to surface the changing beliefs shaping who we are, what we think about our planet and our fellow human beings. It is not to say the themes have not been discovered before. On the contrary, they are the subject of debate and reflection in many circles but not brought together with linkages drawn in the way that is done here. Through this we can explore the way we have surely entered a period which could be as radical and transformative as any other we have lived through in human history.