We’re all no longer human; we’re something else now. When someone had the first thought of the dichotomy of the nous and the numinous and attempted to reconcile and unify them, we transitioned to another state of being.
The ghost in the machine dissipated and we in turn then became more machine than human, more mechanism than moiety.
” we’re something else now”
Maybe not what you mean, but I work with young people (university students) and even if it’s in a different country…. current 20 year olds relate to _everything_ in a way that is often utterly alien to me…. they might as well be a different species from people the same age 10 years ago.
I get where some of it is coming from and most of it is just adapting a radically different human environment that’s very new so I’m not being critical…. but at least once a month my mind is blown at something one of them casually says or does and I feel a bit like a dinosaur looking at those furry little critters running around.
Oddly, none of my colleagues seems to get this or think of the implications.
I was more thinking of Julian Jaynes’ idea of the bicameral mind and the Cartesian theater and relating those, though being vague because my thoughts also were.
But I do think what you’re talking about is also an expansion on that. We’re becoming post-literate and it won’t look the same as when society was largely pre-literate; it’ll be something else altogether, something we’ve not seen and are not prepared for.
Though I do think Stephenson got it mostly right in The Diamond Age.