There's not much that makes me more uncomfortable than the thought that all those religious nutbars might be right after all. Cognitively, emotionally, you're still human. The essence of you has not changed, even if you've inserted yourself into a tougher chassis. Even if you upload your mind into an immortal android body- and even if you buy into the questionable premise that such a process actually does make "you" immortal, rather than granting immortality to some copy that gets to go off and explore the universe while you continue to rot away and die- it's still your mind, thinking your thoughts and feeling your emotions. I mean, sure, everyone wants to live forever, leap tall buildings, and factor prime numbers in their heads- but that's just optimizing what we already are, not changing us into something new. My take on the process itself is that regardless of the speed at which technology improves (and that speed is little short of breakneck we already have brain implants that can be used to port memories from one individual to another, in rats at least), the adoption rate of any augmentation tech is likely to plateau well before we reach true post-humanism. Peter Watts : I don't think I know enough about the social movement to express a competent opinion. It was a real balancing act, and I still don't know if I pulled it off. You might as well just be dreaming random shit up and throwing it at the keyboard. If you describe posthuman behavior in a way that's comprehensible to us baselines, then you're not describing real post-humans because if you were, we wouldn't be able to understand them but if you make them authentically incomprehensible, you risk writing an unsatisfying story in which nothing that happens makes any sense to us. I wanted to deal with issues of transhumanism, which is a really tough assignment because I myself am not transhuman I'm just a regular doofus with a regular caveman brain, which means I'm about as likely to successfully describe a post-human mindset as a lemur would be if he tried to describe mine. There was the obvious loose end left dangling at the conclusion of Blindsight- i.e., what was happening back on Earth while Theseus was getting its ass kicked out in the Oort- and that seemed to be crying out for some kind of resolution. Peter Watts : I wanted to do a few different things.
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