Humanism or transhumanism? Scissions of thought and the technological drift of science, a crisis for psychology (¿Humanismo o transhumanismo? Las escisiones del pensamiento y la deriva tecnológica de la ciencia, una crisis para la psicología)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that there is a crisis in the conception of what is human, resulting from the growing tendency to uncritically accept the assumptions of the technological paradigm or episteme and the model of the future that this approach takes for granted. In the authors’ opinion, this state of affairs derives from successive scissions that have taken place in the history of our development as a species (the scission of the cerebral hemispheres) and in the history of thought and science (first-order cybernetics versus second-order cybernetics; inert matter versus living matter; the technological versus the organic; natural intelligence versus artificial intelligence). In the face of the apparent triumph of the mechanistic assumptions that support transhumanism, the principles that have governed the origin and evolution of life are recalled, as well as the constitutive principles of the human psyche, among which the construction of consciousness and freedom, called for from Vygotskian Acmeist psychology, should be highlighted. These principles are those which, in the authors’ opinion, should govern any alternative for the future.