Abstract This work examines the metaverse from a sociocultural perspective, linking its evolution from early cyberculture to contemporary virtual realities. It emphasizes the need for a comprehensive narrative to foster acceptance, explores technological, educational, and environmental potentials, and addresses concerns of corporate influence and social equality. The metaverse, envisioned as a transformative platform, holds promise for education and social engagement while necessitating advances in inclusivity and cultural integration.

Abstract The UK National Curriculum (NC) for primary and secondary education purports to provide comprehensive understanding of biology. Despite this stated goal and the UK’s Darwinian intellectual heritage, there long has been controversy regarding the inclusion of evolution by natural selection within the NC, which was ultimately only included in 2014. There is a palpable avoidance of primate evolution even within current requirements, with a concentration instead on nonhuman organisms. Most jarringly, there is a lack of required discussion regarding human transitional stages after the split from a last common ancestor with the chimpanzee/bonobo. As studies of hominins are not obligatory, this lack likely has multiple knock-on effects on student learning regarding general macro-evolutionary concepts, including gradualism, human animality, and applied behavioral ecology in terms of organisms and their environments. Moreover, the study of transitional hominins is vital in terms of connecting evolutionary theory to adjacent NC requirements, such as the foci on environmental studies, metabolism in organisms, and even disease.

Abstract This article discusses important considerations in the development and use of neurotechnology, particularly referring to brain–computer interfaces and neurofeedback, which some authors have claimed can create a posthuman subjectivity. It provides a psychoanalytic critique to outline the power over the mind and body that comes with neurotechnology and the need for a critical attitude to ensure that this power is recognized and attenuated. Furthermore, it details how ideology is relevant to neurotechnology and how it functions through fantasy, modern capitalism, and the superego injunction to enjoy! Specifically, the authors show that neurotechnology could feed into an ideology of biopolitics that may use human neurodata and neuromodulation as a more intimate, powerful way of managing individuals. This article also emphasizes the importance of symptomatic reading, which identifies lapses or omissions in neurotechnology narratives to unmask hidden meanings to better address the ethical dimensions of neurotechnology. This is particularly significant when considering research that demonstrates the phenomenon of neurohype, where laypeople, academics, clinicians, and others can get carried away with the promises of neuroscience.

Abstract Even though posthuman themes abound in fiction, they often rely on representational practices tied to humanist worldviews, perpetuating assumptions about the meaning of being human and humankind’s relationship with its environment. This article discusses the artist’s book Not-Human, Not-Fly (NHNF), which reconsiders David Cronenberg’s The Fly from a critical posthumanist perspective. Tied to horror conventions, the film reduces the posthuman to a condition threatening human life and well-being. NHNF employs tools from molecular genetics, designing a fictional database of the creature’s genes based on human and housefly genetic information. The hybrid genetic material rewrites the film’s narrative, revealing the “postfly” condition of the “posthuman” character and bringing its posthuman content to the fore by disentangling it from humanist representational conventions. This transdisciplinary approach challenges the film’s hierarchies of being, its portrayal of the housefly as a contaminant of the human genome’s purity, and unsettles assumptions concerning the ontological separation of humans, nonhumans, and posthumans. Thus, this work delineates one possible formal approach to representation of the posthuman via reframing through genetics. Moreover, it identifies connections between contemporary genetics and posthumanist thinking that validate posthumanism’s decentralization from the human, providing a nonanthropocentric interpretation of human and nonhuman subjects and subjectivities.

Abstract Posthumanism has become an important theme in science fiction (SF), and American SF is a significant popularizer of this genre in the modern world. The advocacy of a dystopian future in American SF has led to the stigmatization of artificial intelligence (AI). It has presented AI as a threat to humanity and has reduced it to a mere enemy of humanity in a posthuman future. The cyberpunk culture of SF plays a vital role in ostracizing AI, with many stories centered around an AI takeover where humans face the dilemma of extinction in the face of a technologically advanced world. This article deals with Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the light of Goffman’s theory of stigmatization as the theoretical basis, using Link and Phelan’s stigmatization model to build the argument. The article focuses on the possible stigmatization of AI in American SF and its ethical and societal impacts. It is part of the continuum of knowledge production in SF, Cyberpunk, and techno-optimistic science fiction.

Abstract This article proposes three distinct categories of how Christian theologians over the centuries have viewed the transhumanistic endeavor of (self-?) salvation: (a) reversing the effects of the Fall, (b) transformation of creation, and (c) salvation as a gift. These categories are juxtaposed with Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanist attempts at achieving digital salvation (technological salvation in a digital age), outlining three main attempts: human enhancement, the quest for immortality, and salvation from sin. This article argues that despite the human effort, salvation remains a gift. Hence rather than shunning death, the Christian is claimed to be called to embrace it as the “sister death” and thus, as the gateway to theosis.

This article is intended to offer constructive criticism of the transhumanist imperative of advancing the creation of living beings beyond the human. For this purpose, the conditions of possibility for the emergence and long-term survival of transhuman beings will be identified and examined, particularly within the framework of an enactive understanding of evolution according to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others. Transhuman beings, that is, technically corrected and upgraded entities, have their origin in human individuals whose essential characteristics I consider to be (1) their participation in life and their performance of life and (2) their sense-making cognitive activity—both describable by the autopoietic idea of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. I demonstrate that transhuman beings, which are assumed to share these features with humans and which I therefore describe by the term enactive, can only develop and stay alive if mutual adaptation between them and their environment is maintained. To achieve adaptation, enactive transhuman beings must exhibit the ability to adapt on their own—making adaptedness and adaptability conditions of possibility for the emergence and long-term survival of enactive transhuman beings. From this perspective, optimizing and therapeutic interventions into so-called human nature, which has always possessed a technical–cultural side, are an expression of human adaptability and enable new adaptive equilibria between transhuman being and environment on a phylogenetic level. Therefore, I advocate a moderate transhumanism that seeks to preserve this mutual adaptedness while expanding the (trans)human capacity for adaptation.