Future Anterior

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Definition

The phenomenon of the Future Anterior is "exemplified in the semantic structure of the most common construction in Transhumanist texts, the inclusive personal pronoun future descriptive “we will”. Whenever these futurists “predict” a given scenario, they rely on this construction that simultaneously describes our capabilities in the future and gives an implicit command to bring these prophecies into being. The ambiguous border between descriptive and proscriptive statements found throughout Transhumanism manifests in the very nature of language itself. Because Transhumanism bases its extravagant claims on science, parsing out what is “true” from what is “ideological conjecture” is perhaps the single greatest difficulty in studying Transhumanism, a difficulty that Religious Studies inspired analysis can help overcome".[1]

References

  1. Warner, Andrew. Prophetic Prostheses and the Cybernetic Sublime: A Study of Our Transhuman Condition. A Thesis Presented to The Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics Reed College. May 2010.