Suppose that there is an entity called ‘life’, which does not care about who you are, what you think, what you say, what you do, how you feel, how you love, how you live. Life that does not care about your life. Such an entity, or phenomenon, has been a source of inspiration and curiosity for humanity’s activities throughout history, variously formulated as mythology, religion, humanities, sciences, art, technology and so forth. This is a conception of life that goes beyond the individual; life that does not coincide with who you are and what you do; life that cannot be acknowledged as such.

Understanding the human in a chain of relations between different systems in a wider environmental context, is an idea which has in recent years been challenging various fields of sciences and humanities that have historically revolved around the anthropocentricism, i.e. the idea of the human as the superior mind positioned above the world (typically seen in the Enlightenment and its related fields of study such as taxonomy).  In the latter half of the twentieth century, so-called ‘posthumanism’ – the idea of radically going against anthropocentricism – emerged from the fields of philosophy and social science later incorporating scientific discourses in biology, physics, mathematics, cybernetics, neuroscience and so forth, bringing about a major shift in approaches to the question of the human. Now, the debate concerns how we can unfold the figure of human being as a consistent, seamless entity and dissolve it into a chain of reactions and relations to other creatures, environments or phenomena participating in the dynamism of molecular activities. The question is, how can we think of life in a way that does not distinguish human beings from all other phenomena in the world?