Confirm Humanity

I just did a captcha. And, I’ve seen it before, but for some reason this morning it was phrased a little differently, the reason why we have to do those, and it just said “Confirm humanity”.

😎

I think it’s totally great and it’s totally funny at the same time. But this morning it just entered my consciousness slightly differently than I think even the funny phrase was intended.

For, as maybe some of my readers might now or not, I question that humanity even identifies something that’s common, A common body of creatures called humanity. And one of my posts somewhere I even suggested that if “so and so” is a human being then I must be something totally different because of how ridiculous this person was; and I mean this in a very serious way.

I don’t mean it as some sort of oh interesting intellectual thought experiment. Of course, we could take it as a interesting philosophical thought experiment if you want to. But, I feel when we get to the edges, the perimeter, of what knowing is, what knowledge is, what thinking is, as some thing that arises in the universe, things start to change.

I’ve even pondered in this blog somewhere how this kind of “knowledge of the perimeter” is what has been commandeered by conventional knowledge under the term “esoteric”.  The body of knowledge which conventional knowledge miss identifies under the name of “esoteric” Is really a knowledge that conventional understanding has not experienced, and so misappropriates.

And then we really do get into this idea of what it is to be modern, at that, a modern human being. The very idea of modernity is an encapsulation of irony, a necessary move to either side of the fulcrum which irony represents, And it is the close association of modernity and irony which at once forms the precipitate of a state which arises outside of the individual thinker, but as well, a subject which perpetually ignores the condition of power under which it forms it’s human identity, which is to say, as a functioning global citizen, say.

🥸 So here I am being struck by a phrase “confirm humanity”, and on one hand I understand it’s asking me to confirm that I am indeed a human being as opposed to a bot. Then on the other hand it is kind of an interesting indictment of my presence in front of my phone screen, asking me to confirm that indeed there is a humanity which exists somewhere “out there” on the other side of the screen. 

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