Humans are the dominant species on a dying planet, and we’re still clinging to the idea that we can think our way out, invent our way out, maybe even upload our way out.

But what if the solution isn’t more mastery or more control? What if the only way to survive is to become something else entirely?

Mark C. Taylor is a philosopher, a cultural critic, and the author of After the Human. It’s a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book, one that moves from Hegel to quantum physics to the ethics of soil and fungi. It’s packed with hand-drawn diagrams and photos of dirt and discussions of philosophy and the history of technology and day-to-day dilemmas like having too many books for your shelves.

I invited Taylor onto The Gray Area to talk about how all this coalesces into a uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human, and why we need a new story, a new self, and, really, a whole new way of thinking and being in the world. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At the very beginning of this book, you write, “How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday at precisely 12 o’clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?” Why do you want us thinking about total extinction next Friday?

Because I think it’s a realistic possibility. The real urgency of this book comes out of my concern about climate change, because there’s absolutely no doubt that we are facing catastrophic effects in the very near future, and there’s a complete blindness or unwillingness to confront the actuality of that problem and to address what needs to be done to dodge it if we can.

But it’s not just that. It’s also the intersection of new technologies and the ways those new technologies have transformed the social, economic, and political systems. And they’re all interrelated. The problem isn’t just that people are not connecting the dots; people do not know the dots that need to be connected.

What do you think it means to be “human”?

Part of what distinguishes the human is that we can ask the question of what it means to be human. That’s a level of self-consciousness and self-reflectivity that is important and in some ways distinctive of the human.

And you think the problem is that we’ve come to think of human consciousness as something special, almost separate from nature?

Correct. The philosophical foundation to the Anthropocene [the era in which humans have been the dominant influence on the planet] begins with modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

And what Descartes does is to identify being a human with thinking, and [identifying] everything else as a machine, including the human body. From that point on, there’s always this effort to distinguish the human from the non-human. Descartes’ identification of the human in terms of cognition becomes the heart of anthropocentrism [the idea that humans are at the center of things], and anthropocentrism is the basis of this Anthropocene.

How does that lead us to this situation where we are exploiting nature and wrecking our environment?

We view the individual as what is most concrete and most real, and we see groups as formed of individuals. That’s wrong because there is no such thing as an isolated individual. Every individual is what it is by virtue of its interrelationship to other individuals and entities.

Why is the illusion that we are disconnected and separate so powerful?

If you come back to the climate, we’re parasites on the earth. It’s a parasite-host relationship, and we are in the process of destroying the host upon which we depend. You cut down all the trees in order to serve the economy and we die. It’s that simple. So in that sense, the interrelationship is confirmed. When the current politicians pull out of all climate accords, reinforce fossil fuel, they’re destroying the planet without........

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