Human being finds himself in a nonstop becoming, as much so in his somatic as in his psychic dimension- An upscaled becoming, moreover, when harmonically integrating with technologies of his own devising. The future man —who will not be the man we currently know— puts before us from the present (and from what is perennial) the definitive challenge of putting us before the meaning of this transhumanizing from the perspective of the sacred and the profane.
Transhumanar, significar per verba,
non si poria; pero l’essemplo basti
a cui esperienza grazia serba.
—Divine comedy. Paradise. Canto I.
A decade ago, Neil Harbisson surprised everyone when in his TED Talks he shared his synesthetic experiences of “hearing color.” Neil was born with the inability to perceive colors. Immersed in a perpetual chiaroscuro, objects such as maps and signage, the chromatic metaphors of our language, as well as a good part of the descriptions of the world escaped his comprehension. Then, finding himself at a clear disadvantage compared to his peers, he designed a device that would allow him to translate the wave frequencies of each color into sounds.
Over time, he ergonomically perfected the device, which mutated from a heavy computerized backpack to an electronic appendage that crowns its head in the style of an abyssal fish. What’s more, he optimized it so that it could encode ultraviolet and infrared light spectrums as well, so that it could now auditorily perceive colors hidden from the human eye. From coming of a disadvantage he became an “augmented” human. Formally, a transhuman.
Since then, his enhanced ability allowed him to question several of our conventions. For instance, there are no gray cities, only cities of dominant colors. There are no black or white people, but people of different shades of orange. He observed that from the natural colors of a face it is possible to recreate a unique melody for each human being. And when he dresses, although he looks very colorful and without proper combination, he does it to “sound good”, revolutionizing colorimetry applied to fashion.
If this amazes us in any way, we will be more impressed that these artificial synesthesias were predicted in the 90s of the twentieth century by Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla in his The Foundations of Meta-Technics (1990), so far the most significant contribution of Venezuela to the general corpus of the philosophy of technics. Even in the sixties and seventies, Mayz reflected on the relationship between Technics and Humanism (1972); and deconstructed technical reason into analytical categories, which can be read in his works Sketch of a Critique of Technical Reason (1974) and Ratio Technica (1983).
Meta-Technical Theory
Inspired by electronic devices such as radars and sonars, thermographic cameras, encephalograms and other analogues, the philosopher noted that, unlike technologies prior to the XX century, technoscience after the Industrial Revolution began to modify, replace or eliminate our senses, auguring the beginning of a substantial and unprecedented change in the somato-psychic constitution of the human being.
If technological artifacts now translate physical dimensions such as temperature, decibels, electromagnetic fields or any other to optical-luminical stimuli (or also to sounds, aromas, tastes or touches), then the conditions of an artificial synesthesia are generated that then offers new perceptions of reality, new syntactic logics, new epistemologies. A new logos.
If technological artifacts now translate physical dimensions such as temperature, decibels, electromagnetic fields or any other to optical-luminical stimuli (or also to sounds, aromas, tastes or touches), then the conditions of an artificial synesthesia are generated that then offers new perceptions of reality, new syntactic logics, new epistemologies. A new logos.
Then, just as in the paradox of Theseus the hero’s ship changes piece by piece, calling into question whether it is the same boat, so the body-mind duo of the human being gradually changes in integration with the technical objects of his own inventiveness. Ultimately, this would question our logos and everything that stems from it, including language and institutions; just as Harbisson ended up interpreting our conventions differently.
In this sense, classical and contemporary philosophy are combined between reminiscences of the ideas of Heraclitus and the general concept of individuation of Gilbert Simondon. We are faced with a man who is never the same since he is never culminated in his constitution. It is not understood as be but as being, in dynamic and constant becoming.
As a consequence of the mutation of his senses (first of the body, then of the psyche) man is heading towards a misty destiny of which we cannot be sure much more except that it will be a non-anthropomorphic, non-anthropocentric and non-geocentric one. In short, towards a morphology and relationship with trans-human otherness, the scope of which is difficult to predict; although, despite everything, bridges can be built between that perception of the world and ours.
Historical Moment and a Handful of Nobles
We could ask ourselves how it was possible to anticipate Harbisson’s ways of transhumanizing, or how such futurisms were possible from Venezuela.
First, considering the context, since 1940 the scope of cybernetics in Latin America has been debated. The interest in this field was since cybernetics is the science that studies the governance of entities, governance that is better understood as organization or administration; both of individuals and societies, or of machines and living beings, for humans and non-humans. We will understand it better if we remember that the cybernetic wordcomes from kybernetes, “pilot”, in allusion to the person who formerly acted as helmsman, It could be summarized in the art of directing.
For this reason, the incipient democracies of the region, but also the authoritarianisms that erupted them, had a special interest in centralizing and computing in data the multiple needs of their societies and directing them towards developmental or controlling models, depending on the temperament of the government in power. We can note here the preamble of the technocracies that today drive our destinies, through software and networks.
So, the human-machine fusion that is so familiar to us thanks to science fiction and entertainment content is, at bottom, a further consequence, downstream, of a political vision that sought to quantify human nature and reduce it to a spectrum of data and information. By equating biology with machines, the organic with the mechanical, we finally recognize the cyborg and the cybernetics of pop culture.
In the meantime, Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla took postgraduate courses at the universities of Göttingen and Freiburg between 1950 and 1952. On these days, there was a post-war Germany that still had its wounds open from the storms of steel and the industrialization of the war apparatus, which under the excuse of efficiency and precision tried to standardize, quantify, crush and process life and death.
In Freiburg, Martin Heidegger was one of its professors, recently readmitted to the classrooms of that university after his controversial link with the Nazi party. Mayz Vallenilla would learn from him the pure substance of phenomenology – which in turn was the sap that flowed from Husserl. Of course, he also delved into Kant’s philosophy.
Years later, Mayz published his Phenomenology of Knowledge (1956, doctoral thesis) and his Ontology of Knowledge (1960), clear foundations of his later techno-anthropological ideas. In 1969, when he became rector-founder of the Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela), an institution with a techno-scientific tradition, his attention turned to the theme of technology, education and the human condition. All the above was complemented, in addition, by the advent of electronics and computing in the region, which cemented the concerns that drove the meta-technical theory.
At the same time, the theory was sketched out by a handful of very special men, of interdisciplinary curiosity and intellectually daring. All of them were far ahead of their time, even misunderstood by their colleagues and loved ones. A handful of rebels who refused over-specialization. On the contrary, they were men without complexes of the diegesis that they had to live.
The center of thought for this meeting was the Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA), in the 90s. In addition to Mayz Vallenilla, Alberto Castillo Vicci, computer scientist, writer and undisputed pioneer of systems engineering in Venezuela; Alfredo Vallota, a graduate in chemistry turned philosopher, famous for his efforts to return philosophy to the streets through radio, teaching and the public agora; Douglas Jiménez, mathematician, cinephile, writer and popularizer of the history of math; and Ennodio Torres, professor and mathematician of seven seas, recognized for combining fuzzy logic, systems theory and complex thinking in industrial and business applications.
Thanks to the collaboration of these total men, some corollaries of The Foundations of Meta-Technics were developed, as well as papers and a book were published: Technics and Meta-Technics of Computing (2000).
Future of Meta-Technics
Meta-Technics expands the fields of philosophy, engineering, anthropology and theology from different and unusual fronts. For Alfredo Vallota, theory can constitute a meeting point, even an alternative, between the conception of the individual and the reason of modernity and the various centers or “turns” of postmodernity. A middle ground or hybrid between rationalist humanism and relativistic posthumanism.
However, one of the peculiarities of the theory is, being implicitly transhumanist by pointing towards an inevitable and free human transformation, with an open horizon, it does not, however, intend to eliminate the natural man or to overcome him definitively – as is the purpose of posthumanism. At the same time, according to Vallota, meta-technics would also imply a renewed metaphysics, which positions itself above the tensions between classical metaphysics and positivist empiricism.
Meanwhile, Castillo Vicci and Torres opted to explore the feasibility of linking and translating that potential meta-technical world and interpreting it from our own. In theory, this would be possible through fuzzy logic, nanotechnology, and quantum computing.
The main goal, which may well sound as futuristic as it is pertinent in the field of zoology, would be to develop a “translator of realities” called a nootechnical device, linking the anthropocentric technical world with the non-anthropocentric meta-technical world. It would be a technological link between two self-conscious beings of different episteme.
For his part, Douglas Jiménez built another conceptual bridge by noting that modern mathematics itself already contained the possibility of meta-technics. The abstractions of their developments do not depend on our senses or on the physical materiality that surrounds us: that is, mathematics is a priori ideas and only the play of relations between its theorems and corollaries matters. This would imply that in a meta-technical otherness the same mathematics of our base world coincides and persists. And if they are the same, there are possibilities of communication between that world and ours.
As has happened with Venezuelan philosophy since its inception, its technical aspect and developments have been involved in cycles of advances and interruptions due to the discourse of the time and the lack of continuity between governments. For example, cybernetics was vigorously promoted during the Cold War, and now transhumanism is regaining momentum with the arrival of contemporary technocracies.
In our case, the continuity of meta-technical theory has so far depended on the solitary work of Castillo Vicci, specifically with his book Philosophy and Mathematics of Meta-Technics (2018). Also, besides the punctual reflections of Vallota, we can check Massimo Desiato (ethical and anthropological implications) and Dinu Garber (notes on the meta-technical logos).
For its part, the work The Foundations of Meta-Technics has been translated into five languages – its translation into English was made by Carl Mitcham, one of the most important and recognized philosophers of technology today. Except for these translations, the most recent discussion of the theory in an international academic space took place in 2024, at the Conference on the History of the Philosophy of Technology, at Maastricht University, Netherlands; with the presentation Meta-Technics and Transhumanism in Venezuela. Likewise, in 2025, this time at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, at the V Ibero-American Congress of Philosophy of Science and Technology, the paper Convergences between Individuation, Autopoiesis and Meta-Technics was presented. Both presentations promoted by my own initiative.
That modified man, who will no longer be a man but another way of being, will also be a child of God.
These lines serve to motivate new researchers and scrutinize the scope of meta-technics and its inherent relationship with the dynamics of becoming and transhumanism. It is an invitation that goes beyond mere academic profit. In the first canto of Paradise, Dante bequeathed to us the first record of the word “transhumanize.” And although his sacred transhumanism is different from ours, which is profane because is arrogant, the truth is that man will continue to transform himself into a new sensory, somatic and psychic constitution. That modified man, who will no longer be a man but another way of being, will also be a child of God. From our present we can offer him some hints to ascend properly to the Empyrean.
