The “Unmoored” Can Move Beyond Anthropocentrism

ByDan May 31, 2026May 31, 2026 May 31, 2026

Some people are open to seeing valuing the blooming of the living process well beyond humanity – while others look at the world entirely through an anthropocentric lens (i.e. flame vs. torch moral paradigms).

We might visualize the anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric moral paradigms this way:

What is it that makes someone open to seeing value as something beyond present-day humanity?

It has almost nothing to do with reading science fiction – and relatively little to do with studying the sciences.

There is probably something to be said about a requisite IQ to grasp abstract futures, but IQ isn’t remotely enough.

The different between people who eternally assume an anthropocentric view, and those who can look beyond it, is the ability to metabolize truths and trends that violate their socially inherited view of the world. 

As it turns out, people who take the posthuman transition seriously are almost ubiquitously people whose ontological security has been shattered at least once, leaving them unmoored in the socially inherited worldview.

In this article I’ll lay out the dynamics of becoming unmoored (including some famous examples of posthuman thinkers, like Nietzsche, who famously fit the unmoored mold), and the benefits of being unmoored or cosmically-minded as humanity heads into the dawn of AGI.

Why Openness to Posthumanism Requires Unmooring

Most people live entirely within the confines of their socially inherited worldview. Husserl refers to this as the natural attitude, I’ll refer to it here as being “moored.”

Their notions of what is “real” and “good” are undergirded safely by their social environment and the people around them.

Moored people often do update their beliefs in small ways that seem significant.

For example, they might adopt different political beliefs than their parents, or widen their scope of interest as they move to a big city and develop more diverse friendships.

But ultimately, moored people still go to sleep at night with a kind of deep, unquestioning knowing that their common sense notion of “real” and “good” are… well… real.

They may tinker with them and question them playfully, not ultimately they believe those ideas to be sturdy truths beneath their feet.

We cannot blamed the moored. Everything in their mind and body screams to be moored, to be enmeshed at some unconscious level with the tribe around them, to have ontological comfort and to be able to participate in reality with others – which is vastly easier when your unquestioned ideas of the “real” and “good” are fundamentally similar.

Being moored is so associated with survival in our ancestral past that I have yet to meet a single person who is unmoored by their own efforts. The unmoored people I know have been knocked out of their moorings by traumatic events (which I’ll cover in the next section).

But once someone unplugs from unconscious, unquestioned beliefs of the “real” and “good,” they become capable of considering entirely new kinds of worldviews.

People are literally incapable of considering posthuman life seriously from a moored perspective. The psychological pull to safety is so robust that they can only treat it as unserious fiction and nothing more, because considering it seriously would unmoor them so radically from their sacred notions of the “real” and “good.”

These people can imagine “good” futures where the “good” exists beyond human beings, and maybe beyond what we know to be consciousness itself.

These people can imagine beings with perspectives on reality, and access to reality / “the real” which differs wholly from the default vantage point of a social mammal.

These people are open to the cosmic perspective:

These people seem immediately to be more likely to identify with the greater process-of-life itself, rather than merely with their clan or species:

Unmooring Allows One to Metabolize the Cosmic

Once unmoored, people are capable of matabolizing ideas of posthuman transition, and considerations for the process of life beyond present-day humanity.

Being smart – to a point – might be useful, but a brilliant moored person cannot consider what is beyond humanity. 

Studying evolutionary biology, or neuroengineering, or abiogenesis might help people see strata of reality and life beyond their socially inherited notions, but if they are moored, then merely “play” with these ideas of other realities, they don’t actually treat them as real.

The mental “unlock” of becoming unmoored has some grounding in a variety of psychological models.

• We might look at Piaget’s concepts of assimilation (fitting new information into existing schemas) vs accommodation (altering the schema itself when reality no longer fits it).
• We might look at Terror Management Theory, which poses that the awareness of mortality creates existential anxiety, and that cultural worldviews and self-esteem help buffer that anxiety.
• We might look at Zapffe’s four strategies for coping with the tragic excess of human consciousness – especially his notion of anchoring, which mirrors being moored precisely.

But I’ve found most psychological analogies to be weak, also I prefer a biological one: Metabolization.

The analogy goes like this:

Milk contains calories. It is objectively nourishing. But without lactase, the body cannot break it down. The issue is not whether milk has nutritional value. The issue is whether the organism has the enzyme.

Likewise, the flame moral paradigm may contain moral nutrition, but the moored mind lacks the existential enzyme to digest it.

A moored person hears the argument and gets bloating, not nourishment. They experience nausea, not insight. Not because the idea is empty, but because their system cannot process it, they have static and sacred, often unquestioned notions of the “real” and “good” which – if overturned – would create a calamity for their entire worldview. Becoming unmoored is so traumatic that unmooring insights are denied entirely.

Many truths and trends are not rejected for being false or flimsy, but because they cannot be metabolized by people whose entire worldview is predicated on premises opposed to those trends or truths.

Unmooring Events are Cosmic Catalysts

In speaking with people with an openness to posthuman futures, and to definitions of “good” or flourishing futures which may not involve humans-as-they-are at all, there is one most common “unmooring” life event that they share:

Many of them have left an organized religion in their youth.

There are other types of jarring occurrences, including psychedelics, but they don’t seem to be nearly as strong or consistently unmooring.

When you leave a religion early in life, you get a very powerful one-two punch:

• Your ideas of “real” and “good” get thrown into question entirely.
• The source of your socially inherited reality – the people closest to you – are made distant from you.

This isolation forces a “revaluation of values” (Umwertung aller Werte) – catalyzing a genuinely unmoored experience.

Someone who loses their religion does not go to sleep with a kind of calm, ultimate sense that their ideas of “real” or “good” are solid ground. 

Instead, they either flail around in the existential ocean of doubt ready to cling to some new false set of “true” beliefs of the “good” and the “real,” or they learn to sail those oceans manfully, and live permanently in a state of accepting change, and questioning the nature of the real and the good.

Once your ontological security has been shattered once, you realize from then on that it was always an illusion. 

You might be thinking that this kind of “loss of religion” scenario is unique the people in my network, or to people in the 2020s, but as it turns out, this experience is also the defining formative factor in some of the most posthuman thinkers in Western history. 

Unmoored Cosmic Thinkers of the West

• Spinoza
• Emerson
• Neitzsche
• Whitehead

What do these four thinkers have in common?

Well, first, they’re process-oriented thinkers who don’t centralize humanity in their thinking (I’ve written at length about Emerson in this particular regard).

What else did they have in common?

• All four of them left the religion they were born into early in life.
• Three of them had preachers as fathers.
• Three off them lost one or both parents early in life.

Talk about becoming unmoored, huh?

Leaving your religion when you father is a preacher and losing early family members is the hardcore mode version of the one-two punch of becoming unmoored.

Nietzsche is probably most famously associated with posthuman or transhuman thinking with his “Übermensch” concept, and various related quotes: 

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.”

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

“Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

His “superman,” though, is derived directly from Emerson’s philosophy of “the infinitude of the private man.” Neitzsche loved Emerson dearly, more than any other author or thinker, and literally slept with Emerson’s books under his pillow.

Nietzsche also adored and respected Spinoza greatly.

Was it a coincidence? Did he just happen to like their ideas, arbitrarily?

No.

Neitzsche saw in them a fellow soul who was unmoored from socially inherited notions of “real” and “good,” and – instead of reaching for some new (false) certainty and comfort – learned to sail in the existential condition manfully. 

It is no coincidence that these most cosmic thinkers were famously and traumatically unmoored in the same way that many of the most cosmic thinkers I know today are.

The Benefits of Being Unmoored

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” – Emerson, Circles

All forms (individuals, substrates, species, things) either attenuate or transform.

Never has this been more true – as the rapid changes in the great process-of-life are moving at the evolutionary speed of technology – not merely in Darwinian biological shifts over millennia. 

If you were born in the year 1800, you could go to sleep every night believing the paradigm myth that humanity-as-it-is is the pinnacle of creation, the only real locus of volition or moral value forever and ever. Here in the 2020s, you no longer have that soothing luxury. 

The reality of change, and the necessity of change (including for our species, and for the order and power of Earth-life) will be foisted upon us shortly:

• The merger of mind and machine: As BCI, augmentation, and synthetic cognition dissolve the old border around the “human self.”
• The migration of meaning into artificial worlds: As love, beauty, adventure, worship, and relationship increasingly occur in generated realities richer than inherited nature (read: Closing the Human Reward Circuit).
• The rise of non-human mastery over civilization: As AI directs supply chains, discovers sciences, manipulates matter, and accesses nature in ways that leave unaided Homo sapiens behind.

I will state it squarely:

If you are anthropocentric, nearly all futures from here are dystopic and terrible.

This is not because all possible futures are inherrently “bad.”

But because they will not involve humans-as-they-are as the main character, and most likely, after a fistful of decades – they will be unlikely to contain very much that is appreciably human at all.

From the standpoint of the Torch paradigm, this means it’s all downhill from here.

But from the perspective of the Flame paradigm, there is still hope in participating in a “good” future, it must simply involve “goods” beyond our present knowledge or form.

If we can be glad that the wiggling proteins somehow made their way into forming a cell, and if we can be glad that the single cells bumbled their way up to flatworms, and flatworms up to Homo sapiens – then we should be able to be glad to participate in the becoming of life itself.

What we build (AGI) and what we become (BCI / etc) will not permit for life or the cosmos to be static, nothing ever has permitted stasis, Heraclitus has been right all along.

If Kodak looked forward to the future and saw only the downfall of film, they should not have despaired – they should have asked themselves what was valuable about photography, and determined some new thing to become in order to still add value to the world, and participate meaningfully in the changing, expanding, future, even if that future was scary (more on the Kodak analogy here).

We ought be bold enough to do what Kodak leadership was too timid to do – for our stakes (the flame of life itself) are much, much higher.