Multidimensional: The Human in a Posthuman World

"We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”

"Oration on the Dignity of Man" (Oratio de hominis dignitate)

by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Renaissance polymath

„Throughout my life, many times I had to face people who told me: 'Focus on just one thing.'" Then one day I replied: "If I must focus on one thing, I will focus on myself."

And I am much more than just one thing."

Pablo A. Ruz Salmones, modern polymath

In an age where AI completes our sentences and global wildlife populations have shrunk by 73 percent — vanishing like whispers in a fading forest — I keep returning to a single, aching question: what does it mean to be human now, in this moment of supercomplexity, acceleration, and unraveling certainties? How did we arrive at such abundance, such towering technological prowess, and such exquisite self-destruction? 

To trace that arc, one must step far back — twelve thousand years or more — to the slow, epoch-defining shift from roaming bands of hunter-gatherers to the rooted rhythms of early agrarian life. And from there, zoom forward to the last 500 years, an astonishing acceleration that has redefined life itself.

It is the15th century and the European Renaissance, with its cascading influence on science, finance, and philosophy, marks a fault line in this long trajectory. Important: it must be seen not as a solitary pinnacle, but as part of a broader mosaic of global intellectual flourishing. While Florence birthed humanist manifestos and da Vinci sketched the future into his notebooks, brilliant minds in Timbuktu safeguarded astronomical manuscripts, the scholars of the Ottoman Empire translated and transmitted ancient Greek and Persian texts, and Chinese polymaths refined inventions like printing, compasses, and paper long before their arrival in Europe. In the courts of Mughal India, Persian poetry intertwined with Hindu philosophy and sophisticated urban planning. These civilizations — interwoven through trade routes, conquests, and silent whispers across deserts and seas — contributed to the shared pool of human wisdom that would ultimately nourish the Renaissance itself. Thus, to understand this era fully is to acknowledge not a singular European rebirth, but a global dialogue, a polyphonic awakening, shaped by exchanges far richer and more entangled than the West often admits. 

That radiant cultural awakening, spanning the 14th to 17th centuries, is often celebrated as the birthplace of modernity — not merely due to the blooming of art and science, but because it reshaped our very conception of the self. Renaissance humanism, rooted in the revival of classical wisdom and an unshakeable belief in the dignity and potential of the individual (see the famous quote by one of humanism’s masterminds, Pico della Mirandola, at the beginning of this article), lit a fire that would fuel the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and eventually the digital age. It produced masterpieces of art and entire shifts in how knowledge was systematized, how time was valued, how worth was measured. And towering above this shift stood the polymaths — Leonardo, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Dürer, More, Erasmus — those luminous minds who revealed the power of integration, synthesis, curiosity without borders.

This Renaissance mindset, nourished by a return ad fontes — "to the sources" — wove together the fragmented strands of Greek, Roman, and Arabic thought into a new intellectual fabric. It dethroned medieval fatalism, replacing it with agency, empirical curiosity, and a sense that human creativity could shape the world. The universities became crucibles of reform. Patronage systems birthed artistic marvels. Civic ideals like Bruni’s republicanism hinted at the democratic futures to come. But every golden age casts shadows.

The very same shift that unshackled the human imagination also laid the groundwork for a mechanistic worldview: a way of seeing the world as a vast machine, governed by fixed laws, reducible parts, and predictable outcomes.

The Industrial Revolution, which followed like a thunderclap — sudden, loud, and awe-inspiring — also crept in like a silent tide, subtly hollowing out the meanings we once held dear, until this mastery of the outer world was refined into machinery that began to shape our inner lives as well. The human being, once celebrated as a divine spark, became a cog. Efficiency replaced meaning. We ceased to think of ourselves as miraculous contradictions and began to treat ourselves as units of labor, of productivity, of function. And thus began the long forgetting of the human as ‘the free and proud shaper of their own being,’ as one of the founding fathers of humanism once proposed.

Interestingly, we kept calling it humanism, even as it evolved into modern secular humanism. Why? Because the word “human” is comforting. Familiar. It reassures us, even as the ground beneath us shifts. We use it as an ethical talisman, a guarantee of empathy, a moral compass. But I dare ask: what does it still mean? To be human is not merely to breathe, to reason, to create — it is to dwell inside contradictions, to weep over extinct birds we’ve never seen, to feel kinship with a star. When I used to call myself a humanist, it was in homage to this trembling, expansive potential. But over time, I began to sense that something was off-kilter.

The very core of humanism — the centering of the human as the crown of creation — began to feel brittle, insufficient. Because by placing the human at the center, we forgot Life — with a capital L.

Not just life as in organic, carbon-based beings. But Life as the totality of existence: the living and the non-living, the animate and the inert, the visible and the invisible. Life as the ceaseless dance of atoms, particles, energies, flows — where even a stone holds movement at its core, and a desert breathes in slow time. Strictly speaking, everything is alive — at least on the atomic level.

We decentered the forest, the river, the wind. We ignored the intelligence of mycelium networks and whale songs, sidelining them as background noise to the great human opera. And now, as the oceans acidify, as insect populations collapse, as we wage increasingly cruel wars in the century that was supposed to be defined by peace and planetary stewardship — I wonder if our foundational philosophies themselves are in crisis.

I have always been in love with the luminous range of human capacities, enchanted by the beauty and variety of human talent. Because, after all, where does it come from?  We were all vesatile as early humans. As foragers, we tracked animals, knew the stars, made tools, told stories, treated wounds, sensed the weather, and read each other’s silences. Then came the Agricultural Revolution with the division of labor, the narrowing. It turned into the long sleep of specialization. And yet, somewhere inside us, the polymathic impulse remained — part instinct, part memory, waiting to be reawakened.

And so, I became a researcher of polymathy, ending up with two written books on the topic. Polymathy is the art of mastering multiple disciplines deeply and weaving them together into fresh, creative insights. At its core polymathy is about embracing complexity and connection. In my research, I first turned my attention to those we call polymaths — those who dare to bridge the arts and sciences, technology and philosophy, bodily practices with literature… Those with a wide-ranging breadth of knowledge and skills, yet also significant depth in several domains. They are, in fact, multi-specialists (not to be confused with generalists) — masters of several domains who synthesize and merge knowledge into something new, constantly riding the wave of innovation. People like Confucius, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Hypatia, Archimedes, Cleopatra of Egypt, Cicero, Maimonides, Avicenna, Al-Biruni, William Shakespeare, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Alfred Nobel, Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Winston Churchill, Robert Oppenheimer, Charlie Chaplin, Alan Turing, Benoît B. Mandelbrot, and Iain McGilchrist, just to name a few.

But then came a deeper realization: each one of us is, inherently, a multidimensional being. The term — multidimensional human — suggests something profoundly beautiful, yet sorely absent from our bureaucratic, industrial-age categories. The 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman captured this truth beautifully when he declared, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” But today, those multitudes are flattened by job titles, passport numbers, social roles. You are an engineer. A mother. A German. A diabetic. A voter. An algorithmic ghost of yourself, reduced to data points in someone’s cloud.

And now, in walks artificial intelligence — not as an intruder, but as a mirror, a smooth, glinting surface that does not merely reflect our brilliance and creativity but also refracts our reductionism, echoing back both our symphonic imagination and our fragmented, mechanistic tendencies. It gazes at us with algorithms trained on our myths and our mistakes, forcing a confrontation — with what we create and how we define ourselves. A shapeshifting, polymodal presence that can brainstorm with us, co-write poetry, diagnose disease, simulate emotion. It dazzles and unnerves, not just because of what it does, but because it forces us to ask: are we still evolving, or merely optimizing?

If we continue to treat humans as one-dimensional — a single function, a narrow role — we will neither make best use of AI nor manage the consequences of crossing planetary boundaries, nor keep up with the fluidity of tomorrow.

The thing is, it's not a matter of choice.

We are already multidimensional. We always were. What’s needed now is recognition.

But what does it even mean?

To be a multidimensional human is simply to be more fully human.

It means recognizing what most of us already sense deep down — that we are not built to be just one thing. That it’s perfectly normal to have more than one career, more than one passion, to shift roles and identities as life unfolds.

Is it reserved for a gifted few? No — it’s a potential in everyone.

Children show it effortlessly. They build, dance, question, imagine, fix, break, and rebuild. And then school and society begin to narrow them down. “Pick one path. Be one thing.” But what if we changed that story? In fact, we must — because even future-of-work foresight now tells us that today’s teenagers will have at least five different careers in their lifetime. So it’s official: there is no one path anymore. Versatility is no longer a luxury, it becomes a necessity. And that fits perfectly with what it means to be a multidimensional human.

To be a multidimensional human is to live by integrating intellect, emotion, body, and spirit into a coherent whole. It means recognizing how deeply we are shaped by — and how we, in turn, shape — systems both personal and planetary, biological and technological.

In this worldview, learning never ends, roles evolve, and boundaries dissolve.

It’s a farmer who studies astronomy. A biologist who writes poetry.

Allow many layers of your self, your curiosities, talents, contradictions, and callings to coexist in dialogue with one another, to cross-pollinate over time, and to grow into something richer, more whole, and deeply alive.

To live as a multidimensional human is to move fluidly across spaces — art and science, intuition and data, past and future. This identity isn’t fixed; it emerges, flows, holds contradictions, and thrives in paradox. Can you sense this living, breathing, beautiful and versatile being? It's you!

And here is where posthumanism enters the stage. Posthumanism began to stir in the late 20th century — quietly at first, then with growing urgency. Important — not to be confused with transhumanism, which seeks to enhance and perfect the human through technology. Posthumanism is something else entirely. It is all about decentering. Stepping out of the spotlight altogether. Its thinkers — Donna Haraway with her Cyborg Manifesto, N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, and later Rosi Braidotti — challenged the old Enlightenment tale of the sovereign, rational individual. Instead, they spoke of entanglements. Of blurred boundaries between humans, animals, machines, non-living systems, ecosystems and even the whole Universe out there. Of humility. Of interdependence.

Posthumanism calls us to loosen our grip on human exceptionalism and to ask: what if we are not the center, but part of a web? What if “being human” was never a fixed category, but a shifting relation?  

At its heart, posthumanism invites us to decenter the human — not to degrade ourselves, but to remember we were never alone. We are part of a network: mycelial, digital, microbial, ecological. We were shaped by the bacteria in our guts long before AI began whispering back to us in human tones. The soil under our feet is alive. The forest dreams in chemicals. Our bodies, minds, and choices are braided into systems too complex for reduction.

While some speak of posthumanism in terms of neural implants or cyborg futures, others draw from ecological and Indigenous perspectives — seeing posthumanism as a return to relationality, to kinship with land, water, and non-human intelligence. I find a more fertile terrain in the merging of human consciousness with nature. Think of fascianting fields like Zoopharmacognosy, the study of how animals use natural substances like plants to self-medicate. Or, just think of the fact that today we are already close to decoding animal language with the help of AI — a shift that could fundamentally change how we understand and relate to other species. How will we relate to animals — our pets, the ones we farm, the ones we fear — when we begin to understand their needs, their stories, their warnings? Will they still be the same animals to us? Or will this transformation in comprehension rupture and reweave our entire perception of what nature even is?

With the right ethical approach, technology can be used to enhance life rather than dominate it. We see signs already. People using AI to brainstorm art, discover new cancer treatments, or personalize education. Elderly individuals extending their vitality with bioenhancements or gene therapy — not to chase immortality, but to remain fully present, fully alive. Are they transhuman fantasies or the  extensions of care?

Statistics tell us that global life expectancy has risen from 52 years in 1960 to over 73 today, while rates of depression and ecological degradation have surged in parallel — reminding us that longevity alone is no guarantee of well-being. Yet many live longer without feeling more alive. Perhaps this is where a posthuman, multidimensional ethic must intervene, enriching our long lives like a symphony.

Imagine then, a re-enchanted identity. A vision of humanity not as the apex predator or supreme algorithmic engineer, but as one intelligent node in a vast, trembling web of Life. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” What if that “defeat” is not an end, but a softening? A yielding to the complexity we are part of?

The multidimensional human, in dialogue with posthumanist insight, becomes a way to both honor our Renaissance past and step into a future that is less about mastery, more about belonging. A mother who is a migrant, an accountant, a healer, and an activist is not switching identities — she is inhabiting the new subjectivity: fluid, hybrid, embodied. A farmer using soil sensors is not a cyborg, but part of a new ritual between data and earth. And AI? It’s a mirror, asking us to become more fully ourselves.

Posthumanism doesn’t destroy the human. Posthumanism extends it, reframing our complexity. It insists we are not gods, nor ghosts, but beings-in-relation. And in this view, Life — complex, fragile, emergent — becomes the center again. Not just human life. All of it.

So perhaps we have come full circle. From the Renaissance dream of boundless human potential to a deeper dream — of humans remembering they were never alone.

Of rediscovering our own complexity not as a burden, but a birthright.

Of becoming a consious part of this interwoven, multidimensional world.