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Defining what is human is not a new activity. Instinctive thinking developed when we were living our Neolithic Village lifestyle makes it easy to define strange cultures as composed of not human people. The most visible example of this in American history is the treatment of African Americans during the 1800's.
As humans develop new ways of using technologies in the 2010-60 time frame this question of what is human is going to move to the forefront again. Human bodies, and nearly human bodies, are going to be filled with new bio and nanotechnologies, and they are going to communicate differently than they have in the past -- think of the differences between using landline telephones and smart phones. Humans are going to communicate using a lot more cyber, and they are going to communicate a lot more with cyber as cyber intelligence grows.
So the question of what is human, versus what is cyber or near-human (human parts being used in non-human ways), is going to be a big one. And this will effect what my post-snap stories will talk about.
For my story purposes, human is defined as those beings for whom the center of conciousness resides in the brain as we currently recognize it. If a being is looking through human eyes, but the decision making is happening in cyberspace, this being is not human. If a being's decision making is being handled by nanotech in the brain, this being is not human.
Why this choice? Because this is something human readers of the 2010's can relate to, and I can relate to. These other kinds of beings will inhabit this post-snap world, and they will interact with humans (as I have defined them), but their thinking processes are going to be so different that they will be, truly, alien in their thinking.
In particular, their instinctive thinking will become non-human. They will have emotions as humans do, but those emotions will not be based on living in a Neolithic Village environment. They will be based on different formative environments. This will make these new kinds of beings difficult to understand and impossible to relate to. This difference is well beyond the Spock/Data "no emotion" concept. These beings will have emotions but they will emerge from completely different constaints so they will be pretty much unrecognizable as emotions by humans. Their thinking will be... different.
Post snap humans will not be amazed by this diversity of thinking styles. They will take it for granted. They will lead their lives, with human emotions at the root of their thinking, while these quirky cyber thinkers are just part of the scenery. This is part of the wondrous adaptability that is part of our biological human thinking package.
This is also where the conventional "cyber overlord" stories are way off track. The cyber overlord concept plays well to human emotion, but it's not going to be part of post-snap reality. Cyber overlords will have much more interesting and important things to think about than dominating humans.
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