Superhumanity

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

Novels are (usually) about humanity but some of these guys aren't human. Olmy:

uploads the recoded mentality of a captured hostile alien, called a "Jart," into one of his own memory implants;

sends a "partial," i.e., an incomplete recording of his own personality, in there to investigate the alien and report back to him;

has algorithms to interpret alien sensory experience, e.g., Jarts combine sight and sound into a single sensation;

has internal defenses to prevent contamination, sabotage etc by the Jart;

is interrupted in this process by an "assigned ghost," i.e., a projected partial of a colleague who wants to speak to him;

has, with his wife, reproduced by constructing an artificial personality that exists in a virtual reality and has to pass an exam to be incarnated;

should survive death because an almost indestructible implant will be extracted from his dead body, enabling his personality to be preserved and reincarnated although not necessarily in a humanoid body.

Despite all these differences from humanity as we know it, Greg Bear conveys to his readers something of the motivations and inner experiences of a character like Olmy.