New artificial hand allows amputee to feel touch again.
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Our optional cyborg attachments and implants are getting better by the day, now being directly linked to our nerves with two-way communication. Check this out!
"I am using muscles which I haven't used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don't have them anymore. It's amazing." posted: Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/06/2009 08:51AM by pragmatica. | |
pandora114 posted: Yeah but seriously!! but that won't be for while after my death, i think this is insane. i'm all for this kind of stuff. 100%! pragmatica posted: That's a cool thought. makes me think, where is the line? if you upgraded 95% of your human components to bionic parts, would you still be human?!  Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2009 12:34AM by djnixon. | |
djnixon posted: It's hard enough to define human as it is. Other simians can also use symbols to communicate. What about people born unrecognizably deformed or those with genetic abnormalities like Down's syndrome where their number of chromosomes doesn't match up with what is defined as a normal human? Where's the dividing line between a mutated human and one that's so different it can't be classified as human at all, despite being descended from two humans. Who decides that line between what is or isn't human, and what gives them the right to choose that line? I don't think we can really boil down to being a mammal with opposable thumbs. To many the mind is as - or more - important than the body in defining what is human. When you start looking at all the exceptions, both mental and physical, to our general idea of what is human, there is a huge gray area indeed, even without technological enhancements. It used to be that defining what species a mammal belonged to involved two biological examples of the species being able to create fertile offspring. Technology changes that as it allows the creation of radically different new lifeforms without biological reproduction whatsoever. The rules need to be rewritten or discarded as biological lifeforms and cells are now at the point of truly merging seamlessly with technology. I just say: who cares if the lifeform is human or not? If it's equal or better in capabilities and is more likely to survive as a result, great. Why should we get in the way of the evolution of something better? Just imagine if some creature way back when had arbitrarily decided that human beings were "too evolved, too smart, or too dextrous" 1 million years ago and actively prevented our species from developing, or outright exterminated it? Let's see what happens, just like we had our chance. Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2009 05:27PM by pragmatica. | |
pragmatica posted: "Normal" is a setting on a washing machine and nothing more. | |
Riktor posted: I'm not actually sure that simians do use symbols as we do, they use sequences of 'signals' that are communication tools, which does not mean they perceive environment through a conceptual system (which is our condition of beings seperated from "material" real world by reflexive consciousness), neither it could mean they own a language that can be shifted from it's appropriateness to reality for poetic purposes. But in anyway these are only 'clues' of what seperates us from animals, but if we found our definition of humanity on the constancy of a subjective point of view through time and the ability of a metaphysical thinking, you can not (that was Descartes's statement) tell that anybody else but you is actually human, so we hit a metaphysical wall. Then, in my opinion, we can not consider the 'line' this way. The only thing I could tell, considering that body is just a tool used the mind/consciousness couple for experiencing environement, making bionic improvement on our bodies does not change anything to our humanity, it's just like having a faster car (well, if we make the statemen that this "mind/consciousness" couple has to have a physical relation with brain, there's indeed an issue with modifying brain... but this statement is impossible to objectify... think that in animism, a soul does not need a brain) . I think there's an issue with the goals we pursue in our lives. When we will have become just technical extension of the 'machine', conceived as a search of pure efficiency, then we will not be humans any more. But that could happen without bionicalize our bodies... I think the right and human use of technology is the never-ending pursuit of what one could call a "infinite finality". For exemple, art, or knowledge, or a greater good. I want a technology that leads us to infinity and human exploits without any "performance-cost ratio". And the best example of that is the exploration of infinite outerspace. This would be a great purpose for Human body improvement, and technological advance in general. We are in a deep lack of dream and human pride, we nearly resignated ourselves to rust in this old planet, trying to fit an always-smaller house with any "sustainable developpement" system... (which could be considered as some kind of autopoietic machine plunging us in an eternal and dishumanizing present, indeed lead by a "performance-cost ratio" logic) Get Astronautic ! 
(and please excuse my french-powered english) Edit : pragmatica posted: I would not say it this way. I apply to darwinism, in any extend concerning the evolution of matter organized as animal 'life-form', but in my opinion it's indeed the definition of life that causes problem. What's the difference between an animal's life, a plant's life and another auto-poietic system such as the climatic system ? Maybe nothing, that's matter in movement. If you consider what you can objectify of a man, what reason can positively deal with... is a body, an animal. But where darwinism fails, is defining what's a subject, what's the human subject that has an experience of matter. I would say a Human is not his body, because in an immanency state of total and direct being, there cannot be any experience, because there can not be any subject as a one an only center of the universe he experiences through time. That's why everyone from his own point of view is human, he his fundamentaly different, not only from animal, but from any from of matter in movement (including other "human bodies", that's why recognizing the other as human is an effort on reason). Since the subject actually makes the universe exist trough his point of view, he subjectively gives an existence to wholes of matter, and paradoxically, to humans as well as to anything. So considering this way of seeing things, you can say that there's no life, conceived as existence, except in Human, as well as you can say that Human is the origin of any life-form which he determines. But in anyway, the conclusion is that there's no life if there's no human, and there was no life before there was any human, and since Humanity takes place in a material shell, there's to different 'time-lines' for the existence of the universe. Because Human is not matter in movement and not abiding to darwinism, technology can not, I think, being considered as an adaptation strategy. It has to be something else, it's the way we experience and we have an action on matter, and it's the way through achievements that are not related to any natural necessity. Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 11/14/2009 05:25AM by AnKerbe. | |
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This thread is full of complete awesomeness. I'm all for Prag's idea of having nightvision/ultra violet/etc.....having a brain camera would rock as well!!
CharmlessMan posted: and prolly kick your butt too!  | |
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