How we become cyborgs
anonymous
September 17 2015, 04:37:19 UTC
We become cyborgs not all at once but by degrees. Do you remember the phone numbers of all your family and friends or does your phone do that for you? Has not the phone become an extension of your memory?
Today our views are constrained by the visions of cyborgs of past generations. A cybernetic arm or leg is easy to envision. What about the little things that no one could see? A prosthetic kidney. A cybernetic heart.
Miles Vorkorsigan had his brittle bones replaced (with titanium I think). Has Lois McMasters Bujold made the hero of the series a cyborg?
I wonder. If we can replace the memory, can we replace the whole brain? Ian McDonald wrote of a man who replaced his whole body and brain with a machine in "Christian" and transferred his memories and feelings over. Is he still the man he was? (Ian did not ask that question nor did he answer it.)
Re: How we become cyborgsnancyfuldaSeptember 17 2015, 14:55:04 UTC
Ha, that's funny -- I never thought of Miles as a cyborg. If I recall correctly, he not only has titanium bone replacements, but also ends up with a neurostimulator wired into his brain to help him manage his post-cryogenic seizures.
There's a fabulous book called "The Mind's I" by Douglas R. Hofstadter, that deals with a bunch of questions like this. My favorite is the essay on distributed neurons: if you take a single neuron out of the brain and replace its input/output channels with a simulation of the way the rest of the brain would behave, is it still experiencing sentient thought? What if you do the same thing with every single neuron in the brain?
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Today our views are constrained by the visions of cyborgs of past generations. A cybernetic arm or leg is easy to envision. What about the little things that no one could see? A prosthetic kidney. A cybernetic heart.
Miles Vorkorsigan had his brittle bones replaced (with titanium I think). Has Lois McMasters Bujold made the hero of the series a cyborg?
I wonder. If we can replace the memory, can we replace the whole brain? Ian McDonald wrote of a man who replaced his whole body and brain with a machine in "Christian" and transferred his memories and feelings over. Is he still the man he was? (Ian did not ask that question nor did he answer it.)
Good question, Nancy. Stimulating. Kudos.
PS Like the puzzle CAPTCHA.
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There's a fabulous book called "The Mind's I" by Douglas R. Hofstadter, that deals with a bunch of questions like this. My favorite is the essay on distributed neurons: if you take a single neuron out of the brain and replace its input/output channels with a simulation of the way the rest of the brain would behave, is it still experiencing sentient thought? What if you do the same thing with every single neuron in the brain?
Weird stuff. Fascinating, but weird. :)
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