In this week’s blog I would like to spend a moment reflecting on the nature of being human. What exactly does it mean to be human? Is being human something physical, mental, metaphysical, all, or none of the above? What if tomorrow technology made it possible to connect our brains to machinery that would potentially exist indefinitely? Without our bodies, are we still human? What about our feelings, emotion and senses? What about our soul or spirit, does it all reside outside of the body or does it enter, as many say, at a certain stage of our development? Would it remain with the brain and inhabit the machine, the robotics or cyborg sort of contraption that we are now housed in?
Cyborgs Closer to Becoming a Reality of Human Evolution
This week I posted a story from Science Daily, the title to which is very telling, “Cyborgs closer to becoming a reality of human evolution.” Picking up a couple of quotes from the article, this is the gist of story:
. . . Our world is a continuously changing complex system and humans are a part of this ever-changing system. Within this framework, human evolution is an ongoing process that shapes us now and will shape us in the future, body and mind. We must understand it in order to survive and be able to direct it to our advantage.
The advent of brain-machine interfaces may force humans to redefine where our humanity lies; it will blur the boundary between human and machine. 1
Redefining Humanity
Our technology has often raced ahead of our philosophical grasp of the ramifications implicit in the impact technology can have on our view of our selves and the world around us. We can easily become mired down in debates about life itself as with the whole matter of stem cell research or human clones.
Have we come to a place in our evolution where the meaning of being human is a matter of mind, the preservation of mind over species? Or is the preservation of mind the same as the species?
Threshold to Eternity
Mind connected to machine does offer a new explanation of eternity. Is there a need for metaphysics here or will we see yet another religious twist, one that touts the co-creative power of mind to create not only a new sense of what eternal may mean, but to begin further advancing technology to create life itself? After all, the great creation stories essentially say something like this, “In the beginning there was only God and God divided himself creating all things.” Do you know how many billions of cells you are capable of using to create clones should we decide that this too is the direction of human evolution?
I have spelled out many of the new technologies that interface man and machine, mind and computer, and so forth in my book, “Gotcha! The Subordination of Free Will.” Believe me, as the article in Science points out, and I quote, “We are becoming increasingly dependent on such devices [technological devices] and it can become easy to think of the body as a kind of machine with parts that need replacing.” 2
As always, thanks for the read and I appreciate your feedback.
Eldon Taylor
Provocative Enlightenment
NY Time Bestselling Author of Choices and Illusions
www.eldontaylor.com
Sources:
1. University of Adelaide. 2016. “Cyborgs Closer to Becoming a Reality of Human Evolution.” ScienceDaily. May 27, 2016. Retrieved June 2, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160527091214.htm
2. Ibid