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originally posted in:Secular Sevens
Edited by A3LeggedBurrito:
3/1/2014 4:51:12 PM
21
Would a Human Mind in a Non-human Body Still be Human?
So, this is an interesting thought. If a human consciousness in its entirety were to be transmitted into some kind of non-human surrogate, would you regard that vessel as human? I guess another related question would be, "How much do our bodies play a role in making us who we are?" Of course, this also requires a definition of human.
Personally, I think the affect of our bodies on our character and values is often underestimated. The body sets one's limitations and shapes how one experiences reality. I believe our mortality and weaknesses are fundamental parts of the human experience. So, I guess I would answer 'no' to this question.
What do you think? Yes? No? It depends?
For clarity, the surrogate could be either biological (like another species of animal) or non-biological (like a robot). However, I am gearing the question toward the non-biological scenario, but if you want to discuss the biological one, that's fine as well.
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Reminds me of this song...
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Chemicals fron the body influence the brain heavily.
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1 ReplyWhat does it mean to be human?
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1 ReplyTo make this "transfer" work, you need something that can handle human consciousness. Then you need a system built around it that can respond to the commands of the consciousness. That is to say, you need a brain and a body. So if you have a computer chip capable of running the human operating system and you hook it up to a bunch of components that handle the system's requests, seems like what you have is a human being. But it seems like trying to take consciousness out of the brain is a lot of wasted effort. And it doesn't seem to be what we're doing right now, as we make ourselves less "human". I imagine that a man in an electric wheelchair would not seem very human to people many centuries ago, though we consider it pretty normal. The chair is an extension of his body: his brain sends a signal to his hand to push a joystick up, and that ends up moving him forwards. So to what extent is his consciousness separate from the inhuman hardware? Let's extrapolate wildly to a future where a man is put inside the cockpit of a fighter jet, outfitted with a full life support system. Now, he eats and breathes and speaks inside a jet plane 24/7. He complains about his problematic fuel injector to his friends. He whistles at new models of jet fighters. On his days off, he fuels up and spends some time doing loops over a scenic part of town. He gets reprimanded for hooking himself up to a line that feeds him some very potent, but also corrosive, fuel. At what point is he no longer living inside of something different from himself? And do we actually have to be inside anything at all? Drone pilots certainly don't. Our Matrix bros don't either. Rather than Asimov's idea of a transplanted consciousness zooming around the galaxy, what it we were to keep our consciousnesses comfortably at home and control our [i]new[/i] "bodies" over one hell of a network connection? Inevitably, our limbs will atrophy and we will find easy ways of cutting them off to save weight or energy. If you're lying in a futuristic life pod 24/7, you don't need much more than your brain. And just like we augment our bodies, we augment our brains too, with vast stores of information that are seconds away. This is all just stream-of-consciousness stuff so it probably seems pretty dumb. I guess what I'm wondering is at what point our human consciousness becomes one and the same with the hardware it controls, just like what we consider to be human today.
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1 ReplyBiology isn't really my field, but physically the being would not be considered a human being if the anatomy is completely diverse from that of a normal person. From a philosophical point of view you could argue that they are human if they possess all of the wants, needs, and other behavior traits of a human being. Star Trek The Next Generation did a great job of showing this point with the android named "Data."
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Still human.. Especially if it had all the emotions
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4 RepliesOn the topic of the digital consciousness thing, I don't think our current silicone processing technology can handle human complexity. Transistors rely on positive/null binary programming, which works great for calculations but lacks the complexity of context. Neurons are not positive/null binary systems. They activate through a bunch of different means, cascading signals through one another. There are null/positive integers there, but its waaay more complex than just those logic gates. Its like asking a person which way to go to the market, expecting a left or right direction to be given, but told north by northwest instead. Until we can make some sort of computing technology which can duplicate that at least 4 way system of logic gates in contrast to our current binary systems, we won't ever be able to ever start to duplicate neuronal data in any meaningful terms. In order to gain contextual perspective, something more than the binary system will have to be derived.
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1 ReplyIts still just that, a human mind in a non-human body. If it is not a homosapien it is not a human I'd assume. They'd be some sort of hybrid.
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1 ReplyWhat, like a robot? If we ever did make Mechanical platforms capable of personality interfacing, they shouldn't look that different from our standard humanoid lay out. Unless they had to fill a specific role, or had to operate in a specific environment.
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At such a stage of transcendence, "Human" is a redundant concept.
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3 RepliesFirst we must answer What defines a human? Only then can we move beyond
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cyborg
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Tough question. I like to hope so.
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6 RepliesCan I legally have sex with it? If not, then to me it's not human.
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7 RepliesEver heard of the Chinese Room experiment? The idea behind it, if I remember right, was that until the person acts unlike a human, it is no longer a human. Then again, I'm not really good at these kind of subjects so I dunno.
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No, it would be a human mind in in a non-human body (:--- )
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They are a human, they are not a homo-sapien.
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8 RepliesWhat is a "non-human body?" If I cut off my arm, my body no longer matches with the normal human body? Would that be a non-human body?
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Their brain is. Their body is not.
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3 RepliesTangentially related, I've often wondered how transforming into a different body would affect the mind in any way (aside from any possible distraught that transforming into a different body would bring).
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4 Replieswhat's that old story about rebuilding a boat? at what point is the boat no longer the original boat, or whatever.
