How far have you taken identifying as a cyborg?

Eh, they don’t have to see it my way so long as the dictionary’s on my side :wink:

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Real fortunate position to be in, knowing what most everybody else thinks.

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Hey, my arm and my hand glow! So I qualify, too? :stuck_out_tongue:
Honestly, I don’t call myself “cyborg”, for I just don’t feel like that. I’m in the cyber-scene anyway, so that’s the term I use, and declaring myself as cyber-cyborg would sound a bit stupid :smile:

But all that “augmentation”-discussion… dunno, I think I feel “improved” with everything I get done to me. I’m not faster, stronger, whatever, but with every mod I do, I feel a bit more… hm, self-aware? I am shaping my body (and therefore my mind as well) in a way that makes me more “at peace”, in a way - incredibly hard to explain, but definitely an improvement.

In a way, yes, but I’d limit that to things you can’t take off easily or wear (nearly) permanent, like a prosthesis or the incredible eyeborg of mr. harbisson up there.

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My NExT quickly became an integral part of me. I would feel less me without it. The idea of gaining mag field sense with the Titan excites me as much as the scalpel install scares the shit out of me. In my mind, the NExT was the turning point. It changed how I perceive myself in a way the stainless steel screw anchoring my ACL reconstruction, the nylon mesh of my hernia repair, and the growing collection of gold and porcelain in my mouth never did by adding an ability, not replacing or repairing an existing one.

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I take it a bit seriously.

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I would agree with the magnet vs chip argument, thus the magnet changes your brain. It is a new input…for you brain.
Sure-sure you can interpret the memory of the chip as an input device, but you need another device to access the data on it.
I’d argue pacemaker makes you a cyborg, borderline, I’d say.
Fake tooth, glasses, watches, dildos, smartphone are just devices. If you accept them as technology you might as well call beavers cyborgs, or otters those banging stones on their bellies.

Magnet maybe, eyeborgs maybe, neurolink maybe soon. Although you could argue with me that these augmentations worth not a lot without technology and that includes magnets as well. What would you feel otherwise? Magnetite?
Or if you accept prosthetics as augmentations you might as well consider medicines, they keep people alive longer, make stronger…etc

Does a passport make you the part of the nation or the way you feel about it & the cultural heritage you share with others. Or is it your DNA. How many of these can you miss from this mini list yet still have real nationality?

I think you considering yourself as cyborg makes you cyborg. That generally speaking changes the way you think about your surrounding and interact with it. It changes you and the world around you in some way.

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I’ve given the matter some thought - quite a lot of thought actually: since my views on the matter seemed so reviled, it must be because there’s something wrong or not well thought out with them. So I decided to revisit the subject.

And with the help of this interesting article, I’ve come to the following conclusion: there are no cyborgs, because all humans are by definition.

The one thing that clearly defines humanity is the ability to invent tools to augment its own abilities. Be it caveman hunting sticks, clothes, houses, cars, hearing aids, RFID chips, or cochlear implants, humans simply cannot function without their tools. There is literally no human being on Earth that lives as a pure human being - and there hasn’t been since human beings ceased to be apes. Hell, one might argue that the environment itself is a tool, since we’ve terraformed the planet so much to suit our needs.

Humanity is defined by its tools. Humanity cannot exist without its tools. The tools wouldn’t exist if we didn’t need them, and have no purpose without us. We all are in a symbiotic relationship with our tools, whether they are complex machines inside our body or simple objects outside of it.

And that’s why most people don’t see someone with a stent or a knee prothesis as a cyborg, or find people with rice grain-sized RFID implants who claim to be a cyborg slightly silly: that’s because they themselves already are cyborgs, as much as, and no less than we are. They just don’t need a label to identify something we all are: humans. And neither should any of us.

My conclusion is that the augmented vs non-augmented humans, or “normal” vs cyborg humans debate is moot: the two groups overlap perfectly.

Maybe this was obvious to most of you - in which case it confirms that I’m a slow learner :slight_smile: But maybe someone will find my musings worth considering.

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This is basically the premise I started my TEDx talk with… we are tool users… to expand our capabilities is essential to humanity. To me, cyborg is simply an adjective to describe a certain type of capability augmentation. Phycologically I think there is a difference between an implant and carrying a tool… which leads to philosophical discussion… but in a practical level, humans be augmentin… nothing new about that.

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I did say I was a slow learner :slight_smile:

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I think there are different levels to all that - there is a difference between using a key (which clearly is a tool for opening a lock) and using an implanted chip to do the very same.
I thought about all that quite a lot, too (this forum is great for making people think^^), and I like to compare it to modifying my body. People have always decorated themselves, from the very beginning of mankind, and yet I think there are different levels to that as well - from painting the body, adorning it with fur or feathers, to putting the colour under the skin, piercing the skin, creating scars or even such things as binding feet or taking out teeth. It might all have the same reason or background, but still there is a variation in “quality”.
So when people use technology in a way they embed it into their bodys, not just using it as a tool they can just put away at will (or just use a different or newer tool or whatever), I think it has a new quality as well, and since we all grew up with a certain picture of augmented humans through popular culture, I think the term cyborg is - in a not-100%-serious way - fitting.

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I would say the difference is not only psychological, but also fundamental!

Summary

At uni we had a topic where you could choose the theme ‘cyborg’ to write about, so we discussed that as well. We went pro and contra with the debate and eventually it got accepted that we are all cyborgs as we have access to technology (broadly speaking smartphones with internet). I killed the debate with one line:

Your tool is like a snorkel, my implant is like mitochondria.

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I think they overlap for a while, but the concept of cyborg in my reading reaches beyond.

Yes, I want to think of myself as reaching for the next level, and here comes Amal’s quote again, with the Psychological (or however we spell it) difference.

Not sure about that. I mean the final stage of cyborgisation is the disappearance of the wetware part of the human/machine symbiosis - i.e. only robotic beings left.

However, my opinion has always been that machines made by humans - and machines made by human-made machines - are part of humanity: they’re our creations, and our future.

I remember talking about that with a friend when Spirit landed on Mars: my friend thought it was really sad that the first thing would-be Martians would see of their human visitors is their machines. To which I replied: those machines are us. They are humanity. They are our representatives to putative alien lifeforms. We walking bags of water are the relics from the past, planet-bound and condemned to watch our robotic offspring conquer space on our behalf.

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That one is difficult… it is inside your body, and it “does things” for you, yet you could live without it - I highly doubt you could live without your mitochodria :wink:

Since humanity basically killed all that “darwin”-aspect of evolution (no more survival of the fittest, on a genetic base at least), we actually need to find a different way of “improving”. That might be biohacking, might be genetic engineering or even meditation and similar stuff to “enhance” your mind.

If we transfer this to religion, it would mean that the creator and his creations are basically the same… interesting thought. I think the machines may represent humanity, but they are no part of it as long as they don’t reach the point they become creators themselves - not just acting out and physically building the stuff mankind invented, but inventing themselves. I have no doubt this will happen one day, maybe really soon (singularity…), but until then I think they are still different from humanity…

No need for religion: if you have children, they’re human. If you have a child with Down syndrome (technically a mutant), very limited mental capacities and unable to reproduce, it’s still human. Push the logic to its limit: if you create a machine that has the gift of thought, even that of a toddler, you “spawned” it - albeit not with your womb but with your hands and your brain - it has a life of its own, whatever the form it takes, and I don’t see how it doesn’t fit the criteria for being your child, and therefore human also.

Robots are the next step of evolution. Only we force that bit of evolution.

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They say a lucky anaero single cell slurped up the mitochondria and instead of a stomach ache they lived happy after all.
Maybe that lucky cell was wondering it the primordial soup… :roll_eyes:
-Shall I keep this mitochondria, or puke it out? :microbe:
But they made friends, and therefore… (and now we are speaking about time scale that makes sense for Evolution itself) I got a magnet and live as happy with it as that lucky cell a gazillion years ago. Doest the story makes sense? Timescale is important, especially if we discuss The Theory of Evolution.

No, we didn’t kill it. From the perspective of human lifetime what accepted commonly has changed radically. 100 years ago illnesses decimated humanity, now we have vaccination.
Xhundred years ago people decimated each other, nowadays you’d better be tolerant or else you’ll be called out by PC purple hair collage students.
Now the smartest is the fittest, the tolerant is the fittest…etc.
Genetic level? Yet again, it takes time for a meme to become a gene

Leave religion for a second, let’s talk about art.

“Every picture is a self-portrait” Ralph Steiner

This sentence is golden! GOLDEN!!

Might be that way, yes - but still, this doesn’t limit reproduction. If an animal gets killed because it has a “flaw” (from the evolution-point of view), it won’t reproduce. In mankind, the most evil, stupid, intolerant or whatever person is still free to distribute its genes to next generation - and by raising the child in its own believes, it spreads its intolerance, stupidity and all that, too. What I meant by “killing the darwin-aspect” is that everybody is free to reproduce, no matter what the consequences are.

No problem :wink: I just think it’s interesting that there is a debate on whether god created mankind or it was the other way round. I like the philosophy of many religions, even if I’m not a part of it :wink:

I get that. Honestly, I tried to find the flaw in this thought, but I couldn’t :wink: I’m just not sure if everything I (as a human) create is human as well, I think the important part here is the “life on its own”.
But, sadly, there are even “real” human children who will never be able to live a life on their own, and they definitely are human.

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My definitions of life and humanity are very loose for one simple reason: if you make them stricter, then you need to exclude the proverbial dribbling Down syndrome kid from humanity. Since it’s unthinkable, for intellectual honesty’s sake, you must apply the same criteria to machines and dribbling kids alike.
And by that token, machines don’t need to be thinking very much or be self-replicating to be considered part of the human family. They just need to be created by humans and display a modicum of self-sufficiency.

One might consider some amount of self-awareness or emotions as indicators (not as exclusive indicatiors, for several animals have that, too)… or maybe we need to finally accept that humanity can’t be separated from the rest of the animals :wink:

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