So really, what's a human?

[weaksauce]

If I would replace the whole of my body accept my central nervous system with artificial body parts, would I still be a human?

If yes, it means that the CNS is the only thing that makes me human, since the rest of the body is non-existent.

If I then had nanomachines that could replace my inborn nerve cells with artificial cells of whatever material, on the fly while I am still conscious and I would still feel like me when my whole brain has been replaced, can I still be considered "me" and be seen as a human?

If yes it means my "humaness" lies in nowhere in my inborn body, and only the spirit.
But if no, it means consciousness and experience and all the human abilities doesn't matter.


If we are defined as humans by our "inborn" body parts, then wouldn't that mean that a person who loses any limb is considered "less of a human"?

This does seem highly logical though. And that would coincide great with abortion-philosophy.

But is it correct?

Should DNA also have any place in determining our human state? After all, a rat embryo and a human embryo may have the same properties, but the DNA is the only thing that makes them different, and in the long run makes them rats and us humans. You are, after all, what you eat (and to a small extent maybe what your mother once ate). Rats and humans probably eat similar things, all that originate from soil.

Is it wrong to say, that DNA forms the soil into a being? It may seem religious but think about it, think about a seed planted in the soil.

Wouldn't this mean, that we are all soil in the form our DNA has defined us, in the human form?

If this is the case, I would be something that is formed out of a spontanous process. If I would replace this with artifical parts, I would re-design myself in a conscious manner. But I don't know if this would change the initial question. Surely I can see myself as the spirit, but is there still a human?

edit: lol I accidentally put a wii icon in the title.

 

[Scott_Arm]

edit: lol I accidentally put a wii icon in the title.

If all of your extremities were replacement with wiimotes, you'd still be human. Maybe even superior?

 

[AlNom]

Denis Dyack will show you next year.

 

[ebola]

If I would replace the whole of my body accept my central nervous system with artificial body parts, would I still be a human?

er.... my favourite 'weird idea' that I read recently was speculation that conciousness was a complete continuum generated by ANY information being processed;
i.e. a cockroach with 1m neurons has 1m units of the same type of consiousness that we have a 10 billion units of , and that you can trace it all the way back: even the simplest systems like a switch with a 1 or 0 state .. or 2 particles interacting via some force - have a minimal amount of the same type of conciousness (albiet negligable by comparison). There is no point on the evolutionary scale or of anytype of matter at which 'conciousness' springs into existence - it is as fundemental as any other physical property.
To put it another way, the universe is made of information, and information is conciousness.
(this relies on having rejected the ideas that conciousness arises from quantum effects..)


So applying that line of thinking to your question:
I suppose I would say that replacing your limbs does change your human-ness: the body, although a machine controlled by the CNS 'cpu' is inevitably quite involved in generating your 'human-ness' through the various feedback processes involved in your development... just as a PC's cpu interacts with many peripherals, I dont think you can discount the processing embedded in the machinery supporting your CPU when defining a 'human'.

I think some researchers into AI have concluded that natural language processing is the wrong way to go about generating artificial intelligence and that starting with the same physical interfaces and solving the same problems that animals deal with is a better route; it was the freeing up of the hands for tool creation (as a result of walking bipedally) that led to the evolution of human intelligence, not vica versa.

Have you heard about the weirdness resulting from the number of neurons contained in the heart ... the claims that hints of memories and personality traits are carried across in transplants...?

However I think here we would have to seperate personality and what religion calls 'the soul' from the complete object 'a human': I think I agree with you that at the point where your CNS is wired up to entirely artificial machinery, and even replaced your neurons one by one with artifial ones, that 'you' would still beleive 'you' were the same entity, even if the ensemble was no longer human.
Another angle would be to look at what proportion of the total information involved had been changed, I assume that the vast majority of the information associated with a human IS indeed in the brain.
Given how much is generated by feedback from the enviroment however, I dont think your DNA is enough to define you.

er... I'll stop now and get back to thinking about refactoring code for SPUs ... I'm not sure i've even stayed on topic with your original post, or posted a coherent reply.

 

[nthd]

If I would replace the whole of my body accept my central nervous system with artificial body parts, would I still be a human?

There is only one way to find out, isn't there?

 

[soylent]

Would you be human without the countless species of bacteria, bacteriophages, virii and other microorganisms outnumbering the "human" cells in your body?

 

[_xxx_]

The only thing that makes us "better" than animals is the awareness of our existance and the capability to overcome our instincts/genetic programming.

 

[Arwin]

Weaksauce, my compliments for this thread. You have an agile mind, which is a good thing.

So, there are two questions going on:

- the physicality (hi Eggebrecht ) of being human. Let's call it hardware, since that suits this forum. ; ) If you replace parts of your body with non-human parts, then your body become a hybrid, basically. So you can talk about how much of your body is still human, and how much isn't. So that makes the initial question very easy to answer, because you can look at each individual part of your body to the tiniest detail and say whether it is human or not. In the case of the CNS example, that'd be all that's human left in your body.

- the identity, i.e. the self-conscious 'you' part. Let's call this software. If you look at the 'you' part, you're not discussing your physical aspects per se, but you are thinking about your consciousness and your identity. This consists primarily of information and processes, that at least in theory, can be virtualised to any kind of other hardware. Think VMWare type environments. I have thought a lot about what consciousness (and more importantly self-consciousness) really is, and imho self-consciousness is basically a process that is aware of the other processes going on in your mind. It's very reliant on the development of a concept of self, but it isn't as much in control of the 'other' processes going on in your body as you might think. You can define a lot of prerequisites for self-consciousness, at the core of which obviously are memory and perception.

(Sometimes the best way to get an answer is looking more closely at the question)

 

[_xxx_]

Humans have three levels of conciousness which are separate, but influence each other vastly, in a bottom-up way. We have the "reptillian brain" (basic instincts like survival instinct, hunger, breathing, the urge to reproduce,...), the emotional brain and the rational thinking. The lowest one has the highest "interrupt-level", said in terms of computers. the emotional level surely affects rational thinking, that is obvious to everyone. Without the influence of the reptilian brain, we would not WANT to survive, we'd have no urge to reproduce etc.

Thus the body is not replacable. Our emotions and urges are created by it, without the body we would be desireless robots with no purpose or will to live. What makes us survive and evolve is the will to live and only a living biological body can have that. It's on the genes level and not concious. For example, look at castrated humans - they have no will to reproduce, no aggression, they usually become fat, lifeless androginous beings. Why? Because the corresponding body parts creating those feelings and urges are missing.

The new sort of evolution (which is also blazingly fast compared to the genetic evolution) is the intellectual one. Just look at the human mind some 10000 years ago and now. It's a world of difference. But I doubt we will ever become purely etheral, bodiless beings.

For the interested, I can recommend "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. Also somewhat related is "The Red Queen" by Ridley.

 

[Arwin]

Humans have three levels of conciousness which are separate, but influence each other vastly, in a bottom-up way.

No, no, no. The reptillian brain consists of hardwired stuff. It does not have any consciousness. And there is no difference between it and the emotional brain. Like you say, a lot of basic motivators are all over the body, excreting mostly hormones to provide signals to the brain and other parts of the body. The 'emotional' brain is just the part of that system that's located in the brain, responsible for detecting and dealing with hormones and such. Motivation is key in making us human and above all, making us want to do things. But where you got that thing about castrated humans about, I'm not sure.

Thus the body is not replacable. Our emotions and urges are created by it, without the body we would be desireless robots with no purpose or will to live.

Obviously, you can recreate the parts that create the hormonal signals. You can even inject these directly into your blood manually (which is what some patients have to do, I talked to one just last week).

What makes us survive and evolve is the will to live and only a living biological body can have that. It's on the genes level and not concious.

See? On a subconscious level you do know how it really works.

The new sort of evolution (which is also blazingly fast compared to the genetic evolution) is the intellectual one. Just look at the human mind some 10000 years ago and now. It's a world of difference. But I doubt we will ever become purely etheral, bodiless beings.

This is what we call the cultural evolution. The human mind hasn't changed all that much, but the accumulated knowledge (culture) of our social units has grown immensely and has benefited us a lot. You can see this in animals too, where on the one extreme animals rely on pre-programmed instincts, and on the other extreme learning everything from their parents (imagine a fluent line between the one extreme and the other and dot animals at various lengths)

Don't believe everything you read though (including me) Dawkins for instance isn't the best authority to rely on for this subject. You'd learn more from a book like 'Natural Prozac' (which I thought was rather surprising, considering the mushy title , but it's been very helpful for both my understanding of human motivation and helping people in my environment ).

 

[_xxx_]

I read many, many books on this stuff, not just Dawkins That book being over 20 years old, surely there are further developments in the field.

Reptilian brain is here and it does it's work, call it hardwired or conciousness or whatever. The emotional part is definitely not the same thing, because the emotional brain can be influenced and changes/evolves over time as we grow older, while the hardwired reptilian brain is, well, hardwired and it never changes. We WILL always breathe, feel hunger and want to survive etc. regardless of what our emotions look like (unless a person becomes suicidal, but that usually can be traced back to some psychological "defect" or a bad emotional state).

As for castrates, it's been confirmed for humans (just look for info on eunuchs in harems throughout history), as well as in many experiments with animals.

You could recreate the hormonal signals to some extent, but that wouldn't change much - if you replace the whole body, what are those good for? You'd have to create a very complex program to replace the natural stuff and that would be a complete replacement of the personality and thus humanity. That would just be some sort of AI and AI's are not human nor would they exactly resemble the original, even though they would "live" in some way. But that would lead to a separate development which probably wouldn't resemble the humanity very much.

 

[Arwin]

I read many, many books on this stuff, not just Dawkins That book being over 20 years old, surely there are further developments in the field.

Just checking, since out of the many, many books you chose to cite only two, and the first one was his.

Reptilian brain is here and it does it's work, call it hardwired or conciousness or whatever.

Of course it's there. I just didn't want to call it consciousness, or it wouldn't do it work whether you were knocked out or in a coma.

The emotional part is definitely not the same thing, because the emotional brain can be influenced and changes/evolves over time as we grow older, while the hardwired reptilian brain is, well, hardwired and it never changes.

The bit that changes and evolves is simply due to our powers of association and memory. Emotions are very much to the chore of the reptilian brain, but like almost everything in there it can be associated, rerouted, overruled, etc. Think Pavlov, basically. And that system can in fact overrule breathing, feeling hungry, wanting to survive, and so on.

We WILL always breathe, feel hunger and want to survive etc. regardless of what our emotions look like (unless a person becomes suicidal, but that usually can be traced back to some psychological "defect" or a bad emotional state).

A psychological defect would point to a learned problem. A neurological defect would be a hardware issue.

As for castrates, it's been confirmed for humans (just look for info on eunuchs in harems throughout history), as well as in many experiments with animals.

At what age have they been castrated? I mean obviously though, castration has effects has the testes are a source for among others testosteron, though it's not the only place where it is generated. Also, men have a lot more of it than women (10x) but of course in women some of that is compensated by higher levels of Oestrogen and such.

You could recreate the hormonal signals to some extent, but that wouldn't change much - if you replace the whole body, what are those good for? You'd have to create a very complex program to replace the natural stuff and that would be a complete replacement of the personality and thus humanity. That would just be some sort of AI and AI's are not human nor would they exactly resemble the original, even though they would "live" in some way. But that would lead to a separate development which probably wouldn't resemble the humanity very much.

Apart from medical reasons the obvious point in this thread was mostly the mental exercise of determining what 'human' means in various contexts.

 

[_xxx_]

Well in that sense we could argue if Aibo 7.0 will be described as a dog or a machine

There is only one original, anything else is just, well, something else... not necessary less or less worthy, just different.

 

[ebola]

Thus the body is not replacable. Our emotions and urges are created by it, without the body we would be desireless robots with no purpose or will to live.

Yeah this is the line I'm with. Human intelligence is generated as a solution to the problems a human is designed to solve.

This reminds me, maybe veering off topic and back to the forums subject matter, of a talk by the designer of the N64 hardware at sigraph.

He explained how he beleived 3D's ultimate purpose& potential (as an extention of IT generally) would be to help the human race evolve beyond 'spoken/written language' to a place where we communicate exclusively through images.

He used the phrases 'super-evolved squid' (in reference to how they seem to use pulsating colours to communicate) and 'hunter and kill interface' - to explain how a kid picking up an FPS's is dealing with something more fundemental than ABC..

If you consider the importance of the enviroment, and cultural evolution (e.g. language centres being developped and changing the types of problem you can solve), then thats quite profound.

We're not making timewasting games, we're pushing the human race to the next level

 

[RussSchultz]

The only thing that makes us "better" than animals is the awareness of our existance and the capability to overcome our instincts/genetic programming.

I thought it was our ability to kill any of them we desired and eat them.

 

[_xxx_]

I thought it was our ability to kill any of them we desired and eat them.

They also kill and eat each other, no difference there besides the fact that we have more powerful weapons.

 

[weaksauce]

- the physicality (hi Eggebrecht ) of being human. Let's call it hardware, since that suits this forum. ; ) If you replace parts of your body with non-human parts, then your body become a hybrid, basically. So you can talk about how much of your body is still human, and how much isn't. So that makes the initial question very easy to answer, because you can look at each individual part of your body to the tiniest detail and say whether it is human or not. In the case of the CNS example, that'd be all that's human left in your body.

But am I still a human being?

- the identity, i.e. the self-conscious 'you' part. Let's call this software. If you look at the 'you' part, you're not discussing your physical aspects per se, but you are thinking about your consciousness and your identity. This consists primarily of information and processes, that at least in theory, can be virtualised to any kind of other hardware. Think VMWare type environments. I have thought a lot about what consciousness (and more importantly self-consciousness) really is, and imho self-consciousness is basically a process that is aware of the other processes going on in your mind. It's very reliant on the development of a concept of self, but it isn't as much in control of the 'other' processes going on in your body as you might think. You can define a lot of prerequisites for self-consciousness, at the core of which obviously are memory and perception.

Who's concioussness, who's identity? Is "human conscsioussness" human because it is generated by a human body? Is it human because it is a property of the body? But if there is no human body anymore, is there a human conscioussness, as in the case with the nano-machines? You know I could make a robot, which clearly is not human, with the exact same properties as my (the spirits) new artifical body, down to the tiniest atom, and turn it on. The robot and I would then be an exact match, actually two of me. We may have a different past, but the past doesn't exist.

(Sometimes the best way to get an answer is looking more closely at the question)

So the conclusion is then, that a human body constitutes a human being, and the spirit doesn't matter, neither the abilities of that body?

Ok then, I think we can move on in that case, to what a human body is. Why is it a human body, and when is it a human body? Is it a human body, when all of the orgnans that the DNA has a potential to "make", are present? And human, because it has the potential

shit gtg they're gonna turn of the computers

 

[_xxx_]

The body became the way it is because it had to deal with the environment, through interaction. It being the container where our mind resides, it does influence the way we think and behave from the deepest level.

Think of it, if our bodies were different or if we were energy beings, we would have a totally different angle on life and everything would have evolved differently.

If you make a copy of the human down to the last atom, you'd have another human. But considering its mind, it would be like a newborn child - empty. But still human.

That of course only if you don't believe in God and other fiction like that.

 

[3dilettante]

Learning and memories are linked to the arrangment of neural connections and the concentration of chemical signals.

An atom-for-atom replication of a human being would have the same memories.
If the energy state and directionality of the atoms was maintained for the sake of maintaining sensical biological processes, then such a copy would be functionally human.


To head off the likely path of this discussion after this point:

We should expand the title of the RSPC forum to be the RPSPC forum.

The Religion, Philosophy, and Socioeconomic Climate forum would catch those ostensibly neutral topics about the nature of All That Is that inevitably become a religious/political/socioeconomic discussion.

 

[weaksauce]

Ok then, I think we can move on in that case, to what a human body is. Why is it a human body, and when is it a human body? Is it a human body, when all of the orgnans that the DNA has a potential to "make", are present? And human, because it has the potential

To complete that sentence:

"And human, because it has the ability (or potential?) to mate with similar beings, thus a specie as the other".

Is it necessary for it to have developed that far? And why?

It not being conscious is not a valid argument now.

We're getting closer to the truth!

The body became the way it is because it had to deal with the environment, through interaction. It being the container where our mind resides, it does influence the way we think and behave from the deepest level.

However it is not necessary to change the mind through indirect means as interacting, you can change the physical state of the brain and behavior of organs consciously and directly with the mind, which kind of gives the mind a "mind of it's own", as it seems to me.

Learning and memories are linked to the arrangment of neural connections and the concentration of chemical signals.

An atom-for-atom replication of a human being would have the same memories.
If the energy state and directionality of the atoms was maintained for the sake of maintaining sensical biological processes, then such a copy would be functionally human.

I've been looking at it this way: the brain is like a complex set of "highways" (connections, neurons) and "turbochargers" (chemicals) and that which runs on it is electricity (the spirit). But I don't really know what energy is. I mean one talks of "charges" and "currents", but is it really packages of energy that flows? Or is it more the behavior of the atoms that make up the brain that is "brain activity"? Thus a mind is the behavior of a brain, and not really anything extra "on it". I mean it's not like the spark you see in an electrical discharge or whatchamacallit. Electricity is always portrayed like something moving and flowing, but is it really that way?


This argument about consciousness is pretty interesting and I'd like to bring in the whole universe, but I think it's getting off topic.