Quote:
|
Originally Posted by QuasiMondo
My first thought is that once you replace the brain, you're not human. Or, at the very least, you're not you. If you think about Alzheimer's patients, as their brain deteriorates, they lose themselves, literally. They don't just forget who you are, they forget who they are as well. The brain contains the pieces of the puzzle that make up you. If you replace that with an artificial reproduction, it's not really you, it's just a copy of the genuine article.
The brain is what makes you human. Lose your mind, lose your humanity.
|
Okay, but I question the big "equals sign" you have between brain and mind.
Some day in the future we may be able to copy our consciousness into computers. Will we still be human? We may be able to teleport ourselves via a mechanism that destroys one copy of us and recreates another copy of us elsewhere (like Star Trek transporters do). Will the re-constituted "you" still be you?
By my estimation, the one thing that distinguishes a human being is this:
a human being makes meanings. Everything always means something to a human being. It's uncontrollable and unstoppable, and it's intrinsic to the creature that a human being is. And, as far as we can tell, it's unique to human beings. Dogs and cats don't make meaning. They have instinct, but that's different. If you think about, for instance, the turing test... What that actually is is a test to see if a system can communicate and receive symbolic meaning. Any system that can, we call "Artificial Intelligence".
So, as long as you can still make meaning, regardless of how much of you is meat and how much is metal, I say you're still human.