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U.S. Soldiers Recipients of Newest Prosthetic Technologies
plaastik writes "The next generation of naturalistic and touch-sensitive artificial limbs are being worn by U.S. Soldiers. Instead of the old velcro strap and cup these new models are fused directly to the bone and are controlled by controlled by the wearer's brain. From the article: 'Future prosthetic arms will fuse to existing bone, eliminating the need for awkward attachment systems. These more naturalistic limbs will use bionic nerves attached to natural nerves to send and receive signals from the brain. Chips embedded in the user's brain will help command artificial-muscle-activated, touch-sensitive, fully articulating hands.'"
Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines about these exact notions. He seems to think that consciousness itself is a sort of soul, and once humans are entirely machine--which he thinks is coming fairly soon--we will still be "human".
Ghost in the Shell takes a good look at the issued involved with cyberizaion of people.
1. Why does the same American government that sends soldiers to be permanently mutilated in Iraq refuse to allow the full range of stem cell research that could, one day, re-grow the limbs torn apart by pointless, wasteful war? Why should we condemn the mutilated soldiers to a life of crappy prosthetics?
2. More fundamentally, why does the American government send soldiers off to sacrifice their lives in Iraq when most Americans, including American politicians, refuse to make any sacrifice for the sake of that war? No one is sacrificing. Only the soldiers are sacrificing -- their lives.
Question #2 is particularly damning. When the average American refuses to support a surcharge on gasoline (to bring its cost to $4.00 per gallon) to pay for the bloody war in Iraq, why the hell should Washington insist that soldiers sacrifice their lives? In World War II, the entire nation sacrificed for the just cause of the war effort. Clearly, we have no just cause in Iraq. Nearly no one supports the Iraq War.
We should count most Republicans in the "no one" category. Most Republicans also refuse to support a surcharge to pay for the war. Their mouth says, "I support the war." However, their wallet says, "I oppose the war." Their wallet tells the truth.
But if you still insist, it is obvious that the soul, if present to begin with, can be only in the head, and only in the brain then. We do not have prosthetic brains yet, so there is nothing to discuss yet. When we get some decent processing capacity, then ask me again :-)
No, not really. Because even a theoretically unaging body would, in time, stop working. Maybe the sentience would collapse. Maybe the body would be physically destroyed. Maybe it'd just run out of harvestable energy and go out with teh rest of the temporal universe in cold-death. It would, eventually, die.
Oh, and as the best scientific evidence shows no room for a physical soul of any weight, the soul cannot be said to exist anywhere physically. It is a spiritual object, and as a spiritual object it exists in all parts of the body and no part of the body, so long as the body can be controled by or in turn influence the will of the soul.
Exactly. We're human because of our physical bodies, but when we talk about being "human", we really mean being conscious entities. I'm not sure about whether I believe in the singularity like Kurzweil et. al. promote, but I have no problem with the possibility of becoming an intelligence within a artificial context at some point in my future. As for now, I don't have a terrible interest in prosthetics, but I am very interested in human-machine interfacing of increasing sophistication, which is something this works towards a lot.
It can become cheap, once enough people go for it. I'm surprised at how many naysayers are on this forum, possibly conditioned to believe that spiderman villains are villainous because they didn't get their superpowers "naturally".
There may be benefits to complete prosthetic bodies which have capabilities superior to flesh and blood which would make limb regeneration a less preferred alternative.
In the article Jeffrey Morgan notes that students at Brown have pierced noses. Limbs and skins impervious to flame, cold, bullets and infection might be the next big thing in body modification. Also, if you break your leg, you can take it down to the shop and get it fixed while the mechanic loans you a courtesy leg to get around in.
As for concerns to losing your humanity, it's not who you are inside, but what you do that counts.
Finally, is it just me, or does everyone want to strap on a combination of the Hugh Herr Catapult and the german built Powerskip mechanical jumping boot and go street racing?
It will be interesting to see a study on the brain plasticity of amputees fitted with these new prosthetics, similar to those done on the adult auditory map of hearing impaired patients (e.g. after sudden unilateral hearing loss).
Do the phantom sensations, usually experienced by amputees, disappear after these C-legs have been fitted?
Khaed evades the point: if we order our soldiers to sacrifice their lives in a war, then we should be willing to make sacrifices like paying a surchage on gasoline to finance the war effort. Khaed then takes this point and creates a strawman, suggesting that all of us should go to Iraq to fight.
Allow me to repeat myself. No one is sacrificing anything for this war. Borrowing money from China is not making a sacrifice.
The point is particularly true with the Republicans. They say, "I support a war in Iraq." However, the Republicans oppose making any sacrifices for this war. They want the soldiers to make all the sacrifices: 2500 dead soldiers and tens of thousands of seriously wounded soldiers.
If the majority of Americans are unwilling to make any sacrifice to wage a war, then the majority should not order a minority of Americans to risk their life to conduct that war. The concept is fairly. Anyone who says, "I support the war in Iraq", but who refuses to make any sacrifice to support that war is an arrogant hypocrite.
Look at Joseph Padilla - who really thinks he will be convicted when, if ever, he is brought to trial? If there was real evidence, they would've tried him already. What they want is to suspend habeus corpus without it looking like they're suspending habeus corpus, and just lock whoever they want up forever without any oversight or evidentiary standards to meet. But it's hard to crow about freedom when you run a police state, so a bunch of knickers are tied in knots over what to do. And yes, Virginia, detention without trial, without charges, constitutes a police state, even if the cops don't get cool double lightning-bolts on their lapels.
I certainly wouldn't want to be in charge. Now that you've had people in custody for years, subjecting them to torture and humiliation, even if they were originally pure as the driven snow they certainly hate us NOW, so what do you do? Anyone you let go could be a terrorist, even if they weren't originally. It was a lot easier for Stalin. But then again, he was what we call a "bad guy." But as has been pointed out, there was no crime in the Soviet Union. They just shot you. Of course, they shot everyone else, too, but as they say, freedom isn't free.
It's called the Free State Project I've already joined and gotten many other people to do the same. I've also joined the ACLU, NORML, and a couple of other organizations that I know better than to talk about in public. Sheesh, what more do you want?
Funny, I thought we sent people who voluntarily signed up for military service these days. Must have just missed the press gangs.
See Plato's Phaedo...
Okay, I scanned through the Phaedo text, searching for instances of the word "soul". I was unable to find a definition of the word soul, only a very long discussion about death and the body and soul. The very first instance of the word is in this section:
"Then is it not the release of the soul from the body?
And this is death,
the body being released apart from the soul by itself,
and the soul apart is released from the body by itself?
Then is death anything else but this?"
It appears that the existence of a soul is an assumption, upon which this great volume of text has been stacked. Did I miss the definition in this text?
All metaphysical investigations are not "evidence-based" in the sense that they are subjectable to the scientific method, but they are still "reasonable", perhaps even "logical".
When talking about a "soul", it must first be agreed upon what this word actually means. It's like Scientology and their entire religion which is based upon thetans and the like. You can have a wonderful metaphysical investigation of these thetans which one might consider reasonable and logical, but what's the point? We may as well be discussing the finer points of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.