To stay within sci-fi lingo, wearing a detector bracer around your arm does make you a cyborg in the same way that having an iPhone in your pocket makes you a netrunner: it sort of does a comparable job, but at the end it's clearly not a part of your body and it's always going to be an external tool.
Humans carrying tools around are awesome, but they're not cyborgs. The prospect of having a real internal augmentation is that it seamlessly and naturally becomes a part of your body. Everything else is a little bit of a cargo cult, which is sort understandable considering the lack of progress we made so far into that area of research.
I get what you're saying, but I think that you're placing way too much emphasis on the integrity of the body, in a way that folks that use wheelchairs to get around might not.
While we tend to think of our bodies as single, solid things, this has more to do with our conceptions of them and less to do with the actual situation. I say this as someone who spends 90% of his time behind glasses, so much so that without them my experience of the world would be so markedly different-- and different even from modding up my eyes via lasik surgery.
It's not metaphorical to think of some tools we have as being so ingrained to our selves that they are basically parts of our bodies, even if they are outside/removable/changeable.
You might find it primitive, but the fact that it would be a life altering experience for me to live without my glasses indicates to me, at least, that although this technology is external to my body it is every bit as important to my getting by in the world as my index fingers, and thus every bit as much of my being human as my body.
Udo|13 years ago
Humans carrying tools around are awesome, but they're not cyborgs. The prospect of having a real internal augmentation is that it seamlessly and naturally becomes a part of your body. Everything else is a little bit of a cargo cult, which is sort understandable considering the lack of progress we made so far into that area of research.
scarecrowbob|13 years ago
While we tend to think of our bodies as single, solid things, this has more to do with our conceptions of them and less to do with the actual situation. I say this as someone who spends 90% of his time behind glasses, so much so that without them my experience of the world would be so markedly different-- and different even from modding up my eyes via lasik surgery.
It's not metaphorical to think of some tools we have as being so ingrained to our selves that they are basically parts of our bodies, even if they are outside/removable/changeable.
You might find it primitive, but the fact that it would be a life altering experience for me to live without my glasses indicates to me, at least, that although this technology is external to my body it is every bit as important to my getting by in the world as my index fingers, and thus every bit as much of my being human as my body.