Life as a Cyborg
August 12, 2007
This article on the psychological effect of an artificial heart is totally fascinating.
Much of the original artificial heart work was driven by the technological optimism born of the space program. Some of the current work is driven by the idea that our brains and bodies are separate entities. But now, in light of Houghton and other victims of psychological and cognitive trauma after intervention in their bodies, some scientists fear that we are tampering not with a bodily machine but with the human spirit.I used to read a lot of fiction that directly or implicitly considered what it means to combine the organic and the inorganic. Though these issues have always been with us, the sophistication and the functionality of the technological measures we take to augment our fragile bodies is making things quite a bit more complicated and interesting.“We’ve got to understand the organs and systems coming into our lives. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the psychological or emotional aspects of thinking of ourselves as bodies,” says Arthur Caplan. “People interested in eternal life through body regeneration or organ substitutions” consider humans to be “a brain on top of a complicated bag of water,” he says. “Ship that brain elsewhere, and it would still be you. Not true, exactly. Not that we couldn’t adjust or adapt. But in some subtle ways, our sense of self—who we are—is shaped by our carcasses. Shaped by the containers we drag around.
“People who have their heads frozen to live forever, like Ted Williams—my view is that if you get your head stuck back on something” that isn’t your body, “your identity will be shredded. It isn’t you anymore. It could lead to despair and depression, rather than gratitude that you can live forever. If you find yourself embodied in a different way, your perceptions and awareness of the world would be changed.”
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August 14th, 2007 at 1:08 am
I imagine that humans can get used to changing bodies, like they could get used to anything else. You wouldn’t be the same person you were before that change, no, but there are gates we all pass through during life that make us different than what we were before. Would something like that drive a person mad? Losing a loved one drives some people mad. Adults who have lifelong walleyes corrected with surgery often go mad. The character of the person in question obviously plays a large part in this. For myself, I’d risk insanity for a shot at experiencing life a different way, if I were old or terminal.