Humanity is advancing cyborg engineering and biotechnology with the goal of defeating death. This is forcing us to redefine what it means to be human and prepare for a time when the boundaries between body and consciousness are blurred.
Humans have long feared death and fundamentally sought immortality. This fear stems not only from the terror of facing the end of life, but also from the anxiety of losing the meaning of one’s life. As a result, humans have battled disease, hunger, and natural disasters throughout the ages, analyzing the causes of death and finding ways to overcome them. These efforts have led humans to step further away from the boundary between life and death and to seek a better life.
The development of medicine in the 20th century has revolutionized humanity. Thanks to advances in science and technology, epidemics and hunger are no longer the biggest threats to humanity, and war is now unthinkable. This doesn’t mean that people suffering from epidemics, hunger, and war have completely disappeared. Rather, it means that humanity has made these problems sufficiently controllable that we have the ability to prolong death, which means that what was once a natural and inevitable death is now perceived as a technological problem.
Now, humanity is not just trying to prolong death, but to overcome it. Google Ventures recently invested 36% of its assets in life extension projects. The rise of fields such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology is a clear indication that modern science is focused on overcoming death. This phenomenon is not just a corporate investment strategy. It suggests that modern humanity’s desire to conquer death is increasingly becoming a realizable goal.
In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that “since death is the result of technical problems in the body, there must be a technical solution, and therefore death can be overcome.” The solutions he proposes are biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and the synthesis of non-organic matter. This perspective is revolutionary in that it departs from the past perception of death as an inevitable fate and instead recognizes it as a problem that can be solved.
In particular, cyborg engineering means fusing the human body, which is an organism, with non-organic devices. For example, one example is the implantation of a mechanical leg in a person who has lost a leg that is functionally superior to the original leg. Other examples include implanting electrodes in the brain to control a machine on the other side of the world. Before such cyborg engineering can be commercialized, I believe that we need to redefine what constitutes a human being, i.e., the extent to which a person can be called a human being, otherwise there will be ambiguous cases where the laws and social commitments that currently apply to organic humans will not apply.
For example, we need to define whether a person’s machine-replaced body is considered part of the person or an object that the person possesses. This is not just a philosophical discussion. There are real legal and social issues that could arise. If someone damages it, it could lead to the question of whether they should be punished for attempted murder or vandalism. Furthermore, even if immortality is achieved through cyborg engineering, the question arises as to what is the point of immortality if we can no longer be called human. Therefore, it is necessary to define the scope of humanity and prevent the side effects of cyborg engineering.
To address these issues, I will attempt to redefine humanity based on Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus. First, I want to make one assumption in order to define human beings. According to Harari, cyborg engineering is based on the premise that the organic brain is the command center of the body, so the idea is to replace body parts such as arms and legs with machines, while preserving the organic brain, and synchronize them to move according to the brain’s signals. If a machine could have a consciousness and mind like an organic brain, there would be no need for an organic brain to act as a command center. Therefore, to maintain the premise of cyborg engineering, it is assumed that a mechanical algorithm cannot have a consciousness and mind like an organic brain.
Based on this assumption, a being operated by a non-organic algorithm, such as an artificial intelligence, cannot be considered human. Therefore, if we leave a person’s body intact and replace their brain with a machine, they are no longer human. Even if it has an organic body, it lacks consciousness and mind, which are human identity. Conversely, if the brain is left intact and the rest of the body is replaced by a machine, can the person still be called human?
Hypothetically, if all of the body is replaced by a machine, it can still be called human because it has consciousness. However, replacing all of the body with a machine except the brain, or, to put it another way, implanting a human brain into a machine so that the machine is driven by an organic brain rather than an existing algorithm, is not human. For example, a brain implanted in a car that speaks through radio speakers and rolls on wheels would be called human. Furthermore, when this becomes possible, humans will no longer need to be confined to a single body. You could implant your brain into an airplane when you need to go to another country, a laptop when you need to work, a stove when you need to cook, and so on.
Even if the algorithm of an organic brain is important because it is our identity, the algorithm is ultimately only as good as the hardware it runs on. In other words, algorithms and bodies are reciprocal. So having an organic brain doesn’t mean that the body, in whatever form, is unimportant. As in the example above, it is difficult to call a being human if its body is malleable and deviates significantly from the universal human shape.
A way to solve this problem is to divide the body into organic and non-organic parts, and only consider the organic part to be the body. For example, when a human rides a car, we don’t think of the human and the car as one entity. A person wearing a prosthetic leg does not become a part of the body, any more than a person riding in a car is a part of the body. It’s more accurate to say that the human organic body is using a non-organic prosthetic limb. In the case of a human whose body has been replaced by a machine, only the organic brain can be called a body.
To summarize, a Homo sapiens with an organic brain is called a human being, and the scope of the individual is the organic body parts operated by the brain. With this definition, we can avoid the controversies that can arise from the ambiguity of the scope of the body as mentioned in the introduction by having a clear definition. This definition is based on the assumption that mechanical algorithms do not have consciousness. It also has the limitation that it cannot account for cases where only part of the brain is replaced by a machine. Nevertheless, it is clearly necessary to attempt to define a human being in preparation for the coming era of immortality.
