After taking a look at Star Trek, and reflecting back on the speaker from last week, I had started to think about what really makes us human. Is it the way that we act? How we look? The way our body is put together?
When I first started thinking about it, I had focused on that maybe it was the fact that we were living and that machines are dead. However, when it came to looking at cyborgs, this argument was incredibly null. Due to the cyborg nature of being half organic and half construction, it doesn't work to say something is half human -- at least for this argument.
I then decided that maybe it is how we look. If something has the appearance of being human, is it human? Think about it. We instantly recognize another human by the way that we look, and this is also how we perceive cyborgs as being human for this reason. However, if someone becomes disfigured and starts to look less human, does that make them any less human?
This led me finally to one more belief. What if it is our emotional responses that make us human? Both humans and cyborgs have emotion. And without emotion, we consider them something less than human. But, even if a machine starts to show emotion -- we think of them as human. Think of the child from AI as an example. I firmly believe that it is emotion that makes us feel like something is :Human". Even the emotion of the Queen from Predator make us feel for her.
Something that is important to think about as we move further into the course...
It's the same question I ask about The Ship Who Sang- really what is it that makes us human? I considered everything you talk about here. I truly think that it is our emotional responses that set us apart from mere machines. You could call a Terminator a Cyborg, but not all Terminators are human feeling- they look and appear human. But as far as we know there are very few who actually have anything like human feelings or emotions. And that was gained in some by tinkering with their programming. The Alien Queen is in no way "human" in anyway except in her instinct to protect her children. So yes, emotion is a key component of being human for me.
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