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This So-Called Unnatural Nature, Ourselves
All you have to do to resolve the enhancement debate in your mind is watch these fantastic epiphanies by Richard and Megan. Computers enhance our memory and help us do just about everything we want to do just about every day we want to do it. But the buck doesn’t stop there…
Phones project our voices over longer distances than our vocal cords; iPods store our friends’ phone numbers while helping our eardrums jingle in pleasurable ways. My glasses help me see the world; my father has gone a step further and gotten laser eye surgery. Surgeons use robotic hands to save lives with the least possible amount of bodily trauma; rovers go where we can’t or don’t want to go.
Athletes use performance-enhancing drugs while critics sit in the bleachers watching the action through binoculars. We enhance our abilities every time we light a stove, drive a car, lace up our shoes or wrap ourselves in a blanket.
“Trans”human? If we’re going to use that troublesome word, then we have to admit: we’re already there folks...and it is natural. If “natural” is to be understood as what grows on trees and falls from the sky, then there is already almost nothing natural about the way we live. If the word is to mean the progression of evolution, then there is everything natural about our lives.
The truth is, we enhanced our bodies - and subsequently our minds - the moment one of our ancestors picked up a stick and used it for any purpose. Is to be “natural” to be pre-invention? Pre-ingenuity? Pre-creativity? With our minds a product of the evolution of matter, our various technologies are the continuations of a trajectory that began at the birth of the universe.
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