On this date in 2009 we first asked this question in the post Which Came First - Cyborg Or Robot?.
It is not as easy to answer as it appears to be at first blush.
So, the Ecocosmology Blog, using that Dredd Blog post as a springboard, took it a bit further in the post there entitled Putting A Face on Machine Mutation.
To complicate matters, in the post Will Humans Evolve Into Machines? the Ecocosmology Blog pointed out that there is a principle called Dollo's Law which says that evolution has only one direction, meaning there can be no "un-evolution", or reversal of the process.
So we must know which came first, the biological or the machine, because that determines the direction in which things must go.
Some scientists seem to think that money will solve the mystery, indicating that only the rich will have the money it takes to evolve into robots (Will Humans Evolve Into Machines?).
As we were wondering if it would help to ask "which came first machines or sex?", along came the post The Virgin MOMCOM - 2, setting forth leiolepis ngovantrii, a virgin lizard that gives birth without sexual encounter (leiolepis are all virgin females).
Is it any wonder that Dredd Blog then posted Absolutism: Pabulum For The Insecure?, a post questioning those who embrace absolutism lik
e a clingy kid grasping his mother, or those "embracers" we wondered about in Thumb Sucking For Power And Pleasure who can't seem to give up thumb sucking?
Who knows, let's ask The 9/11 Commission of Bush II, since everyone knows that era was The Peak of Truth, and thus everyone in the MOMCOM media believes what they said. No? Or perhaps we could consider the journal American Behavioral Journal to beef up on some of the psychological manifestations in this tug-of-war involving a notion of human vs. machine?
The previous post in this series is here.
Wikipedia
ReplyDeleteCyborg:
"A cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial (e.g. electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts."
Is Dick Cheney not a cyborg? :-)
Clearly, he is.
ReplyDeleteWhich came first his iron fist so prone to torture the biologicals, or his organics, so prone to spread disease?
The nomenclature should change as scientific discoveries improve.
ReplyDeleteIn this context, "artificial" is something for art museums and the like, not fundamental science.
Entities are either machine or cyborg.
Cyborg is a term describing something more than a machine, something described as both organic and machine.
The archaic descriptions that come from a time before super microscopes, and the ability to get down to the fundamental quantum elements, can be confusing.
The fundamental machines, the elements, are the place to begin, then we can work our way up to a place, a level, where we observe what we call "organics" (a non-machine type of super organization).
When there are both organic essences and machine essences in one entity, it is proper to call it cyborg.
Electronics (moving electrons and the management thereof) does not change the basic distinction, because electrons are part of a machine, a machine we call an atom or a molecule.
Adding electronics to an already existing cyborg does not change what it already is. See Putting a Face on Machine Mutation.