a story with that cyberpunk theme of “are you really human if you modify your body to gain power“, except the body modification is just strength training.
parallel storyline with “these cognitive enhancements are making you INHUMAN and OUT OF TOUCH” but it’s just an education in statistics
humans stop being “truly human” and become “cyborgs abominations never intended by god or nature” the moment we pick up a fork or pencil.
… are you some medieval pope?
I actually am a pope but not a medieval one.
But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it.
When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts.
It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature.
So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things.
So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers.
Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.
The base of my argument is that “unmodified humanity” doesn’t exist (except maybe the tiniest of newborn babies) because we change ourselves to be better at what we’re doing. That’s how humanity works. There is no “pure natural state” to get back to, we’re built to change and adapt and people worried about “losing humanity” because of implants and prothesises and drugs and gene therapy are missing the point: of course they’ll change who we are as humans… Changing our form IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.
Like, I’ve talked about this before, but you can spot a London cab driver on a brain scan easier than you can tell male brains vs female brains, because learning how to do that changes the form and function of your brain to such a degree that you can detect it just by doing an MRI. You can tell if someone was an archer or a ballet dancer by the shape of their bones. You can tell what language a newborn’s parents speak because they babble in the same cadence and pitches as their soon-to-be-first-language, just from hearing it in the womb.
If you’re ever worried that something you do or become means you’re “less human”, don’t be. Becoming less “human” is the most human thing you can do.
I’ve been trying so hard to explain this to people ever since I got promoted to forklift driver. How quickly my body map integrated this five ton machine into a natural extension of my being. I’m actually better at guessing the battery charge on my truck by the minute sluggishness in my lift actuators than I am at assessing my own hunger. I can clear turns around shelving units within an inch of my sideboards easier than I can avoid tripping over my own feet out of truck.
It doesn’t just make me stronger, faster, able to reach higher, it also makes me more graceful, more agile, more aware of my self and my surroundings.
Perhaps even more human.
Exactly! Getting forklift certified makes you the next state of human evolution!
I have been saying this about motorcycles for years: Ie, what does it mean to “be” a “man” or a “woman” when by mass three quarters of my body as I experience it (and as it would be seen by a passer-by) is made by Kawasaki and I am getting more useful sensory information from my front tyre (hot, slipping, near the limit of my grip) and my engine (struggling to breathe, pounding too fast) than from my arse or feet (numb)?