Should humans use machines to overcome their limits?
Whether technology should be used to defeat death, the body, or human nature.
- Q15Should extending human life indefinitely be a goal of technical progress?
Yes4
- 1637Descartes, Discourse on Method
Hopes that a practical science of nature will free people from countless diseases and perhaps from the infirmities of old age.
- 1793Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
Speculates that mind will gain power over matter and that human life may be greatly prolonged once society is rationally ordered.
Asks whether the interval between birth and decay might have no assignable limit, and expects medicine and better living to lengthen life indefinitely.
- 1906Fedorov, The Philosophy of the Common Task
Makes the defeat of death and the physical resurrection of all ancestors the common task to which science and technology should be directed.
No3
- 1726Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's wish for endless life collapses when he meets the Struldbruggs, immortals who keep ageing and become wretched.
- 1798Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
Rejects Condorcet's indefinite prolongation of life, arguing that a partial improvement whose limit is unknown does not show that improvement is unlimited.
- 1922Čapek, The Makropulos Affair
A singer who has lived over 300 years by an elixir finds such a long life empty, and the recipe is burned rather than used.
Qualified1
- 1907Metchnikoff, The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies
Metchnikoff defines orthobiosis as prolonged active, healthy old age followed by satiety of life and a wish for death, expressly distinguishing this ideal from simple prolongation.
- Q16Would replacing bodily organs with artificial substitutes preserve the identity of the person?
Yes5
- 1694Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Places personal identity in continuity of consciousness, not in the body, so a person who loses a limb, or whose consciousness follows a severed finger, remains the same self.
- 1785Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Reid argues that amputation does not divide the person: the enduring self is indivisible even though its thoughts, actions and feelings change.
- 1925Belyaev, Professor Dowell's Head
A scientist's severed head is kept alive by machines and remains himself, thinking and suffering, without a body.
- 1929Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil
Proposes replacing the body organ by organ with mechanisms until the person is a brain in a cylinder linked to artificial senses, and treats this as the same mind continuing.
- 1931Jones, The Jameson Satellite
Aliens place a dead professor's preserved brain in a mechanical body and he continues as himself.
No2
- 1739Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Argues that we ascribe identity to a ship or body whose parts are gradually replaced only because the change is gradual, and that this identity is a fiction of the imagination.
- 1839Poe, The Man That Was Used Up
Satirizes a celebrated general who turns out to be assembled each morning from artificial limbs, eyes, palate and wig, leaving little that is him.
Contested1
- 1918Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz
The Tin Woodman, whose flesh was replaced piece by piece with tin, meets his old living head, which denies that the tin man is the same person.
- 1637Descartes, Discourse on Method
- 1694Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- 1726Swift, Gulliver's Travels
- 1739Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
- 1785Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
- 1793Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
- 1795Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind
- 1798Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
- 1839Poe, The Man That Was Used Up
- 1906Fedorov, The Philosophy of the Common Task
- 1907Metchnikoff, The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies
- 1918Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz
- 1922Čapek, The Makropulos Affair
- 1925Belyaev, Professor Dowell's Head
- 1929Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil
- 1931Jones, The Jameson Satellite