Week Thirteen: Bionics and Our Biophysical Future

This whole topic is a little depressing to me. If you have any good jokes about lost limbs, I'd love to hear them.



Would you support the development of a “bionic” person?

Bionic parts don’t trouble me as much as perhaps they should. Someone in the market for a bionic replacement probably had a bad accident, or perhaps worked their body so much that the part just wore out. It sure is nice to be able to move around “normally” with all your parts, free of pain. We’ve been giving people false teeth for some time now -- at least since 1789 when George Washington became president. It’s good to be able to chew your food, you know? I know a lot of people of my mother’s generation, born in places where the water wasn’t fluoridated, who have a full set of dentures today. Nothing seems ethically “wrong” with this to me. But when I looked into George Washington’s false teeth I discovered that his dentures (there are four sets that are still preserved) were made of the following materials: gold, ivory, lead, human teeth, horse and donkey teeth.

It is the questioning of the kinds of materials that might be used for bionic parts that gives me pause. Where will the materials come from? Will the demand for bionic parts rise so high that it will impact the earth due to overuse of materials and the fact that today’s bionic parts don’t biodegrade?

Social justice questions come into the picture here, too. Who will receive bionic parts? Only people who can afford them? Will the distribution of bionic parts be equitable?

What impact does having non-human body parts have on the energy system of the body? Is it “healthy”?

The scariest scenario of all this is that the military might put bionics to nefarious uses, as usual--kind of like Robert Downey, Jr., in Iron Man. The military always seems to find a use for new technology - a new way to kill people. Just the opposite use of what “medical advancements” are created for.

But finally, if we have a way to replace limbs lost to diabetes, to cancer, to reckless accidents, to war, what’s to encourage us to live healthier lives, collectively? Why do we have so much diabetes and cancer? Bionics just seems to say “who cares” on these issues, and pushes on forward to the “future” where we can continue to move further and further away from “nature” and invent ways to get around our suffering. So far, judging from where much of our technology has led us, it seems this doesn’t actually alleviate suffering in the end, but increases it.

How would you rate “the control of artificial limbs by thought alone”?

I apologize, but I can’t quite get over how we arrived here...experiments on other animals for “human benefit.” How can something that was created from the suffering of others be a “good” technology? How can we blindly disregard and accept this fact? Some of us recognize that Decartes mind/body split was inaccurate and many of the effects of this thinking were harmful. Decartes performed a lot of experiments on non-human animals for the benefit of science, to satisfy his own curiosity, and with the presumption that non-human animals don’t feel pain. This is profoundly disturbing to me and feels wrong at all levels.

It’s pretty exciting to know that our brain waves are “real” and exciting to think of being able to move physical objects, or even objects on a screen, by thought alone. It feels very empowering. But we have had a number of people claiming these powers for a long time -- psychics, spoon benders, even qigong masters -- and these people were laughed at and disregarded. Only through “real scientific proof” gained through putting a lot of living beings through a lifetime of awful suffering for the benefit of human kind, beings we arrogantly decide are more worthy than other living creatures, do we give credence to this power of the mind. I think that sucks and on principle cannot think these technologies are exciting or cool because they come to us in a most inhumane way.

There are videos on you tube of the experiments that used monkeys to develop these technologies. I’ll spare you from my urge to post some of these videos. These images are difficult, if not impossible, to watch. What kind of life is that for anyone, for any purpose? It kind of takes the fun out of playing one of these mind control video games. And takes away the joy at watching some little kid, whose arm was blown off by a land mine, have use of an artificial limb through thought alone. I just can’t sit quietly with that. I would rather put my efforts into stopping war, diabetes, stroke, and reckless accidents so that we don’t need to use this technology. I’d rather practice trying to bend spoons with my own mind, or honing my “psychic powers,” however hippy dippy that may sound to some people. Or working with people to try to find joy in life without all of their body parts intact.

So I would rate this technology, developed in this way, as awful. It turns my stomach.

I’m sure there are a lot of innovations that I myself take advantage of because some other animal was subject to many lifetimes of hideous experimentation. That’s hard to sit with, too.

Causalities of war...I'm sure robotic limbs would improve their lives.






But this doesn't look like a very happy existance to me.