Comments on: Book Review: An Army of Davids

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 08:19:47 +0000

which was my point, without the peripheral nerves, your brain is useless.

It’s a fine line to walk. on the one hand, of course we shouldn’t keep tech from the infirm. but on the other hand, bad things WILL happen if healthy individuals get augmented.

I guarantee this. Leftism is a result of a reality disconnect. augmentation through technology (transhumanity) accomplishes the same thing.

read the preface of Bill McKibben’s Enough to understand where I’m coming from. then add in a bunch of behavioral ecology, psychology, and neurobiology. it WILL get ugly.

good review btw, Brad. I might check it out.

By: VRB

VRB — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 17:22:09 +0000

Sometime the function is in the design. A transplanted kidney nerves are not connected, but it still functions as a kidney. I would assume if quadriplegics were able to have their muscles replaced with carbon tubes to get any function they would. The nervous system is not the key to our humanity it is the brain. This is where we create our own interaction with the world.

By: IndianCowboy

IndianCowboy — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:25:28 +0000

bah! futurists will be the death of humanity. And I mean that seriously.

Nothing wrong with tech, so long as the boundary between man and machine is maintained.

man in exo-suit=good
man with implanted carbon tube muscles=bad

No matter how much we try to deny it, the meatsack and the mind are intimately tied together. Both are pretty worthless without each other. The only place that an action potential can START is at the periphery, courtesy of your sensory receptors.

And you can make a muscle go through the motions, but without a connecting nerve, they wither away.

no mind-body dualism. lose the body, lose the mind.

also, at this point I think the army is a lot more like a barely organized militia, but I have great hopes for it.

mens sana in corpore sano and all that.