>Is it? And you are, precisely, whom, to judge that?

God. Have we met? ;>

My apologies - I should have appended that with "IMO". I assumed it was sort of implied, but...

>Replicate the sensory reality of the arm - the way it looks, the way
>it feels to be touched by it, and the way it feels to own it and touch
>with it - and you have replicated the arm. Today's technology, I
>grant you, cannot do that. Sufficiently advanced technology will.

Sufficiently advanced technology will be able to replicate what it feels like to be touched by the arm. It will be able to stimulate nerve endings in order to generate the same sensation of touching something. It will be even easier to replicate the look of a human arm. But I'll readily wager that it will never be possible to replace the feel of owning that arm, to make the arm feel entirely natural to its owner. You want to put money on that, I'll gladly accept the bet.

It's possible that in the future, I'll be proven wrong, and we'll have the technology to create a mechanical replacement for an arm that's indistinguishable from the real thing until you hack it open with a knife. But I'd tend to doubt it. There are some things that will remain distinctly human, no matter how hard we try to replicate them, because they're not simply mechanical, because we're not simply mechanical. We're flawed in that respect, and that's part of our charm.
-Eliot "The fact that we're having this debate could support that point in and of itself" Lefebvre
-=()=-
We're only given a little time in our lives to waste. Make the most of it.
Electronic Transcendance Productions
Producer of, um, stuff for an unspecified time-period.