LAST EDITED ON Jul-11-01 AT 01:20 PM (EDT)

>Okay... agree with you so far...

Really? Wow. The universe is going askew. ;>

>Now this is crap.

No, this is crap. Or about crap, anyways.

(With apologies to Mr. Schroeck... if I was really clever, I'd have linked to the Tomb Raider movie website.)

>We are more than the body. But the thing that makes us more than just
>a machine -- the soul, if you will -- is not of the body. The
>body is, ultimately, a tool for the mind and spirit for interacting
>with the physical realm, and when infirmities caused by environmental
>damage or design flaws come into effect, then the tool is less
>efficient, less effective. There's no mystical connection to your
>original body parts, and if you built an arm that was
>indistinguishable from the real thing to all external appearances and
>in the sensations and response it produced, and then put it in place
>of the original arm, you would not know that such a thing had been
>done.

See, this is where I disagree with you. No, the soul and the body are not one and the same. But neither are they two separate entities, with no more interaction between the two than between a car and a driver. The two interact in different realms, but both are connected underneath it all, in more of a sense than simply one shuttling the other through the physical realm.

Don't get me wrong - if I lose an arm in an accident, I'll happily take a cyberarm to replace it. I'm not talking about replacing parts that are damaged beyond functionality - I'm talking about removing and replacing parts that are working within their normal parameters, just below the level that their owner wants. Certainly, I'd like perfect vision... but my eyes work fine, just a little buggy. Replacing them with cybereyes would be like ditching my motherboard every time my computer crashed.

(And just to totally throw in some chaos theory, what scientific proof is there that we don't have some mystical connection to our original body parts over cybernetic equivalents? We've got none. Of course, to base an argument off this is simply silly, and the idea is included for consideration purposes only.)
-Eliot "I'll also note that I seem to be the only one who hasn't dismissed someone else's views as crap yet" 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.