Personhood Beyond Humanism by Tomasz Pietrzykowski

Author:Tomasz Pietrzykowski
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.3 The Return of the Ship of Theseus Paradox

Several decades ago, in his discussion of the concept of analyticity, Hilary Putnam used a thought experiment to demonstrate that the sentence “All cats are animals” would prove false if we were to discover that cats were in fact robots controlled from Mars.44 The experiment illustrated a strictly hypothetical possibility of falsifying a statement which had so far been regarded as analytically true. Interestingly, some quarter of a century later, in 1999, British Airways refused Kevin Warwick, a British cybernetic engineer at the University of Reading, a ticket for his robot cat on the grounds that animals were not allowed in the cabin. Although the whole case was in fact a result of a misunderstanding and Warwick’s cybercat bore very little resemblance to a real animal, continuing technological development turns the problem of discriminating between natural creatures and their cyber-counterparts into a more realistic and urgent issue. This applies equally to artificially synthesised biological organisms (that is, organisms based on a lab-generated genetic code), to animal imitating robots, and to the emerging technologies of artificial implants inserted into a living biological organism and influencing its function.45

The last-mentioned type of technologies belongs to the most rapidly developing fields of modern biomedical research. Technologically advanced devices which, when integrated with an organism, are able to replace disabled organs or improve their operation are looked at as the new hope of the twenty-first century medicine. In many cases, they represent a new generation of apparatuses long known and used in medical practice. In others, they involve most recently developed technologies and applications which not only provide a substitute for natural abilities lost or impaired as a result of aging or dysfunction, but also enhance and boost human capabilities in ways which go beyond what is naturally available for a fully abled individual.

Cardiac implants (such as, for example, valves, pacemakers and stents) are widely known to have been in common use for decades. Research is being carried out to enable equally common use of the artificial heart, which would eliminate the necessity to obtain the organ from a biological donor or at least considerably prolong the time the patient can wait safely for a biological transplant. It seems that, after clinical trials, such devices may bring much better results than xenotransplantation, which until recently raised similar hopes. Parallel investigations are being conducted into the development of artificial lung technologies—an implant device that would take over the breathing function (in contrast to prosthetic external devices, which have been in use for a long time and which can temporarily take over or improve breathing and circulation function).

The oldest and the most widely used devices replacing body parts are of course limb prostheses. So far, however, they have been attached to the patient’s body in a purely mechanical way, as a very basic replacement for the missing body part. At present, a large number of investigations focus on their hi-tech counterparts, which, integrated with neural connections, would be able

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