Are Cyborgs Persons

This book presents argumentation for an evolutionary continuity between human persons and cyborg persons, based on the thought of Joseph Margolis. Relying on concepts of cultural realism and post-Darwinism, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz redefines the notion of the person, rather than a human, and discusses the various issues of human body enhancement and online implants transforming modes of perception, cognition, and communication. She argues that new kinds of embodiment should not make acquiring the status of the person impossible, and different kinds of embodiments may be accepted socially and culturally. She proposes we consider ethical problems of agency and responsibility, critically approaching vitalist posthuman ethics, and rethinking the metaphysical standing of normativity, to create space for possible cyborgean ethics that may be executed in an Extended Republic of Humanity.

This book presents argumentation for an evolutionary continuity between human persons and cyborg persons, based on the thought of Joseph Margolis. Relying on concepts of cultural realism and post-Darwinism, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz redefines the notion of the person, rather than a human, and discusses the various issues of human body enhancement and online implants transforming modes of perception, cognition, and communication. She argues that new kinds of embodiment should not make acquiring the status of the person impossible, and different kinds of embodiments may be accepted socially and culturally. She proposes we consider ethical problems of agency and responsibility, critically approaching vitalist posthuman ethics, and rethinking the metaphysical standing of normativity, to create space for possible cyborgean ethics that may be executed in an Extended Republic of Humanity.

The book aims to establish a critical dialogue between sports ethicists and bioethicists across the range of sporting disciplines at elite level. It will address questions such as: are the increasingly intrusive testing methods of elite sports compatible with the right to autonomy and privacy granted to patients in general medicine? could there be a moral obligation to correct injustices produced by the genetic lottery? how should the goals of sports medicine be viewed from the perspective of rationing scarce health care resources? This book was published as a special issue in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

This book provides in-depth information about the technical, legal, and policy issues that are raised when humans and artificially intelligent machines are enhanced by technology. Cyborg: Human and Machine Communication Paradigm helps readers to understand cyborgs, bionic humans, and machines with increasing levels of intelligence by linking a chain of fascinating subjects together, such as the technology of cognitive, motor, and sensory prosthetics; biological and technological enhancements to humans; body hacking; and brain-computer interfaces. It also covers the existing role of the cyborg in real-world applications and offers a thorough introduction to cybernetic organisms, an exciting emerging field at the interface of the computer, engineering, mathematical, and physical sciences. Academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, and engineers that are interested in the advancements in artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and applications of human-computer in the real world will find this book very interesting.

This volume discusses the definitional problems and conceptual strategies involved in defining the human. By crossing the boundaries of disciplines and themes, it offers a transdisciplinary platform for exploring the new ideas of the human and adjusting to the dynamic in which we are plunged. The emerging cyborgs and transhumans call for an urgent reconsideration of humans as individuals and collectives. The identity of the human in the 21st century eludes definitions underpinned by simplifying and simplified dichotomies. Affecting all the spheres of life, the discoveries and achievements of recent decades have challenged the bipolar categorizations of human/nonhuman and human/machine, real/virtual and thus opened the door to transdisciplinary considerations. Ours is a new world where the boundaries of normality and abnormality, a legacy of the long history of philosophy, medicine, and science need dismantling. We are now on our way to re-examine, re-understand, and re-describe what normal-abnormal, human-nonhuman, and I-we-they mean. We find ourselves facing what resembles the liminal stage of a global ritual, a stage of being in-between—between the old anthropocentric order and a new position of blurred boundaries. The volume addresses philosophical, bioethical, sociological, and cognitive approaches developed to transcend the binaries of human-nonhuman, natural-artificial, individual-collective, and real-virtual.

This book introduces the concept of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of things (IoT) with real human organs to form a cybernetic organism or cyborg. It is a concept of man–machine mixture which helps in restoring or enhancing the ability of a body part by integrating some technology or artificial component with that body part. These smart artificial organs act as a substitute for real organs having various capabilities like scanning the body, detecting and transmitting the diagnostic data to machines. For example, an artificial heart is capable of monitoring the overall health of a person, and lungs can inform the doctor of abnormalities. This book benefits academic researchers and industrialist who work in the field cyborgization and IoT within human bodies.

‘Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’ is an ethnographic monograph that examines the ways in which the peoples of a peri-urban locality in East Java, Indonesia conceive of the person, by looking at how their everyday practices relate to understandings of ethnicity, kinship, Islam and gender. The volume is also a thought experiment that aims to make a theoretical contribution to the discipline of anthropology by proposing the concept of the ‘diaphoron’ person and re-deploying the method of ‘total ethnography’.

Much has been written on the grand prospects for "Information Society"; much less on what this might mean in everyday terms. So what do we find when we look at what is happening in a society, Finland, that is one of closest to an information society? Bringing together studies of everyday local practices in workplaces within information society, this book has a special focus on social space and the agency of actors. It includes both theoretical reviews and detailed qualitative research. It also highlights the political challenges of the information society, challenges which are likely to become subjects of international concern.