What makes us human? Is it our capacity to contemplate and question our existence? To ask complex questions like, e.g., „do tears freeze in rain?” – and to seek complex answers? Or our capacity to comprehend our own mortality, to instantly recognize that someday each and everyone will perish?
If your answer is all of the above and then some, then you’re probably right.
But is there an essential quality that defines us, so as to be able to dramatically differentiate ourselves from any intelligent and sentient being, machine or hybrid we would have to confront?
It is no longer just a fiction, but an increasingly pressing philosophical dilemma. Humans hearing with bionic ears, using integrated bionic limbs are already among us.
When will they cease to be human? When will we cease treating them as such?
Or will eventually the „enhancement” process make them more human than human?
