Cybernetics Organisms, or Cyborgs, are often confused with robots. A cyborg is part man and part machine; underneath it is a microprocessor-controlled, but from the outside it is living human tissue. This definition raises couple of important, yet unanswered questions, like: “What is the threshold between turning a man into a cyborg, and a cyborg into a robot? What does it mean to replace, or even add, an optimized version of an organ in an organism? Does it have something to do with changing parts of the organism’s consciousness through a physical change?
These questions have huge implications on how we understand consciousness through the different lens of theories in the realm of philosophy of mind; specifically, the idea of whether consciousness is divisible or not. Michael Chorost laid down an answer from a first-hand experience when he got a cochlear implant by saying: “I have a summer self and a winter self, and each time the world moves from one season to the other I feel an internal shift resetting the variables of my consciousness to different values.” This idea of feeling like something is changing physically; however, relating it to this higher order entity to feel like someone’s self again. Chorost continued and said, “And then I feel like myself again. But it is always eerily strange that I have to change in order to feel stay the same.” This line brings couple of thoughts. First, changing a physical feature, which alters parts of the consciousness, lead into feeling like one’s self again. Second, is it really strange that we change in order to feel the same? Don’t we change all the time with every small tiny bit of information we receive in every picosecond that passes in our lives? Yet, we feel complete and the same at all times. This shows how consciousness is divisible through connection to physical entities, like the cochlea in case of Chorost.
In general, a man with a technology optimizing, changing, and altering a man’s consciousness makes them a cyborg. But we can’t know for sure when a cyborg loses its human consciousness. Maybe it never does. The ship of Theseus will keep being his ship even if every single part of it is changed, because he is still the captain.
