Where the question came from

What change carries a person on, and what breaks them apart?

The question of what a body may become is old. It has been asked for centuries. Sometimes modestly. Sometimes with great ambition.

In the early nineteenth century, a novel imagined a body assembled from the parts of others. What it produced was not the first person carried on. It was a new person, whose build was broken.

That novel set the terms the question has lived in ever since. What kind of change to the build carries a person on? And what kind breaks them apart, so that they can no longer go on as one life that reads itself? Two centuries later, the question has not closed.

The mid-twentieth century brought augmentations whose soundness nobody questioned. Pacemakers. Kidney dialysis. Organ transplants. Cochlear implants. Prosthetic limbs.

Each could be taken in by the person’s build, at the grain the person’s modelling needed. The book calls the grain resolution: how fine a reading is. Each widened the corridor. The person stayed the person the body had been holding.

Run the test on each, and the verdict is one no major medical or philosophical tradition has disputed.

The late twentieth century opened the question at a new depth. Brain-computer interfaces. Neural prosthetics. Devices that might work at the grain where you model yourself, rather than at the grain of your biology. Now the question of what the build can take in became live.

The early twenty-first century has produced two things. Working medical neural prosthetics, which restore what was lost to paralysis, sensory loss and motor disability. And a transhumanist movement, arguing for extending the build past the body’s ceiling, in directions the body’s own growth would never have gone.

This chapter reads the question at the level the work has been building. The test runs at every augmentation. The verdicts vary.

The chapter sets the test every verdict must pass through.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 8 — Transhumanism and the Augmented Window. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/08-transhumanism-and-the-augmented-window/. The film, Bandwidth does not upgrade you: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-8.1 to APP-8.5.