You are already augmented

The body you are reading from has already been augmented.

Try to deny the question. Say augmentation is a separate problem. A matter of technology. Of regulation. Of taste: one way of being built preferred over another.

Something has to do the saying. You do it. And your own build has already been augmented, many times, across your life.

Glasses correct your sight. Food your body could not have produced alone. The language you think in was handed to you from outside, while you were growing up. Some readers wear a prosthetic limb. Some use a hearing aid. Some take a medicine every day so the body can stay inside its corridor.

The body you are reading from is already augmented. In more than one way. Each way can be named exactly.

Transhumanism is the movement that argues for extending the body past what nature would ever have built. So the question is not whether to augment. The question of transhumanism is where augmentation’s conditions fail.

The chapter does not refuse augmentation as a category. It does not permit it as a category either. It gives the test. The same test the chapters on the body have been building, run at the level where augmentation works: the build.

What the test reads is whether the build holds together as one. The book calls it architectural integrity.

Augmentation that keeps the build whole is maintenance. Augmentation that breaks it is parasitic, at the level of the build.

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.