From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Mar 07 2002 - 01:24:10 MST
On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 04:05:31PM -0500, natashavita@earthlink.net wrote:
>
> From: Simon McClenahan
>
> >If you have artificial skin, wouldn't you value natural and unblemished skin
> a lot more highly?<
> It would seems so at first blush, but I don't think so because the
>artificial skin has other elements that are more adaptive to the
>environment and which peform a broader range of tasks for the cooling
>and filtering system of the body. While the skin's job is to help cool
>us down and keep toxins from entering and attacking other organs, these
>errands can be better handled by nanobots.
>
> This is no way means that I do not have a high regard for what has
>been known as the "natural" human body. *I do!* I also have a high
>regard for what will become the "natural" human body.
I think this is a bit like my fascination for strange minerals, and
especially their crystals. I really enjoy the regularity of pyrite,
quartz or ulexite crystals; they are highly ordered structures that have
emerged from a random interactions in a disordered state (ulexite even
manages to act as a bundle of natural optic fibers). Clearly, human
skill can produce equally or even more ordered structures than these
minerals. This is good when we make silicon chips, since natural silicon
crystals are not up to the job, steel makes a far more useful cutting
edge than obsidian under most circumstances and glass is much more
transparent and malleable than quartz.
But appreciating the beauty and utility of steel, glass, bismuth
crystals or silicon chips does not mean the beauty of the natural
minerals vanish, or is reduced to "wow, that rock is almost as good as
this tool!". Instead we can appreciate minerals for their own perfection
- they have been shaped by highly contingent and random processes,
producing regular and still unique shapes that are aesthetically
pleasing. A human made copy would not be particularly interesting - we
should use our creativity to go further, to do things that are uniquely
human that minerals can never aspire to.
In the same manner I think the difference between "traditional skin" and
"new skin" is that traditional skin may be inherently beautiful and its
unblemished state impressive given its background, and the new skin
beautiful due to its new properties and utility to act as a canvas for
human creativity.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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