After reading this article I asked myself if mankind or any other intelligent species could be able to sacrifice its own biological body to give birth to a race of thinking machines.
Why this question? Cause human beings (as the only known intelligent beings, dolphins excluded) have a self-preserving nature and in any aspect of its thinking and reasoning this nature has always ruled over it. The idea of the article is a good one, no doubt about it, in a purely objective logic that will be the natural way in which any species will evolve, yielding its own biological nature to acquire a sort of “immortality”.
However, there’s a great disjunction in this evolutionary line: the soul or the spirit, the concept that makes every single being a unique one. This is an abstract notion for which every individual has a different understanding, nonetheless it always involves uniqueness, either it survives or not to death.
The notion of Soul, in the case that it won’t survive to death, could be considered as a synonym of Mind (in French, for example, they are the same word: “Esprit”) and the Mind is the name we give to the “Cognos”, to our consciousness, to what defines our thoughts and our behaviour and in the very deep, in the very root of our mind, a little voice tells us we are unique because we are flesh and bone and that we should protect our body and our progeny.
The notion of Soul, in the case that it won’t survive to death, could be considered as a synonym of Mind (in French, for example, they are the same word: “Esprit”) and the Mind is the name we give to the “Cognos”, to our consciousness, to what defines our thoughts and our behaviour and in the very deep, in the very root of our mind, a little voice tells us we are unique because we are flesh and bone and that we should protect our body and our progeny.
The one who is speaking is our subconscious, who connects our quality as unique beings with our biological nature, it is the one who dictates our most basic instincts, it is the one who tells us what we must eat and the one that sometimes imposes it’s willing in our relationships. Another question that we could have is if it is right. And I ask: has your subconscious ever been wrong? In any case the fact is, that this impulse of preservation is there and that it is not something easy to ignore. Finally, in the same way that humans have it, we can extrapolate that it would be absolutely normal that any other alien species will be governed by the same rules.
Therefore, the question stands there, as the doubt of if any intelligent species, even more intelligent than we are at the moment, or if in a future, the mankind itself would be able of overstepping this impulse of self-preservation to yield its “Cognos” to an artificial being, risking to lose its unique nature and probably also its Soul.
