Will Humans Ever Live in Space?
This is the cover story and question of Scientific American in October of 2023. The answer is no. SA treats this question as primarily technological, and secondarily psychological and physiological. But that really misses the important question, one raised by the current revolution in AI, and right behind it in robotics. What is a human? What does it mean to be human? The conceit of the Enlightenment, which has deeply influenced contemporary culture in the West, is that humans are embodied brains, and that humanity/the self/the soul both arises from the brain-body complex and resides within the brain. This is why from the standpoint of medical science when a person is "brain dead" there is no more human person present and the body can be used for spare parts. On this basis a brain transplant would be a transplantation of human consciousness. And of course it can be imagined that a detailed map of the entire brain could be recreated in a silicone "brain" and still...