When is a human no longer human?

The belief that human persons are composite, made up of mind, body, soul, continues to dominate contemporary Western values and beliefs. Our sense of collective and individual identity is deeply affected by how we perceive this composition. Yet developments in science and technology offer significant challenges to this picture. None more so than the emerging field of neural implants, or neuroprosthetics. One such example is an artificial hippocampus, currently under development in North America, and the promise that it brings of restoring lost memory function to patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Since memory plays an important role in the formation of our identity, and its persistence over time, the impact of an artificial component on a complex organic system is uncertain. In other words, could a computer-based implant completely replace the intricate processes of our own complex hippocampus? What might this mean for ‘choice’ in memory formation? Would there be difficulty in forgetting, when one feels a need or preference to do so?

This talk will present an introduction to these issues, as well as exploring new challenges to traditional boundaries between health and sickness: Is it the case that people ought never to accept certain defects or illness, old age and death, and if not, what are the limits and what kind of limits are they? It is indicative that ideas of the person as a ‘work in progress’, to be fixed or upgraded, permeate popular culture alongside ideas about health and well-being. As implant technology becomes more sophisticated, will there come a time when we have to draw a line between what counts as a 'fix' or an upgrade to a human being, and what has the identity of a post-or trans-human?

Our Speaker, Yasemin J. Erden, is a researcher in the ethics of emerging technologies at St Mary's University College, and is on the committee of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. She teaches a number of topics in philosophy and also acts as an Independent Expert on Ethics for the European Commission.