Ill-defined humanity

While subtly breaking my promise, let's talk about that quality we all possess, but seem unable to wrap our heads around: our humanity. It is a topic that is often discusses in sci-fi, and I'll offer two examples to show how badly we apparently understand it.

Whatchamecallem... Case studies?

First up is Futurama, one of the funniest cartoons ever made and while I'm sure most of you are already frowning ('You can't take it seriously!' and nonsense like that), be quiet and read on, or stop torturing yourself with my weblog.
In the fourth episode of the third season, 'Parasites Lost', the main character Philip J. Fry goes from a subhuman intelligence to being comfortably highly gifted, due to some smart space parasites; this allows him to finally court Leela, the love of his life, in a way that doesn't end with him alone in his room. At the end of the episode, however, he flushes out the parasites, saying that she didn't love him, but the parasites.

Secondly, we get the upcoming action-RPG Space Siege, wherein the protagonist (ie. the player) is humanity's final hope, as all that is left of our race drifts through space on a huge colony ship invaded by unfriendly aliens. One of the main selling points of the game is the choice that Seth Walker, the protagonist, has to make concerning cybernetic upgrades. In the black-and-white world, the choice is as follows: install the cybernetics, become more powerful and loose your humanity, or don't, don't and retain it.

Not that smart

What is this? Gaining muscles doesn't make you a different person, why would gaining intelligence? Oh, sure, you might be able to see thing more clearly, but what has made you you, your experiences and memories, your emotions and the great many trains of thought are still there. Yes, they'll change, but that's what intelligent life forms do; from cradle to grave, we change, every waking moment and then some. True, you might act differently in a given situation depending on your intelligence, but the same goes for knowledge, and I'm sure we all agree that knowledge is something worth striving for (well, not at any cost, but that's another discussion). Besides, it's not that clear a distinction, intelligence and knowledge, knowledge and intelligence.

So what if you're able to enhance your intelligence with a little chip? And for a few dollars more, enhanced vision and a built-in Wi-Fi connection. Would it make us less human? Hell, no! Prosthesis don't, and while we are still on the level of only replacing that which is lost, it won't be very long until I have a microphone in my palm, a speaker in my thumb (these two constitute a phone), a pen in my index finger, a corkscrew in my middle finger, a small reservoir of silver polish in my ring finger and a small caliber gun in my little finger. Oh, how very human I will be!

Never that smart

Of course, the success of non-critical prosthetics depends on its ability to mimic our natural forms and on the direction the zealots' noses are pointing at that time ("You can't tamper with God's creation!" - "We owe it to ourselves to be the best that we can be!" and so on and so forth), but no matter the outcome, even if we transplant our brains into giant spacefaring vessels to explore the galaxy, we'll still be the same petty people who can't see the reality of our existence for all the illusions we create for ourselves.

For now, that's enough.