I actually am a pope but not a medieval one.
But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it.
When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts.
It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature.
So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things.
So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers.
Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.
The base of my argument is that “unmodified humanity” doesn’t exist (except maybe the tiniest of newborn babies) because we change ourselves to be better at what we’re doing. That’s how humanity works. There is no “pure natural state” to get back to, we’re built to change and adapt and people worried about “losing humanity” because of implants and prothesises and drugs and gene therapy are missing the point: of course they’ll change who we are as humans… Changing our form IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.
Like, I’ve talked about this before, but you can spot a London cab driver on a brain scan easier than you can tell male brains vs female brains, because learning how to do that changes the form and function of your brain to such a degree that you can detect it just by doing an MRI. You can tell if someone was an archer or a ballet dancer by the shape of their bones. You can tell what language a newborn’s parents speak because they babble in the same cadence and pitches as their soon-to-be-first-language, just from hearing it in the womb.
If you’re ever worried that something you do or become means you’re “less human”, don’t be. Becoming less “human” is the most human thing you can do.
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