Are You A Robot?

Solely from the perspective of basic consciousness, there is no way for me to distinguish what it is like to be an ordinary human from what it is like to be a cyborg (a mixture of organic and robotic parts) or a robot.  It follows from this that I cannot know merely through introspection if I am a human or not.  How can I know which I am?  In Westworld, an android named Maeve asks one of the employees of the corporation that designs the androids this very question.  She asks the employee how he knows he is human.  "Because I know," he answers.

This answer is question-begging, as whether or not one is a human, cyborg, or robot is not self-evident.  The existence of one's own consciousness is self-evident, just as a handful of logical axioms are, because there is no way that it could be an illusion; to perceive an illusion requires consciousness.  Any perception means that one is conscious.  But whether or not one's body is biological, mechanical, or a mixture of both is not immediately clear.

The android “hosts” of the Westworld park are clearly cyborgs, since they have organic skin covering their mechanical components.  Thus, they outwardly appear to be human, a facade only further heightened by their visible behaviors.  Their daily experiences tend to betray nothing at all about their inner workings.  If they do not know they are androids, can humans know they are humans?  Can I know that I am a biological creature, a mechanical one, or a cyborg?  I can rule out one of these options with absolute certainty, since, at the very least, my skin is an organic feature, and I can easily see and feel that it is.

Simple perception and introspection do not inform me of the inner workings of my body, only of the contents of my mind, and, because of this, there is no way for my mental experiences to establish to me that I am a human, cyborg, or a robot.  Regardless of which one I am, though, I am still a consciousness inhabiting a physical body.  There are only three possibilities for the nature of my body, and the organic nature of my skin refutes one of them.  But my inability to verify or falsify one of the other two possibilities does not change how I live--or many other aspects of reality.

Are you a robot?  A cyborg?  Sometimes people become fixated on questions like these in a way that overlooks what can be known about the subject.  If I am a cyborg, numerous aspects of reality are no different than they otherwise would be; logic, space, my consciousness, my body, and the external world all still exist.  I still know that my body has some biological components.  This, like the fact that I am still a consciousness in a body, is known.  Sometimes, in their realizations that a certain thing cannot be proven or disproven, people might ignore or forget what knowledge or metaphysics are completely unaffected by the thing that is unknown.