From: Bostrom,N (pg) (N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 07:43:45 MST
Anders wrote:
>This of course raises some moral questions, like if your
present >self
>has the right to create a future self in great pain and no
way of
>avoiding it (my answer would be that it is OK - potential
people >have
>no rights)
This is mad. Potential people, surely, have at least potential rights. If
the person comes into existence, she has the right not to be tortured,
whether or not the torture is the result of some mechanism that was set up
before her birth. Otherwise, it would be OK for sadists to have kids and
then to torture and murder them at will; or your parents might one day pop
over to your place and poke your eyes out, acting on some secret intention
they had formed before they conceived you. That is not morally acceptable
behaviour!
Regarding what one can morally do to a future segment on oneself, that is a
trickier issue. You have to specify in what sense this future mind would be
"you". In the case you describe, with this mind having no memory of who the
present self is, and no control over what decisions the other direct
continuations of your present self are making, it seems hard to see in what
sense this mind is you. In this case, it seems you have no more right to
coerce this other mind than you would have to coerce a genetic clone of
yourself.
There might be cases where a super-mind would be justified in creating
inferior minds and then coercing them in various ways, much like we use lab
mice, but surely only if there is an overriding motivation (say, the
super-mind has very strong preferences). Other things equal, it would be
morally undesirable to coerce or torture created beings, be they human
children or artificial sentient minds.
>Maybe this kind of extreme experience cognitive engineering
is >going
>to be a popular thing among the posthumans? A kind of dare,
>passage
>rite/education or just entertainment
A silly right of passage that would be. Why not do something difficult but
pleasant instead? And if it is the education we are after, couldn't we get
that information in a less painful way, say by downloading the memory of the
pain, or just learning about pain in general. Presumably, you think that the
pain might somehow "ennoble" us emotionally; - but why not find a way of
changing our emotional state into that "noble" state - of humility and
resignation or whatever - directly, rather than go through the inefficient
and horrendous process of getting to that state through having long series
of painful experiences. That would be lot more transhumanist in my book!
Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Email: n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Homepage: http://www.analytic.org
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