From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu Mar 21 2002 - 17:52:42 MST
On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 16:01, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> James Rogers wrote:
> > And what is an "innocent human" in the context of survival?
>
> Perhaps it could be expressed as "Sentients are more important
> than things and ideas, including political theories."
I disagree with this idea. What is a sentient? Sentients are only
important in the context of the things and ideas they create. Most
"sentients" have precious little value, and the only reason to give them
any value at all is that they might do something interesting some day,
though they probably won't the vast majority of the time. This being
relative to my perspective along the gradient of sentience. Suppressing
the creative ability (directly or indirectly) of the most useful
sentients to "respect the importance" of "sentients" that are nigh
useless is counterproductive. Of course, we could solve this problem
merely by raising the bar that defines "sentient", a fuzzy definition if
there ever was one. That sentience has a finite value seems fairly
obvious, and purely rational critters will treat it as such. In a more
immediate context, sentients are treated as though they have some
importance today as a game theoretic courtesy. Which basically means it
doesn't amount to much, and that we can get away with our bold delusions
as a practical matter because we haven't had to interact with vastly
superior sentients.
Of course, a lot of the problem is that people use "sentience" as though
it was a binary state when it is really a gradient with arbitrary cutoff
points. Some day we may wake up and find out that WE have fallen below
the arbitrary cutoff by some entity's standard.
Or to put it another way, how is it any less right for me to say that I
will respect the importance of all sentients, but that "sentients" are
defined as, say, entities having an IQ higher than 140 (or any other
arbitary metric)? This standard would be no less arbitrary than the one
originally stated by Rafal. There seem to be a lot of terms and metrics
in these arguments that are defined to mean whatever people want them to
mean.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:03 MST