From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 18:53:52 MDT
YP Fun writes
> I would also like to know what freedom is.
> Human beings are quite hypocritical. If we
> believe that the next generation of
> dominate species will be computers then
> we will have to re-evaluate our
> ideas of en-slavement and rights.
To the degree that you are talking about
legal rights, you raise an important question
(almost needless to say). Just how will some
programs acquire the legal rights that, say
corporations have? We will slowly evolve
solutions to this, but we will be greatly
retarded by people's lack of understanding
of how it's even possible for a machine to
be intelligent or consious.
> Should a machine have rights?
> Should animals have rights?
> Should clones have rights?
(I assume that you're talking, again, about
*legal* rights. These questions are
completely unanswerable in the abstract,
and merely serve to confuse.)
Yes, clones have exactly the same rights
because a clone is a normal human in every
way.
No, animals should not have legal rights.
The basic reason is that they've never been
citizens of any society based on law. We
are lucky that all human beings form a
tight cluster. (Think of how difficult things
would be if some races really were much less
intelligent than others?) We definitely
should not mess with that boundary between
humans and animals.
> I would like to live forever. Some body
> somewhere would like to live forever - so
> out of his DNA he generates a tree that
> buds body parts. Does this tree have
> freedoms?
(i) that tree would never have been considered
a citizen in any society that has ever
existed, any more than a blood donation is.
(ii)Proposal: a citizen must have human level
sentience for starters.
> Where do the boundaries of an organism begin
> and the boundaries of an organism end? How
> close are cells tied together? If two cells
> are adjacent and in contact with one another
> are they one organism? Are two daughter cells
> far apart two organisms?
These questions are not as difficult as they
appear, in almost all cases thus studied. See
a biology book for guidance. But in the future
things indeed will require careful judgment.
Lee Corbin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:47 MST