If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we’ll have even more dystopian ethical dilemmas
Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?
Would it know? What sort of reference could it possibly have?
We already have a similar problem in medicine where people experience pain differently, so it’s hard for people to verbalize and quantify. If you had no frame of reference at all, how would you know that life isn’t supposed to be painful?
You can even view it from the opposite way. What if by removing pain you remove any good feeling it has? There can’t be light without the dark kind of thing.
You murder a mind, not a body, so no mind no murder. Under that abortion isn’t murder at all. Taking a brain dead person off life support is also not murder. You certainly wouldn’t say cutting down a tree is murder.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We aren’t really our bodies, we’re a biological product made by our bodies to function as high level control systems.
There’s the thing though. Our bodies don’t really know what’s good for them with perfect accuracy. They evolved to survive in an environment of extreme and unpredictable scarcity, so your body telling you to eat the sour gummy worms is the correct choice in that context. Historically the job of the brain was to figure out how to get a steady supply without dieing. Now we have to manage our bodies like idiot babies because if we just listened to every impulse we’d end up with a host of health problems ultimately leading to reduced fertility and access to sexual partners. I mean that has always been true really, it’s just never been more true than now.
Probably, because humans are pretty much evil and stupid at the end of the day, regardless of what feel good bullshit movies say. The kind of people who want to be in charge mostly are the same kind who would gleefully torture something like this while having one hand down their pants.
If, however, they could engineer it to not have a personality then it really would just be a tool.
This sounds like slavery with extra steps
If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we’ll have even more dystopian ethical dilemmas
Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?
Like how do we know it’s natural state isn’t just pure pain?
Presumably at that point it could just tell us. Whether or not we would listen is its own set of problems
Would it know? What sort of reference could it possibly have?
We already have a similar problem in medicine where people experience pain differently, so it’s hard for people to verbalize and quantify. If you had no frame of reference at all, how would you know that life isn’t supposed to be painful?
You can even view it from the opposite way. What if by removing pain you remove any good feeling it has? There can’t be light without the dark kind of thing.
Some interesting philosophical questions.
Maybe it would be less happy without the pain!
Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?
You murder a mind, not a body, so no mind no murder. Under that abortion isn’t murder at all. Taking a brain dead person off life support is also not murder. You certainly wouldn’t say cutting down a tree is murder.
Good point and that’s a question I can’t answer.
Well I do appreciate that response, these are hard questions.
Our bodies are literally slavery. I don’t think any of my cells have a choice to be here.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We aren’t really our bodies, we’re a biological product made by our bodies to function as high level control systems.
And yet every day, when I wakeup, I eat a bag of sour worms.
.
There’s the thing though. Our bodies don’t really know what’s good for them with perfect accuracy. They evolved to survive in an environment of extreme and unpredictable scarcity, so your body telling you to eat the sour gummy worms is the correct choice in that context. Historically the job of the brain was to figure out how to get a steady supply without dieing. Now we have to manage our bodies like idiot babies because if we just listened to every impulse we’d end up with a host of health problems ultimately leading to reduced fertility and access to sexual partners. I mean that has always been true really, it’s just never been more true than now.
Best response to song lyrics ever ❤️
This is my favorite sentence of the day.
Yeah, we like to pretend things are black and white, but nothing is simple, there’s always another perspective to view things from.
Probably, because humans are pretty much evil and stupid at the end of the day, regardless of what feel good bullshit movies say. The kind of people who want to be in charge mostly are the same kind who would gleefully torture something like this while having one hand down their pants.
If, however, they could engineer it to not have a personality then it really would just be a tool.