[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Robert Bradbury]

On 4/5/06, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> And they start to diverge into
> different people as soon as they are created.


My copies start to accumulate different information on top of a very large
foundation of information I handed directly to them and they are presumably
executing upon a substrate I provided for them as well (unless society as a
whole is handing out "free" computronium for "colonization" [think New
England ~400 years ago]).

To assume that the mere "divergence" of the information base creates a being
with the rights and entitlements of the original is highly questionable.  We
don't hand "children" the rights to do lots of things until they are deemed
to have developed sufficently to be considered responsible (and distinct)
members of society.

But really these tasks are better suited to robots, which will be
> available by the time you are able to make copies of humans. In fact
> there will probably be laws against creating crippled human type
> beings.


In *this* society perhaps.  But I see little difference between sending a
"crippled" human, e.g. an engineered berserker, off to war and a designed
and manufactured robot with human (or even superhuman) levels of
intelligence off to war or into a reactor melt-down "hot-zone".

But since one of the CSPAN channels last night was playing back the
testimony of some government official involved in the "crusade" against
child-porn on the internet its fresh in my mind... and let me explicitly
state I'm *intentionally* tweeking list members who think they are sitting
on the moral "high" ground... What is wrong with my creating a society with
children engineered to never grow old (not too difficult as some of the
genes which would produce some of these effects are already known) and whose
"raison d'etre" was to sit around and experience pleasure when being diddled
by older folks?  Of course this would be done in my Atlantean cities
floating in international waters, or perhaps because that meme set would
offend most of the people on the planet, on a moon orbiting Jupiter.
Wouldn't you feel compelled to enroll others into taking action to stamp out
this kind of abhorent activity (i.e. to replace my meme set where the
engineering of perpetually young people in support of the "Religion of IPIP"
is considered a normal church activity with an alternate meme set supporting
the "Religion of not abusing conscious matter"?  (Though I'm not sure that
is quite right as it would suggest that its ok for one to fiddle the
"children" so long as they are asleep and they don't know one is doing it.)

The interesting thing about the "Extropians List" is that at least most of
the people involved consciously signed up for having their minds fiddled
with... :-;  There are a few of course whose minds seem fiddle resistant...
sigh.

Robert
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