[ExI] Human extinction

[Lee Corbin]

Stefano writes

> > To me, it's relatively simple. My remote ancestors of 500 million
> > years ago are extinct. Period.
>
> OK.
>
> My point is: beyond your extinction as an individual,
> it is arbitrary to identify with, or to invest emotionally
> in the lot of, your biological grand-children rather
> than your one-million year-distant evolutionary
> successors.

Even just *socially*, this strikes me as very weird.
One can rightly feel responsible for one's children,
whether you know them or not. It's a kind of duty.
This also applies to one's grandchildren, though,
I would suggest, diluted by a factor of two  :-)

But more pertinently, you are suggesting that I should
no more identify with Stefano Voj than with a toad,
should it happen that this toad-like creature is my
direct male descendant a million years from now (due
to certain regressions and periodic near-extinctions
and so forth)?  Surely not!

The metric I recommend is this: similarity of structure
(including similarity of emotional and moral structure,
intellectual structure, and so forth). I therefore have
much greater identification with Imhotek than with
any grandchild of mine who has an IQ of 12,000 and
who would regard me the way I would regard a
retarded but lovable pet parakeet.

> One's grand-children are no more him or her than the
> latter, and both are successors.

Where they occur in time doesn't seem important, does it?

> So, either you metaphorically "survive" in both, or you
> do not in either.

Well, I disagree, since to me it's always a matter of degree.
On the one hand, we should refuse to be driven to the
absurd point of claiming no identification with who we
were yesterday, and on the other hand we should admit
the unnaturalness of claiming to identify with some utterly
alien but extremely advanced computer program (that just
happens to be a descendant of Vladimir Putin).

> But in both cases there no obvious reason why the survival
> of the species should be considered as survival tout court,

Sorry---it often appears your English is better than mine!
I take it you mean total or complete survival by that phrase.

The reason I advance for favoring homo sapiens in a contest
for my affections over some lizard race from Sirius is two-fold.
For one, similarity of structure (including all the aforementioned
traits such as emotion and so on). For two, we naturally have
a certain solidarity with our cell-mates, our fellow city residents,
our national comrades, and even (up to a point) our gender or
racial brethren. This "solidarity" may be at times too strong for
our individual tastes (and so we try to weaken it), and at other
times be too weak. But it's there.  And it applies very much to
our species as a whole: I'd feel quite disloyal if that race of
lizards from Sirius happened all to be interested in math and
avid chess players, and I had to choose between a planet full
of humans surviving and a planet full of them surviving, and I
chose the latter.

> and the survival of the clade should not. In fact, to pose the
> survival of the species as one's ultimate ideal may well be to
> the detriment of the destiny of the clade,

I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clade, but it's not helping
me much here. Instead of "clade" could you be more specific,
e.g., all our DNA cousins?

> and would lead us to conclude that it would have been a
> good idea for our simian ancestors, at least from their
> point of view, to put in place an eugenic programme
> aimed at avoiding the kind of evolutionary change that
> ultimately led to ourselves.

Heh, well of course it would have been a good idea---for *them*!
In fact, they would have been very well-advised to put just such
a program in place, because suppose some simian version of
Charles Heston gets into a time machine back in 4,802,701 B.C.
and appears on Earth in 2008 A.D.  He'd be utterly appalled at
the "Planet of the Humans", and rightly so!

> If we like to think that our "successors" shall be there,
> genealogy is as good a criterion to define them as similarity.

Well, I admit to being a "similarity chauvinist"  :-)

> A rat, as a mammal and everything, may well be much less similar to me than an entirely unrelated human being, but also much more 
> similar to me than an android. Yet I should be more inclined to consider myself extinct if it were the rats rather than the 
> androids to take over. Why that? I suspect one reason may be that androids could be legitimately considered as "children of the 
> mind", something which could never be said of rats. And this of course would be even more true for remote biological successors 
> whose DNA directly derived, artificially or naturally, from my own.<

Yes, I might identify more with the android too---but only if
it had characteristics that made it more like me than a rat is.

Lee