[ExI] Whatever happened to morphological freedom?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-01-01 05:39, Alan Grimes wrote:
>> From the sound of it, people are ecstatic over the prospect of all human
> choice being obliterated in favor of computronium.
>
> **********************************
> Being able to chose the skin color of your avatar in VR is NOT
> morphological freedom.
> **********************************
...
> So what ever happened to the idea and where can I find the people who
> still support it?

I guess I *have* to respond to this :-)

Of course it is still around. It is even cited here and there in 
bioethics these days. I am working on a Morphological Freedom 2.0 paper 
with some colleagues. I think it has some real world traction ethically 
and politically, and might be something we should be pushing into the 
civil rights agenda.

However, I think the issue discussed here on the list is separate. MF is 
about rights - what autonomous individuals should be allowed to do. But 
there might be technological possibilities that are so enticing, or 
long-term evolutionary or economical pressures that are so strong, that 
in the limit people or post-people become morphologically similar 
(perhaps with an insignificant minority avoiding it). This is not an 
ethical issue in the usual sense: it could even be the result of 
individual, fully informed rational decisions. There might be a loss of 
value in diversity (a bit like language loss) or even something deeper, 
but it would be a collective level ethical issue rather.

If the price of bodies is so high that hardly anybody can afford them, 
as a negative rights libertarian type I still think that is compatible 
with morphological freedom. My positive rights colleagues would argue 
that to have real MF we need a society that can support buying bodies 
somehow (and within some limits; this is what we are thinking about in 
our paper). But it might well turn out that this is like debating 
grazing rights for horses: the problem becomes irrelevant over time.


(Still, I can imagine things like Oxford's Port Meadow to remain. 
Wikipedia: "In return for helping to defend the kingdom against the 
marauding Danes, the Freemen of Oxford were given the 300 acres of 
pasture next to the River Thames by Alfred the Great who founded the 
City in the 10th Century. The Freemen's collective right to graze their 
animals free of charge is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and has 
been exercised ever since." - there are usually some cows or horses 
around, although their importance to the economy and to most people have 
dwindled more orders of magnitude than were imaginable when king Alfred 
was fighting vikings. So maybe there will be a few morphologically free 
bodies frolicking somewhere on future M-brains, protected by regulations 
laid down in the remote 21st century.)


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University