[ExI] Whatever happened to morphological freedom?

Samantha Atkins sjatkins at mac.com
Sat Jan 1 17:46:07 UTC 2011


On Jan 1, 2011, at 3:24 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> 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.

Freedom, morphological or otherwise, includes the freedom to make poor decisions and experience the consequences thereof.  It does not include any guarantees of success or ability to survive and thrive choosing any old morphology in any and all prevailing conditions.  If, for instance, eventual uploads do outperform non-uploads significantly then the non-uploads cannot cry their morphological freedom is being denied them if there ability to compete and claim an economical niche is greatly reduced. 

Every pro-upload person I know is big into MF, especially their own freedom to upload in the first place!   The notion that uploaders are against this has been exploded over and over again.   It is very tiresome continuing to see this utterly bogus claim.  It is also annoying when currently there not only is not MF but the freedom to choose to use various drugs for enhancement or otherwise is severely curtailed. 

- samantha





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