In my last in this series on personhood, I mentioned that in attempting to consider how to value other beings, for my own purposes, I settled long ago on a simple, defining characteristic: For my interactions with other beings, I ask whether they can experience pain. If they can experience pain, I have decided to do my best not to inflict pain upon them.
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Posted by
b. on 06/27 at 12:19 PM
Interesting text. I appreciate the continuity between feminism, queer studies and veganism, but I think there is something missing in how machines fit into the mix.
I don’t believe that machines (no matter how complex or “smart”) could ever be persons (or animals) because computation is an arrangement of matter: a representation. The meaning of the state of a computational system is not understood by the system, it requires an external homunculus to give these states meaning. I don’t believe that increasing complexity, speed and even the illusion of personhood changes this fact. No matter how good a photograph of a person, we would never make the mistake of confusing the representation with the reality, as long as we know a photograph is a representation (we know because its constructed). Just because a weather model predicts it will rain, does not mean that it will.
That is not to say that technology cannot eventually become self-conscious and self-aware, but that would require a living technological system (a biological / chemical system that is both alive and representational). Such systems would have great animal-like potential, but their personhood would not result from their complexity, but arise from their foundation on self-growing, reproducing and self-evolving biology. This requires the manipulation of biological components. If these are animal components, then there is an ethical paradox: A system that requires ethical treatment can only be made though unethical behaviour—-the manipulation of living materials without their consent. Now, if the components were plant-based then that gets interesting, technically and ethically.
I realized recently why transhumanism continues to exist, despite this representation problem. Transhumanists must be hard determinist materialsists, they believe that all aspects of us can be reduced to an arrangement of matter and energy, that is a representation. If this is the case, then we can also reduce our free-will to a function of the experiences our material has been through. We are nothing but reflex creatures that deterministically respond to the exact same conditions the exact same way. There is no free-will and all choices we could ever make were determined the moment of the big bang. While this way of thinking is highly popular in science, its hard (impossible?) to resolve with our phenomenological experience of the world and our choices in it. If our choices are predetermined and we have no free-will, then ethics has no meaning, and we can’t be held responsible for our actions, they simply result from the context of our existence.
I think that by opening the door to representations as having personhood, that does a fundementally unethical disservice to living creatures, reducing us to representations who cannot contribute to the world, only follow through the motions.
Posted by
Jønathan Lyons on 06/29 at 04:16 PM
Hi b. I appreciate your comment.
Most of your resistance does strike me as favoring the biological and believing that a technological being cannot be considered a person. As I said, what we need to recognize is that human is a biological concept, whereas person is a philosophical concept, which can extend (and is already applied in some instances) beyond the human species.
I’d also like to direct your attention, as someone who’s clearly giving the issue serious thought, to my second piece in this series:
“Who, or what, is a person? Speciesism and Substrate Chauvinism”
Thanks!
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