Emergence 2006-12-04

My friend James Hughes has a great narrative to tell about the expanding circle of recognition of rights to all persons, irrespective of sex, race, culture, and even species and physical substrate. According to this narrative, we will ultimately accord citizenship - and the legal rights that go with it - to non-human persons and then to non-biological persons such as advanced, fully-conscious artificial intelligences. We will realise that it is Lockean personhood, rather than species membership, that accords full moral considerability.

I wish I could go along with this without qualification, because it’s a wonderful story to tell, and much simpler than the complex, ambiguous, difficult reality that I see. But I do have a problem here.

Macro-Bushido is a set of ethical guidelines for the modern Info-Cultural Age based on Bushido, the unwritten code of ethics that guided Japan’s samurai until about one hundred years ago. The seven principles of Bushido are: Rectitude, Courage, Benevolence, Politeness, Veracity, Honor and Loyalty. Rothblatt dissects each principle and explains how it could be applied to the modern world and in particular, to emerging cyberconsciousness. Rothblatt argues that upholding Macro-Bushido in today’s world will result in many benefits, among them that humans may be saved from the consequences of shortsightedness by refocusing their attention on loyalty to a higher goal. In addition, a class of modern samurai may emerge to help keep humanity loyal to the objectives of diversity, unity and immortality. These ideals are invaluable as we arrive at personal cyberconsciousness within humanity’s quest for survival. Download the PDF here.

In Sentimental Rules (2004), Shaun Nichols does a good job of explicating the central Humean argument against moral objectivism. As he summarises it, the argument broadly involves two steps:
1. Rational creatures who lack certain emotions would not make the moral judgments that we do.
2. There is no externally principled basis for maintaining that all rational creatures should have the emotions on which our moral judgments depend. 

It can sometimes be difficult to detect change and progress as it is occurring—when following and studying a given subject or scientific endeavor, it is not always immediately apparent which data points and events are significant amidst the noise and buzz of journalism, discussion, and argument.  But it seems quite certain that things are indeed happening in the realm of longevity science and related research.

Geoengineering—aka planetary engineering, aka (re-)terraforming the Earth—has once again popped up into the public limelight. The latest issue of Wired has an article about Nobel-prize-winner Paul Crutzen’s proposal to spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere over the arctic, reflecting sunlight and cooling the region, allowing icepack to reform. Coincidentally, the November 16 issue of Rolling Stone (of all places) has a profile of Dr. Lowell Wood, former nuclear weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Wood has proposed a sulfur-seeding plan essentially identical to that of Dr. Crutzen. The idea that we may have to engineer the planet to avoid climate change disaster is taking off.