This is clearly a good way to do skepticism, if you’re going to do it. However, I wonder, at my blog (http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive-antivirus.html), whether skepticism is generally wise at all, and whether religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.
religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.
That is at least plausible, and it is certainly better in a sense to have one piecewise-sane dogma than to be swept away in a deluge of weird and wacky truth claims about crystals and auras. But problems will arise, in god’s good time. The stem cell “controversy” for example is the result of a prima facie pretty innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception. How many more harmless little bits of scripture are waiting in the wings to impede us? Are they not pathogenic as well?
Nonetheless I think you have a point that it’s pretty hard to imagine a majority of people adopting the skeptical procedure used here. I think our best hope is actually to press for the private-ization of spirituality: it’s “true for you” and “metaphorical.” But that will involve a lot of training our gag reflex.
The stem cell “controversy” for example is the result of a prima facie pretty
innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception.
Let’s suppose that cryonically preserved human brains are found to be especially useful for the treatment of several terrible diseases, because of some quirk of the vitrification process. Should we haul out cryonically suspended people and use them for medicine?
I think this is pretty disanalogous. We’re basically talking about killing people who are unconscious in the cryonics case, versus harvesting non-to-semi-differentiated cells in the other.
Let me clarify that although ″life” is a good, quick word, it doesn’t really capture what we value morally, which is mind or consciousness. That’s why we don’t cry when our appendix is taken out, and why we remove people from ventilators when they’re braindead, even though they are “still alive” in the sense of breathing and having a pulse. A frozen brain is a conscious entity that’s temporarily unconscious. The stem cells never were in the first place.
You have to choose if you value actual fellow humans, or just fetishize that blip on a monitor.
what we value morally, which is mind or conciousness.
But I’m going to pick at you one more time and then shut up. Both an embryo and a cryonically suspended person are presently unconcious. If what you value is past conciousness, then there’s no problem, you’re consistent. If you value potential (or long-future) conciousness, there might be a problem. I’m guessing that you value short-future conciousness—a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.
The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I’d shut up.
I’m guessing that you value short-future conciousness—a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.
I think there is a more salient difference, which is that it’s not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.
The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I’d shut up.
By all means continue, I always enjoy parsing these things. My friends are so sick of hearing about trolley cases they’d throw themselves on the tracks.
it’s not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.
I don’t understand this. What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure? How is it that they are different things, while brain (now) and brain (future) are the same thing?
What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure?
Consciousness. Basically, I want to know if there is a reflective “experiencer” there to care about. If not, I don’t give the thing moral standing.
Your cryonically frozen brain presents an odd situation, because the experiencer is sort of “paused.” But I think it’s still clear that in killing that brain you’re ending somebody’s (conscious) life prematurely.
I like this discussion for its own sake, but I am curious: do you disagree with something I’ve said? Or are we just monkeying with scenarios for the sheer hell of it? (Not that that is in any way a bad thing—they are lots of fun.)
If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that the suspended brain is concious (just “paused”, as you say). So there is some property of a system that we can call “concious” even if it’s asleep, suspended, etc., and that embryos (before 20 weeks or so) lack this property.
If this a fair statement, I don’t have anything more to say. The infants, animals etc. stuff is being covered in the “infanticide” sub-thread on this page.
Mostly we’re monkeying with scenarios for the fun of it. I have somewhat less certainty than you about embryonic stem cell research—I estimate some chance that it is morally problematic.
To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I’ve recently begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the age of 5. It tends to elicit a laugh and some interesting discussions thereafter, as I present it semi-seriously.
For the cryonics vs. embryo comparison, it would likely be down to the desires of the people involved and the future costs. A suspended consciousness has the potential for many more people who care about it directly as opposed to a hypothetical consciousness which has yet to influence anyone outside its parents, and is typically cared about in the abstract. The cost of reviving a cryonically frozen consciousness is currently unpayable, so it can’t really be compared with the cost of generating a whole human from scratch (natural birth).
For the ability to do a real world comparison, I would use the cost of birthing consciousness against the cost of bringing someone back from general anesthesia, which is very close to, and perhaps exactly, suspended consciousness. In that comparison, reviving the anesthetized patient has significantly lower costs and has many more people directly preferring it to occur.
This model also applies different values to different levels of consciousness and amount of experience contained within the mind due to the costs involved in obtaining and verifying it.
To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I’ve recently
begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the
age of 5.
I’m intrigued. What specific inconsistency drives you to this? I’m imagining you put a high value on something in order to publicly (even if jokingly) say such a thing, and I’m wondering what that something is.
What sets humanity apart from animals is our conscious mind and ability to reason. Children do not yet possess that full capability, though they typically have the potential for it with the appropriate time and effort. I adjust my values accordingly.
Thought experiment to judge the value/cost model:
Imagine if the revival of a cryonically preserved consciousness required, once thawed, sustaining the mind in an expensive machine which played back its memories at a cost of X per minute of life experience. Without this procedure, the mind would be that of a newborn, and with it, they are fully restored.
Further assume that you are alive at the time of this revival, rather than the person who is preserved.
How much X would you pay, if you were able, to revive a loved one? A stranger? At what point does the cost of X exceed the cost of birthing a whole new person to take their place, should you so desire?
Under this model, cryonics is a choice of very low maintenance costs to preserve the mind until such time as X swings in favor of restoring the preserved person, hopefully with the collective action of those whose preferences are inclined toward paying a higher X (cryonics advocacy groups like Alcor).
I would say that we should conduct trials on equivalent use of vitrified pig or chimpanzee brains before proceeding, or maybe a nonfunctional mockup of a human brain based on organ-printing techniques. I mean, if somebody discovered that it was possible to get high by snorting powdered high-density hard disks, I’d recommend grinding up blanks rather than the last copy of some valuable data.
If it turns out that pig and chimp brains don’t have the same effect, that would be less convenient, yes. I still wouldn’t regret having run the trials.
In such a case, the next step would be to run tests on volunteers (that is, suicides) or people sentenced to be executed. If it turns out that criminals and those who wanted to die are also unsuitable, I’ll allow people with those horrible diseases to sign up for treatment on the condition that, if it doesn’t work, they get their brains vitrified and used to treat the next generation of patients, as a stopgap measure until strictly synthetic treatments becomes available.
The real world is not maximally inconvenient. Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.
More generally, if I were put in some sadistic moral dilemma (say, choosing between rescuing my love-interest or my sidekick) where either option is repugnant but inaction is somehow worse than both of them put together, I’ve got no reason to believe I’d have either enough knowledge of the consequences or enough time for my moral calculus to run in full. Under those circumstances, I would flip the fairest coin I had handy and decide between the two least-repugnant options on that basis, then try not to get backed into such situations in the future.
Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.
That is actually a really good point. Getting in the habit of “accepting the problem as stated” could be a very bad thing.
However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning. A magical cure from eating frozen brains? Unlikely. It was a question about where to draw the line on the ethical worth of living things, that was illustrated with a little story.
However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning.
Not necessarily. I’ve heard it seriously suggested that societies sufficiently advanced to safely revive cryopreserved people might find … more interesting things to do with them. “Spare parts” is one of the possibilities.
This is clearly a good way to do skepticism, if you’re going to do it. However, I wonder, at my blog (http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive-antivirus.html), whether skepticism is generally wise at all, and whether religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.
In matters not related to Catholic dogma, the Catholic Church is (or at least used to be) a consistently skeptical organization.
That is at least plausible, and it is certainly better in a sense to have one piecewise-sane dogma than to be swept away in a deluge of weird and wacky truth claims about crystals and auras. But problems will arise, in god’s good time. The stem cell “controversy” for example is the result of a prima facie pretty innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception. How many more harmless little bits of scripture are waiting in the wings to impede us? Are they not pathogenic as well?
Nonetheless I think you have a point that it’s pretty hard to imagine a majority of people adopting the skeptical procedure used here. I think our best hope is actually to press for the private-ization of spirituality: it’s “true for you” and “metaphorical.” But that will involve a lot of training our gag reflex.
Let’s suppose that cryonically preserved human brains are found to be especially useful for the treatment of several terrible diseases, because of some quirk of the vitrification process. Should we haul out cryonically suspended people and use them for medicine?
I think this is pretty disanalogous. We’re basically talking about killing people who are unconscious in the cryonics case, versus harvesting non-to-semi-differentiated cells in the other.
Let me clarify that although ″life” is a good, quick word, it doesn’t really capture what we value morally, which is mind or consciousness. That’s why we don’t cry when our appendix is taken out, and why we remove people from ventilators when they’re braindead, even though they are “still alive” in the sense of breathing and having a pulse. A frozen brain is a conscious entity that’s temporarily unconscious. The stem cells never were in the first place.
You have to choose if you value actual fellow humans, or just fetishize that blip on a monitor.
You basically answered my question when you said
But I’m going to pick at you one more time and then shut up. Both an embryo and a cryonically suspended person are presently unconcious. If what you value is past conciousness, then there’s no problem, you’re consistent. If you value potential (or long-future) conciousness, there might be a problem. I’m guessing that you value short-future conciousness—a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.
The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I’d shut up.
I think there is a more salient difference, which is that it’s not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.
By all means continue, I always enjoy parsing these things. My friends are so sick of hearing about trolley cases they’d throw themselves on the tracks.
I don’t understand this. What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure? How is it that they are different things, while brain (now) and brain (future) are the same thing?
Consciousness. Basically, I want to know if there is a reflective “experiencer” there to care about. If not, I don’t give the thing moral standing.
Your cryonically frozen brain presents an odd situation, because the experiencer is sort of “paused.” But I think it’s still clear that in killing that brain you’re ending somebody’s (conscious) life prematurely.
I like this discussion for its own sake, but I am curious: do you disagree with something I’ve said? Or are we just monkeying with scenarios for the sheer hell of it? (Not that that is in any way a bad thing—they are lots of fun.)
If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that the suspended brain is concious (just “paused”, as you say). So there is some property of a system that we can call “concious” even if it’s asleep, suspended, etc., and that embryos (before 20 weeks or so) lack this property.
If this a fair statement, I don’t have anything more to say. The infants, animals etc. stuff is being covered in the “infanticide” sub-thread on this page.
Mostly we’re monkeying with scenarios for the fun of it. I have somewhat less certainty than you about embryonic stem cell research—I estimate some chance that it is morally problematic.
To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I’ve recently begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the age of 5. It tends to elicit a laugh and some interesting discussions thereafter, as I present it semi-seriously.
For the cryonics vs. embryo comparison, it would likely be down to the desires of the people involved and the future costs. A suspended consciousness has the potential for many more people who care about it directly as opposed to a hypothetical consciousness which has yet to influence anyone outside its parents, and is typically cared about in the abstract. The cost of reviving a cryonically frozen consciousness is currently unpayable, so it can’t really be compared with the cost of generating a whole human from scratch (natural birth).
For the ability to do a real world comparison, I would use the cost of birthing consciousness against the cost of bringing someone back from general anesthesia, which is very close to, and perhaps exactly, suspended consciousness. In that comparison, reviving the anesthetized patient has significantly lower costs and has many more people directly preferring it to occur.
This model also applies different values to different levels of consciousness and amount of experience contained within the mind due to the costs involved in obtaining and verifying it.
I’m intrigued. What specific inconsistency drives you to this? I’m imagining you put a high value on something in order to publicly (even if jokingly) say such a thing, and I’m wondering what that something is.
What sets humanity apart from animals is our conscious mind and ability to reason. Children do not yet possess that full capability, though they typically have the potential for it with the appropriate time and effort. I adjust my values accordingly.
One real world test: Ashley X
Thought experiment to judge the value/cost model:
Imagine if the revival of a cryonically preserved consciousness required, once thawed, sustaining the mind in an expensive machine which played back its memories at a cost of X per minute of life experience. Without this procedure, the mind would be that of a newborn, and with it, they are fully restored.
Further assume that you are alive at the time of this revival, rather than the person who is preserved.
How much X would you pay, if you were able, to revive a loved one? A stranger? At what point does the cost of X exceed the cost of birthing a whole new person to take their place, should you so desire?
Under this model, cryonics is a choice of very low maintenance costs to preserve the mind until such time as X swings in favor of restoring the preserved person, hopefully with the collective action of those whose preferences are inclined toward paying a higher X (cryonics advocacy groups like Alcor).
I would say that we should conduct trials on equivalent use of vitrified pig or chimpanzee brains before proceeding, or maybe a nonfunctional mockup of a human brain based on organ-printing techniques. I mean, if somebody discovered that it was possible to get high by snorting powdered high-density hard disks, I’d recommend grinding up blanks rather than the last copy of some valuable data.
Good point, but probably not the Least Convenient Possible World.
If it turns out that pig and chimp brains don’t have the same effect, that would be less convenient, yes. I still wouldn’t regret having run the trials.
In such a case, the next step would be to run tests on volunteers (that is, suicides) or people sentenced to be executed. If it turns out that criminals and those who wanted to die are also unsuitable, I’ll allow people with those horrible diseases to sign up for treatment on the condition that, if it doesn’t work, they get their brains vitrified and used to treat the next generation of patients, as a stopgap measure until strictly synthetic treatments becomes available.
The real world is not maximally inconvenient. Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.
More generally, if I were put in some sadistic moral dilemma (say, choosing between rescuing my love-interest or my sidekick) where either option is repugnant but inaction is somehow worse than both of them put together, I’ve got no reason to believe I’d have either enough knowledge of the consequences or enough time for my moral calculus to run in full. Under those circumstances, I would flip the fairest coin I had handy and decide between the two least-repugnant options on that basis, then try not to get backed into such situations in the future.
That is actually a really good point. Getting in the habit of “accepting the problem as stated” could be a very bad thing.
However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning. A magical cure from eating frozen brains? Unlikely. It was a question about where to draw the line on the ethical worth of living things, that was illustrated with a little story.
Not necessarily. I’ve heard it seriously suggested that societies sufficiently advanced to safely revive cryopreserved people might find … more interesting things to do with them. “Spare parts” is one of the possibilities.