Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered.
I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
I don't think there will be any consequences of importance, for a different, simple reason: people generally resist changing their worldview and will do mental gymnastics to preserve it.
Once the "chemical experiment" escapes its petri-dish and replicates in the laboratory's drain, taking over whole beach resorts and a third of the Pacific ocean, people will rethink!
I think it's pretty optimistic (? or pessimistic) to assume that the "chemical experiment" would have a chance in hell against the bacterial super-predators that have spent billions of years evolving to adapt to this environment.
I don't believe in hard barrier between life and non life but interestingly the barrier between human and non human animal are seemingly very discrete.
Are they? Some primates have better working memory than we do, for example. Of course we would never confuse another species for a human, but I also think we would not confuse a domestic house cat for anything else despite them coming in many shapes, sizes and colors, so I assume you mean something more profound than just that we look visually different.
>Of course we would never confuse another species for a human
Yes, this is what I mean. There is seemingly no organism/species that I would confuse whether to classify it as human or not human but I'm pretty sure there are species/organism albeit is rare that I would be in hard time categorizing it as cat or not cat.
Another example is human male and human female, albeit is rare but there is some human population that I would have a hard time deciding which category to put.
It is highly likely that there once were intermediate species. When examined in sufficient detail, the line between ancestor and descendant species blurs.
Even if you might confuse a domestic house cat for some other creature, I'm pretty sure another domestic house cat would not, which is the relevant point of comparison here :)
Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept.
It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either.
Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled.
In that sense I can agree with your sentiment, because I am not sure how much man's success is really controled and not just the result of sheer luck, despite horrible accidents and individual failure.
On another note, this isn't your websearch box. I went on to write an essay because I tried to take the question serious. This became invariably self centered and thus potentially dehumanizing to everyone else, trying to reclaim the terminus because failing to find an interesting definition which would rest on intricate topics in current research and traditional philosophy, I felt rather insecure, dumb and worried if a strong definition of humanhood would eventually exclude myself, whereas too weak a definition would have barely any utility to anyone. It is quite poetic, here's the climax:
"The collective memory greatly expands that capacify, so it can remain out of the question if an individual ape has a low mental capacity, if you won't ever find enough monkeys assembled around a typewriter as you can find humans in the market place trying to dictate the value of life."
To double down on that, let's say the appropriate question goes who is.... Whereas what rather goes along as relative pronoun to denote possession. What has a human, well, a typical human has many humans around them, above and below. Whereas a single human is practically dead, if not conserved in living memory.
Next up: Human rights for Artifical General intelligence and bionic hind brains for poor hackernews commentators, where to draw the line.
As much as I agree with the general spirit of your reply, I think there is some merit to think of posterboy.human() being a socially defined concept.
It's recently became a loaded term (much like gender) due to people in general using the term like that. See expressions like "humane" or "transhuman".
I would prefer if they used some other word instead of overloading the method, but oh well.
What do you think the ethical consequences will be? Genuinely curious, because I don't really see what they would be, or why there would be any. At least not compared to something like e.g. creating an actual artificial intelligence, and then needing to decide if it has rights, and what kind and so on. Creating a novel type of microorganism out of non-living components doesn't really seem to come with the same kind of can of worms, but maybe I'm overlooking something?
It depends. For me it would be incredibly interesting.
If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual who then "reproduced" through cell division (let's call him Luca), then he's effectively never died - in the same way that we consider ourselves to have not died despite regularly cycling tissues and cells.
All life as we know it, if viewed like that, is one organism whose chain of cell division has never been broken as he's grown over billions of years. Variation between those cells (kingdoms, species, plant / animal etc) become like skin, hair and brain / liver cells within the human body.
It would be like taking a runner grass or banana tree and trying to draw a line around true individuals.
If we created life outside of that unbroken chain of cell division, we would have created something which is definitely "other than Luca" and that feels philosophically significant.
Definitely. If I'm mistaken and we can point to an organism living right now which isn't directly related to / descendant from the Last Universal Common Ancestor then we're already dealing with multiple "individuals", and having another indeed would be no big deal.
Otherwise, I still think that it would be.
To clarify, though: I'm not at all against the creation of another individual.
Well, for those whose ethics are founded on their religious beliefs and whose religious beliefs are dependent on the premise that only God can create life, then there might be some adjustment to be made - but people are very good at dealing with inconvenient facts in ways both rational and irrational.
I think goal posts will rightly move towards creating a universe. I guess agnostics have already ”given up” with the thought that a creator was needed for biological life. A creator for a universe is a greater question.
But we already do know how, through means of reproduction, and that on it's own already has millions of philosophical, ethical, and theological debates
I don't think so either. We will likely be able to create something that self-replicates under similar circumtances what we think were in the primordial soup. And we will call this thing (or after some more research things) as possible first evolution steps.
Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered.
I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.