[Ericson2314]

I don't think so.

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.

[dudeman13]

>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright

That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.

[tjchear]

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.

[goodthenandnow]

Exactly.

Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.

[dudeman13]

That's an argument I think is valid for a possible lack of consequences of importance.

Unlike thinking there won't be consequences of importance because of a belief that < 1% of humanity even thought of maybe possibly having

[phkahler]

Not really. They'll just say a chemistry experiment isnt life.

[chess_buster]

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!

[whimsicalism]

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.

[Ericson2314]

hypothetical hyper-vegans must always bootstrap from source, because vendored binaries that exceed the size of small small genomes is heterotrophy.

[matz1]

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.

[Jweb_Guru]

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.

[matz1]

>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.

[mannykannot]

It is highly likely that there once were intermediate species. When examined in sufficient detail, the line between ancestor and descendant species blurs.

[Jweb_Guru]

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 :)

[pnut]

Considering the radical diversity in the spectrum of human cognitive capabilities, I'm not so sure it's a discrete transition from non-human to human.

What is a human?

[posterboy]

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.

[gdy]

"Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept"

This is priceless))

[dudeman13]

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.

[gdy]

Maybe by 'human' they just meant 'sapient'?

[Ericson2314]

That's why we should go clone some neanderthals.

Ideally we should clone enough to see if we can connect us and bonobos in a species complex (no hard boundaries of infertility).

I'm salivating over all the ethical choas that this would cause.