{"id":396,"date":"2011-03-08T10:29:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-08T17:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=396"},"modified":"2011-03-08T10:29:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-08T17:29:57","slug":"personness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=396","title":{"rendered":"Personness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I watched the movie Metropolis<\/em> last night and this morning.\u00a0 (Started it last night, finished it this morning.)\u00a0 This is the anime version of the title, and it brought up some interesting questions.\u00a0 The movie centers around a robot girl, Tima.\u00a0 She doesn’t know, initially, that she’s a robot and she falls in love with a human boy, Kenichi.\u00a0 Actually, I don’t know if “falls in love with” is the right expression.\u00a0 She loves him, but it’s not clear what kind of love she feels for him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The obvious question here is did Tima, by feeling love and other emotions, somehow transcend being a robot?\u00a0 At this point in time, the question is academic, but it will soon move beyond that.\u00a0 Artificial Intelligence research is advancing rapidly.\u00a0 I have mentioned in other posts that soon there will be an artificial brain capable of thinking in ways similar to the human brain.\u00a0 There is the possibility that machines may demonstrate emotions in the next couple of decades.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The deeper question, then, is what defines a person?\u00a0 This question gets stickier and harder to question every day.\u00a0 There are chimpanzees who can use sign language and communicate with humans.\u00a0 It’s been demonstrated that dolphins have their own spoken language and communicate with each other regularly.\u00a0 A wide variety of animals have demonstrated the ability to make and use tools.\u00a0 No few of these have passed the knowledge of their tool use to their kin, again demonstrating communication skills we previously did not recognize.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let’s take this from a different angle.\u00a0 If a human has a serious accident which leaves their brain capable of keeping them breathing and maintaining a heartbeat but little else, many would still say they’re a person.\u00a0 Even if their condition is worse, to the point where machines are keeping their body functioning, there’s more than a few folks who would say they’re still a person, even if they’re in favor of pulling the plug.\u00a0 At that stage, the chimps and the dolphins are, quite simply put, more sentient than they are.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Going to the other end of life, there’s a few who want to define a fertilized human egg as a person.\u00a0 I think that takes the definition a little far, but if that’s all it takes to be a “person” then why do so many members of the animal kingdom escape the definition?\u00a0 The chimps and the dolphins are certainly more sentient than a fertilized egg.\u00a0 They can be put to work, while the egg requires years of development first.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So the basic question of personness is a really tough one to answer.\u00a0 I think it would be a grand experiment to teach a chimp child sign language, get them proficient in speech and teach them the rudimentary skills of daily human life.\u00a0 Once they are fully trained adults, put them into a human job and let them earn a living.\u00a0 I am willing to bet they would succeed, given the chance.\u00a0 If one (or more!) did succeed, would they be given the right to vote?\u00a0 Chimps mature faster than humans, but relative ages could be calculated and figured into what age they should be able to vote if given such a right.\u00a0 The pundits have made it clear there are elected officials with less intelligence than monkeys.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And yet the question, I think, remains.\u00a0 If one could train a chimp or a dolphin or any other non-human animal in the ways of the world and they then successfully integrated into it, would they be a person?\u00a0 In a few decades–and I have mentioned this before–it will be possible to copy an animal’s memories and thought processes into an artificial brain.\u00a0 That artificial brain can be better than what the animal started out with naturally, so it’s possible housepets could (in their new mechanical body) gain a level of sentience equal to our own.\u00a0 Never mind the artificial intelligence I started this post with, this is a natural intelligence in an artificial brain.\u00a0 Do we now give our former pet the status of being a person?\u00a0 No few would argue our pets are already persons, although not many would argue that our pets, as they are now, should be given (for example) the right to vote.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When blacks were first given the right to vote in the U.S., many still were not permitted to do so in many places.\u00a0 In the south particularly it was a popular notion to require people to pass a test to vote.\u00a0 The test was created so that former slaves, largely uneducated, could not pass it and thus vote.\u00a0 Such things are well in the past, but will we bring up a similar solution to determine whether a robot, chimp or other possible person has, in fact, achieved a level of personness to be given the rights humans give themselves?\u00a0 I certainly don’t like the way the tests were used to prevent a large part of the population from exercising their rights, but how else does one determine whether a non-human is sentient enough to be equivalent, at least as far as rights are concerned, to a human?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The world is going through stages of freedom.\u00a0 The U.S. has shown these stages, bit by bit, and its civil rights struggles have been reflected around the world.\u00a0 Some countries are ahead of us, some are behind.\u00a0 We got through the voting rights thing, finishing with Native Americans.\u00a0 (Yes, women got the right to vote before Native Americans.)\u00a0 Then we moved onto rights in general with non-whites, then women and now we’re working on gay rights.\u00a0 I predict the next civil rights struggle will be over polyamorous groups.\u00a0 Somewhere after that will be robots–androids if you prefer–and sentient animals.\u00a0 Each successive stage will make us wonder why we fought over the previous ones.\u00a0 Very few conservatives will openly argue against rights for women or non-whites these days, even though their predecessors certainly did.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Someday, perhaps, democracy will finally accept people of all races and species who have demonstrated by one means or another their right to be accepted as such.\u00a0 For humans, that’s easy, even though there are still plenty who try to deny it.\u00a0 Maybe the struggle for non-human persons’ rights will finally push our racial struggles behind us.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I watched the movie Metropolis last night and this morning.\u00a0 (Started it last night, finished it this morning.)\u00a0 This is the anime version of the title, and it brought up some interesting questions.\u00a0 The movie centers around a robot girl, Tima.\u00a0 She doesn’t know, initially, that she’s a robot and she falls in love with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}