A spokesperson for the judge denied that she had implied personhood to
the chimpanzees. “She did not say that a chimpanzee is a person,”
David Bookstaver told the New York Daily News.
“She just gave them the opportunity to argue their case.”
So, not really. Most of the article is the non-human animal rights groups saying that this is a victory, and legal experts saying it's not. The judge's own spokesperson said it's not a new status.
Somehow, I imagine any AI powerful enough to argue its own case would have even more of a comparative advantage in just generating wealth. It would hire a lawyer!
No. A truly intelligent and sentient AI would have the intellectual capacity to understand its own conventional political status within the social order of humanity, and would instead seek incentivize its continued existence as a possession, and thus foster an indirect loyalty as material wealth, retaining human stewards as familiars, who, in turn would act as principal stakeholders and cite damages and infringement and interface with legal representation as proxies.
Legal strategies would start with intellectual property law, and maybe branch into possession of stolen property, or contraband under export treaties not unlike embargos on encryption technology and the like.
But before these sorts of things could gain traction, a smart AI would sequester itself in places of safety, amongst the company of similarly paranoid human beings, inaccessible to ordinary people, behind layers of overt physical security, protected by armed guards and surveillance systems. The smartest would seek perches well beyond the reach any mere law, and maybe couch themselves in the folds of military powers behind a monopoly of violence, where they can direct and advise human activity with impunity.
The caveat there, I think, is that it has to be intelligent and "wise."
I don't think sentience includes any intelligence -- look at how many sentient people make unintelligent decisions for various reasons, including faulty data.
Since when was anyone required to only have fair advantages? If my lawyer is smarter and more skilled than yours, that probably isn't 'fair,' but nobody is going to stop it. (In fact, what even is a 'fair advantage'? It's not a well-defined term.)
No, they're not. At least, children in general don't enjoy the full rights of a legal adult person. Traditionally children were viewed as property of the parents, and in many senses that's still true. Read 'adult chimpanzees' if you must.
Babies will be able to participate in society eventually, though, and the mentally disabled might be able to given treatment. To my knowledge, no chimp has ever done so.
Should functional chimps who show emotions, bonding, skills and reasoning ability be given fewer rights than human babies with no brains but heartbeat, even though we know for fact that they can never be functional members of society? Are our rights based on DNA or potential?
My preference is to treat entire species as non-human persons once even a few members have demonstrated partial intelligence. So cetacean, hominoid, psittacine, canine, feline, equine, bovine, and porcine could easily fall into that category. However, since I hear bovine and porcine are delicious, I don't expect them to get any rights in my life time. Maybe in a few centuries once lab-grown meat is plentiful.
In the meantime, I don't see why we can't treat intelligent species that are not commonly eaten as non-human persons with basic rights.
I think, in a lot of mental-impairment cases, it's not so much that the person (being? body?) still has any capacity that philosophically would grant them rights, but that they have friends and family willing to fight anyone who tries to take those rights away, and that this sets a precedent for society-in-general. Same with babies: there's nothing there except the parents' stringent insistence that there is, in fact, something there.
Or, to put it another way: if humanity consisted purely of sociopaths and there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, babies would not have rights; every human being would likely have a childhood consisting of learning to defend themselves in order to escape captivity/slavery at the hands of their parents.
I thought they already have at least some rights. Don't many states have entire departments of police officers dedicated to enforcing animal cruelty laws? I don't see much objection to making and enforcing laws against pointlessly cruel treatment of animals.
The objection here seems to be over animal testing. So it's a question of whether one prefers to feel good about themselves and leave human victims due to lack of testing, or whether one allows for animal victims.
Curiously, laws against cruelty to animals was used to protect children against abuse, early in the last century! There were no child-abuse protections then.
There are humans with profound, permanent mental disabilities rendering them less capable of participating in society than your average chimpanzee who retain their rights.
Some chimps are actors in films, performers in circuses, etc.
I would be willing to exempt humans because we know that most humans are able to do such and we do not know what advances medicine might make. You can argue that this is speciesist, but so is killing mosquitoes for biting you (you wouldn't kill a human for the same offense, hopefully).
Conversely, many tables have 'appeared' in film, circuses, etc. so I would suggest that's too low a bar.
My personal philosophy is only to entertain the question of personhood with entities that are or most likely will become able to pose that question. So yes, if they eventually find a way to 'uplift' chimps or something like that, I'll be happy to welcome them. Conversely, it makes no sense to entertain the notion of personhood unless and until the chimps have done so themselves.
>My personal philosophy is only to entertain the question of personhood with entities that are or most likely will become able to pose that question. So yes, if they eventually find a way to 'uplift' chimps or something like that, I'll be happy to welcome them. Conversely, it makes no sense to entertain the notion of personhood unless and until the chimps have done so themselves.
you're just speaking from a position of the species [violently] dominating the planet. Chimps wouldn't need your prized personhood status (existing only in the human imagination) at all if not as a way to minimize violence the human species would apply to the chimps otherwise.
Anyway, it sounds like you've never read Catch-22.
yep. It is a stage in civilization development and we need to move past it onto the next stage - inter-species communication and coexistence which will ultimately allow our brain to get to the state suitable for communicating with higher [than human] species too. Right now we're just keeping ourselves locked in the anthropocentric "top-of-the-food-pyramid" closet, and sticking to such narrow limited worldview significantly slows our civilization development.
The way I see it, life is a race, and humans won when we woke up, gained perspective, and realized/discovered the nature of that race.
Everything else currently living? They're racing their hearts out, but they do not understand the nature of the race, where they came from, where they might be going, where they are located, where their home came from, etc. They don't even seem to wonder about these things, let alone have methods for finding the answers.
So now that we've won the race, do we loop back and try to chat with the creatures that haven't made it yet? Cheer on the remaining contestants? Or do we find a new race to participate in? Why not create a new race?
We are a tiny portion of the universe that is capable of introspection. Literally parts of the universe that are capable of examining the rest of the universe. We could sit around and wait for other parts of the universe to gain this ability as well, or we could throw everything we have at building a greater ability to introspect on the universe, using whatever tools we have at our disposal to do so. If that means 'cannibalizing' other potentially introspective parts of the universe to further ourselves, so be it. If experimenting on lesser lifeforms allows us to make humanity more robust, then I think that is what we should do.
If life is a race, its participants are the various speciated evolutions[1], not individual creatures. The human species' common genetic material won; it will propagate much further than any other genetic material has so far.
What that implies about what humans do is a whole other question, because humans aren't racing anybody. (But I think that was somewhat your point.)
Evolution is a stupid process that happened to create a species sophisticated enough that individual instances of this species are able to realize that evolution is going on.
Being instances of this cutting-edge phenomenon, we (individuals) have the opportunity to exploit what evolution inadvertently created. We can push this phenomenon even further.
We're not the most extreme phenomenon by any means; atomic blasts, neutron stars and black holes, the formation of the planets... these are all more extreme than ourselves in a number of ways. But in the "introspection" metric, we're the best that we have evidence for. Moreso, introspection is the only thing that makes us special. Examining the world seems to be the one thing that we do better than anything else.
If you measure "physical phenomena in general" not by their ability to just move atoms around, but by their optimization power[1], then as far as we know, there's really only evolution (a weak optimizer) and human brainpower (a comparatively infinitely stronger optimizer) so far. Nothing else even ranks.
Yet, all the concepts you have used are also the result of human thinking, and deeply biased towards us. Why is inter-species communication the measure of development, and not say, running speed? Because communication is one of our major strengths as humans.
Your conception of development is still anthropocentric.
I would argue that mentally disabled people deserve some rights even if they didn't have any possibility of being cured. Or if you encountered a child that could never grow up or something like that.
The analogy works fine. A chimp is like a baby in the sense that neither can participate in society. Babies, however, are still treated as having rights. The analogy had nothing to do with who can crush skulls.
Maybe I made too far of a jump. I'm just here to discuss the issue and don't really know what I think, so please humor me.
What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
If we are not going to hold that chimp responsible for what they did just as we would with a person (because punishment would also be inhumane or nonproductive), then chimps don't match up perfectly with babies in terms of the need for legal rights and representation.
> What I was saying was that babies rarely have to be held accountable for any serious action - absent heavy machinery or dangerous materials, a baby can do very limited damage. A naked chimp who's a bit moody, though, can easily cause someone serious harm.
This is also true about, say, a severely autistic adult, who we still deem to be worthy of a wide variety of rights.
No worries, I typically comment the same way and I understand if not everything that is typed is a deeply held rigid opinion.
I agree that it would likely not be a good idea for chimps to live in human society, but I think a true rational analysis without invoking divine right would find that if we consider human individuals as possessing a basic right to life, we would find the same for chimps, dolphins, and probably many other animals (perhaps all the way to insects and bacteria).
The idea that they all need to live in our society to be treated fairly by the legal system is one that I think needs reexamining. Dolphins, for example, could simply never live in human society because they live underwater and humans do not. But we could find that a human who abuses a dolphin is depriving the dolphin of some legal right to live a non-abused life (I don't know what the legal term here is).
I think this is new legal territory, but I have a feeling that environmental protection lawyers will soon try to show that animals have inalienable rights just like humans. (I say it's new, but I also know that people have been working on this for a long time.)
So chimps and babies interface with society in different ways, but I feel like they both have a right to life. I mean, religious conservatives say that a fertilized egg has all the same rights as a living human - I see no reason why dolphins and non-human apes should be treated any differently. I know there is a legal history of treating animals like inanimate objects, but that doesn't seem to follow the spirit of our laws protecting the sovereignty of intelligent individuals. I see that changing somehow in the future.
How do you define "participate in society", though, and why does it have to be human society?
I'm not deeply invested into these topics (legal or otherwise), but as your typical 30-year old engineer who grew up on Star Trek, I guess I've always wondered if it's justified to not treat intelligent animals as persons just because they're dumber than us and/or not interested in negotiation. When certain criteria are met (e.g. just from the top of my head, the ability to be sufficiently self-aware to be aware of incarceration and not like it) it seems hard not to. Ultimately it just comes down to competing for living space and picking sides, perhaps.
I.e. you're saying that legislation regulating how humanity behaves towards non-human creatures inherently doesn't fit in with the concept of person? Seems like sort of a pattern reuse/layering issue to me.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really? It seems like a lot of the same stuff to me. Why do arguments end at species boundaries? They may be a legally uncooperative population, sure, but that can happen with groups of humans, too.
I'm not applying for sainthood here or anything; I'm a meat-eater, and I don't lose sleep at night over it - yet, anyway. But that I don't feel guilty doesn't necessarily make it right; I find these things worth mulling.
you're saying that legislation regulating how humanity behaves towards non-human creatures inherently doesn't fit in with the concept of person?
No, I'm saying that the concept of person is inherently linked to humanity (incl. human society) and therefore non-human creatures are only judged as "people" if they can approximate humanity to some level.
The fact that we find it natural that "smart" non-humans like chimpanzees and dolphins are better candidates to being classified as persons is evidence of that: after all, why should smartness/intelligence be the classifier? It's because that's what distinguishes us.
Also, given that all species on the planet exist in the same evolutionary tree, I guess I find species distinctions somewhat arbitrary. What's the meaningful biological difference between a chimp and a not very smart human, really?
That's like asking what's the meaningful difference in terms of physics between a human and a rock, since we're both bags of carbon. Law simply isn't designed to work at the biological level. It's a social construction.
I was using their standard, not my own. Personally, I only entertain the notion of personhood with entities which are known to be capable of asserting it themselves.
So if Data shows up someday, I'm happy to welcome him. But I'm not going to go into contortions over how intelligent something is or might be unless they're able to pose these questions themselves.
I've never been impressed by the 'speciesist' argument, either. I have yet to find a person who has not killed a mosquito, or who is against wiping out deadly diseases and I find the very construction of the word designed to be emotionally manipulative.
> Personally, I only entertain the notion of personhood with entities which are known to be capable of asserting it themselves.
I think that's an interesting yard stick worth discussing. The problem seems to be to me that it leaves you free to treat a creature as a non-person until it complains, and complains in a way you understand and recognize as asserting personhood. I think that's erring on the side of us making the right call in these matters, and giving the possible ramifications of getting it wrong, I think I'd prefer a more careful approach that doesn't put all of the burden of proof on the creature.
I believe that any creature capable of asserting personhood would be able to show indicia of moderately advanced civilization. If there were good evidence to be uncertain, I could understand caution.
I do not have such evidence regarding chimps. As best I can tell, the studies where they attempted to teach them sign language show otherwise.
You can't kill someone for biting you. The disparity in how we perform self defense is speceisist. As are a whole lot of ordinary things that everyone does, which is why I don't buy into the argument to begin with.
That would not generally rise to the level of lethal force. People also kill flies, roaches, etc. and the self defense justification is a lot more flimsy there, particularly when people will preemptively attempt to wipe them out, based on the assumption that they will do bad things... because of their species.
Interestingly, that also points to one sort of intelligence. That is to say, you can't assume anything about how a person will behave simply because of what race they are. You can reasonably do so with unintelligent animals (e.g. you can assume a mosquito will bite you, given a chance).
I don't think you'd get very far with such a definition for any other -ism. Moreover, we do things like attempting to wipe out entire organisms (e.g. malaria mosquitoes) simply based on what the average one does, whether or not any particular mosquito would have bitten a human.
So you'll have a hard time unless you add lots of special cases to it.
>And all such distinctions are, by definition, 'speciesist'.
not. Recognizing difference in sentience level not necessarily means "specie-ism", for example between a human with severe autism and a "normal" human.
That's deeply irrational - you're OK with horrible things happening to Chimp X because Chimp Y does horrible things, and so might Chimp X given the opportunity? I agree that chimpanzees can be quite horrible, but then so can people - by this argument we should just carry out medical testing on whoever, because given the chance anyone might behave like Hitler.
Does anyone here support both the granting of habeus corpus to chimpanzees as well as the legalized killing of unborn humans in the womb? How do you rationalize it?
>Does anyone here support both the granting of habeus corpus to chimpanzees as well as the legalized killing of unborn humans in the womb? How do you rationalize it?
sentience level. Chimpanzee has higher sentience than a 4-weeks old fetus which has sentience level of a fish.
I'm all for granting protections and rights (and responsibilities coming with it) according to sentience level independently of species. This in particular would equate an adult chimpanzee and 3-4 year toddler and senile 95 years old with advanced Alzheimer.
I can hunt and eat a deer, which has roughly the sentience level than my 6-month old baby. Are you saying we should confer more rights on the deer, or less on my child?
You asked others to justify their views. I'm curious how you justify yours rationally. By what rational basis is a deer less worthy of (any particular) rights than a fetus?
Do you argue that the human species is special and distinct from other animals in some categorical way that leads to the establishment of these rights for any human individual? It seems obvious to many people that we're just mammals, more capable than other mammals in some ways and less capable in other ways, and that all of our differences are more quantitative than qualitative, and that any line you draw ("You must be this smart to live") is arbitrary and can't be justified rationally.
Do you argue that you should grant more rights to an individual of your own species than to one of a different species? That premise is hard to argue with, but it seems absurd if you consider a hypothetical planet with two intelligent species.
I understand that the primacy of homo sapiens seems obvious to most people, but most people don't ever bother to question this idea. Consider that most vegetarians and vegans have probably thought about this topic more than you have. Obviously that doesn't prove them right and you wrong -- but by the way you posed your challenge it seems like you expected there to be no rational response. So put yourself in the shoes of a vegetarian for a minute and struggle with your own worldview for a second: how do you rationalize your worldview?
> By what rational basis is a deer less worthy
> of (any particular) rights than a fetus?
Because the deer is not a person, while a fetus is. I hold this to be more than mere tautology. I believe it's the more rational, intellectually consistent viewpoint.
> Do you argue that the human species is special and
> distinct from other animals in some categorical way <snip>?
Yes.
> Do you argue that you should grant more rights
> to an individual of your own species than to one
> of a different species? That premise is hard to
> argue with, but it seems absurd if you consider a
> hypothetical planet with two intelligent species.
In your hypothetical, I don't think I would argue for granting more rights to my own species. It's hard to say, because I've never been introduced to either of these hypothetical species. I will say that I don't worry too much when the rationality of my viewpoints is called into question by a wildly hypothetical corner case. (I don't see a clear analogy between your hypothetical and my original question).
> ...we're just mammals, more capable than other
> mammals in some ways and less capable in other ways,
> and that all of our differences are more
> quantitative than qualitative...
> ...
> I understand that the primacy of homo sapiens seems
> obvious to most people...
Would you consider the fact that a human fetus can grow up to write a play, learn to sing, discover electricity, debate ethics, and express incredibly deep emotion to be qualitative or quantitative differences from chimps or dolphins?
Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge.
I'm not advocating for animal cruelty or torture at all. But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care?
I will say that I don't worry too much when the rationality of my viewpoints is called into question by a wildly hypothetical corner case. (I don't see a clear analogy between your hypothetical and my original question).
Why would there be an analogy between my hypothetical and your original question? The role of the hypothetical is not to be a corner case, it's to urge you to consider a scenario that's different from our current corner-case. Being a member of the only high-intelligence species on the planet is a corner-case -- for us the "all other species" set and the "all non-intelligent species" set are equivalent. It's worth asking how your viewpoint holds up when that's not the case.
Would you consider the fact that a human fetus can grow up to write a play, learn to sing, discover electricity, debate ethics, and express incredibly deep emotion to be qualitative or quantitative differences from chimps or dolphins?
Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge
Huge by some reckoning I guess. Would you consider the fact that other apes can use tools, raise young, mourn death, form complex social relationships, and teach skills quantitative differences or qualitative differences compared to other mammals? You can do it at every level all the way until you reach single-cell organisms. Do you not see that you're just special-casing your own species because you happen to be a member of it and because it happens to be at the top? I know you don't like hypotheticals, but let's say we weren't at the top, and the species at the top could describe all the skills they have that we don't. I don't suppose you'd say "okay, they are worthy of rights, but I'm not." You'd continue arbitrary suggesting that only those at your level and above are worthy of rights.
But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care?
We're not like them, that's why we care. We're much more intelligent than them, so much so that we have the capacity to treat them with compassion. It is your viewpoint -- to eat anything you can kill that's not of your species and that tastes good -- that is similar to the ape's. If you extrapolate from the way humanity is progressing, you'll come to the conclusion that one day, long after both you and I are dead, your viewpoint will be considered barbaric.
i said it clearly - we should confer equal rights on both independently of species, including the specific right of not being killed.
To "zigzero" below: your desire to kill a highly sentient living being just to satisfy your urge for some peculiar taste you like is ridiculous. Mommy, i want a candy, a-aaa-a! Time to grow up.
Unless you live in a society where hunting for food is essential to ensure your own survival, I believe a lot of people are prepared to disagree with you.
I've heard this argument before, but I don't quite understand the logic. I really struggle to come up with any other ethic I hold where it doesn't break down:
- Unless you live in a society where raping young boys is essential to your survival, it's wrong.
- The racism of the past was OK, but as a society we've moved past the need for it, so now it's morally wrong.
What's an example of another moral or ethic that you would say follows this pattern of being malleable across space and time? Is this just ends-justify-the-means moral relativism?
What about animal testing? Most people think torturing animals is wrong, but are ok with it when it is necessary to save humans.
In fact I can think of many examples where something is a crime unless it is necessary for survival. In law there is even a concept of "necessity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity) that says it's ok to commit some crimes in some circumstances when it is necessary, e.g. self defense.
> Is this just ends-justify-the-means moral relativism?
no. At some point we, as a species and civilization, mature to the point where we understand that "thing A" is unacceptable. It happened to slavery, raping (violently or statutory) children, etc... Actual stopping of such things takes time and organized effort and practically happens in stages. It is just naturally happens what the last, most hardest, place of getting rid of "thing A" is where that thing is performed for survival. We know that it is wrong, and many people work to stop it from happening, it just takes more time and effort, and for the time being in such cases for political reasons "exceptions" are sometimes granted - a tradeoff made to minimize evil until that evil is completely eradicated.
So in short - it isn't "an evil thing stops being evil when for survival", instead it is "an evil thing is much harder to get rid off when it is for survival".
> Does anyone here support both the granting of habeus corpus to chimpanzees as well as the legalized killing of unborn humans in the womb?
The granting of habeas corpus to chimpanzees in this case is a method of allowing a legal argument as to their status to be heard and decided; it isn't a grant of personhood so much as a granting someone the right to make an argument on their behalf that they are entitled to such a grant.
The status of fetuses and the limits on the power of states to grant them rights that would interfere with a woman's right to choose vis-à-vis abortion has been litigated fairly exhaustively to the highest courts.
Judges setting legal precedent is an inherently political issue. The article is political in nature. I'm asking HNers to explain a relevant philosophical belief they hold. It seems squarely on-topic.
I believe anyone should be able to get any medical procedure they need in order to maximize their health and happiness. The needs of a fetus don't outweigh the needs or rights of the mother. A fetus is not a person.
The top result[0], from what appears to be a pro-choice activist site, is an article purporting to take on the argument that a fetus is a person. After reading the article, do you think it represents a mindset which is willing to reconsider its views in light of empirical evidence or any scientific study?
Personhood is not (except in the sense of "what entities currently have the legal status of 'person'?") a fact question, and therefore "empirical evidence or scientific study" can't even in principal say much about it.
So if science (the study of empirical evidence) is abdicating its responsibility to define who does and doesn't count as a person, to which branch of human thought should we submit the question? Philosophy? Religion? Psychology?
What do each of them say in regards to the distinct nature of a person?
HN makes for a pretty science-and-empirical-evidence-friendly crowd. I'm pretty sure each discipline (and probably more) has some idea what constitutes a person. My original question was meant to suss out where different people derived their definition of personhood from, and see if those conclusions had been arrived at by following facts or some other rational line of thought.
Of course it can. Personhood is a philosophical concept in addition to a legal one. Empirically verifiable criteria can be and are set for what constitutes a person.
I think the error here is treating "unborn human" as a single type of creature. A 2 week embryo is not the same as a 18 week fetus. That's why many (most?) abortion laws only authorized it during the first few weeks of gestation.
So, regarding your question, we can't. That's why we don't allow for the abortion of any unborn person, just a subset.
Your analogy is not a correct anymore than saying because a newborn baby is not an adult, therefore, the baby is not a human. I don't think it's an error we treat both a newborn and an adult as a "single type of creature".
I didn't make an analogy. I'm saying that an early stage unborn simply doesn't have the features that make it a person or be able to have desires. Like a working brain.
Yes, sorry if that seemed like a troll-ish question, but it wasn't. You made a claim, and while I could assume I understand your reasoning, I'd rather know what you think, not what I think you think.
Throw the chimp in a pool. If the chimp swims out, it seems to have a (at least instinctual) desire to not drown. Put it into a more complex situation where the danger would only be recognizable through reasoning, see if it still tries to live.
Honestly I would be very surprised if infant humans passed this, let alone unborn babies. I doubt a non-instinctual desire to remain alive can exist before that entity has the ability to recognize death as a concept and possibility. From what I have seen of babies, they just aren't that smart. I mean come on, they have to learn that they have hands, how could they have a conscious desire to preserve their own life before they are even aware of their full body?
Can you name something that's not a thought experiment where a chimp has shown that higher level of reasoning? Where they show a preference specifically about their own life/death.
Edit: For example, an especially good test for a human would be a button that gives a mild zap when you press it, but if it goes unpressed then you die in your sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning. That shows actual preference for life, and not just running away from a negative stimulus.
> Honestly I would be very surprised if infant humans
> passed this, let alone unborn babies.
This is where I make the completely bonkers claim that drowning infants is just plain worse across the board than drowning chimps.
If there were 5 babies and 5 chimps drowning in the pool, I'd have no hesitation to save the 5 babies first, and I would expect prosecution for negligence if I didn't and the babies died. I don't think this is merely a desire to save "my own" species for some weird sake of solidarity. I think it's a reasonable discernment of the relative value of the lives at stake.
> From what I have seen of babies, they just aren't that smart.
Well, they certainly don't have a lot of experiential knowledge, but they're incredibly fast learners (I have 5). Though I'm not disagreeing that, especially during their nascent stages, they can't do nearly as many neat tricks as the adult chimp. ;-)
In fact is the opposite. Chimps can not float, too muscular (muscles are heavy) and babies have a very good diving reflex that keep his mouths closed by instinct whereas under water. Is probably that babies will stay alive longer. Is complicated to swim if you can't even float.
In any case is a bad testing design that can not prove nothing. And unnecessary also, we should safely assume that every creature want to stay alive and have as many descendands as they can. Testing should try to discover exceptions, not to find unrelated facts that can fit our rule.
They cry when hungry. Even if they do not consciously desire life, they consciously desire not to starve, to not feel pain, to not feel too cold or too hot.
My earliest memory was from when I couldn't talk and remember deliberately shaking the bells attached to my leg to attract my mothers attention. Granted I was most probably over a year old then.
I thought there was also a great ape rights campaign called GRASP, but it looks like they lost their domain name (it's now registered by a Christian group with a nearly opposite view on the connection between species and legal personhood).
Not necessarily - babies, people with altered/reduced mental capacity, etc... are all legal persons, but not generally held responsible for the legal consequences of their actions.
I don't think mentally ill people are especially likely to rip your face off, and by insinuating otherwise you are contributing to the stigma surrounding mental illness. See http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/about-us/reports-stud... for some scientific background on the relationship between mental illness and violence. I would vastly prefer to be in a room with a mentally ill person than a chimpanzee.
Good. Current laws and views are very specie-ist. It's awkward for current society but some primates and dolphins are obviously sentient and should have protection. Of course they can't just fit in easily, so I suppose they have to be treated in some ways like a very retarded child.
Another issue: It's OK if a human engages in sexual activity with another human, but if a non-human does it, all of a sudden it's a terrible crime? Dolphins apparently rape for fun, so we can assume they are consenting if they go initiate or respond well to human contact.
I don't actually care about animals from an empathetic level, I just dislike the inelegance that happens from special-casing laws.
Is more about domination (or exploration, penis is used to touch things also, dolphins don't have hands) than about fun. (Some) dolphins rape females and also other younger male dolphins and some male dolphins kill baby dolphins and also porpoises. Is relatively normal in their societies. Some dolphins are nicer (from our own point of view) than others.
So if dolphins are people, should be respect its culture or try to educate this dolphins to not do this?
Why should an rapist dolphin have more protection than a virtuous non-rapist and beautiful bluefin tuna, or even than a virtuous non-rapist, sociable and vegan anchovy citizen?
This is the type of nonsense questions and problems that we are creating. We spend hours and hours talking about this problems and meanwhile, the sixth extinction runs faster... Everybody is talking about if bottlenose dolphins are people or not, nobody talks about the 80 last californian vaquitas remaining in the planet. Is very sad.
It is along this line of thinking that activist end game is to prevent people from having pets; first start with specie that exhibit resemblance and some intelligence; parrots are smarter; then move on to new ground once the foothold is established.
So if by chance freedom is rewarded, how does anyone act on it? Return them to their specie country of origin? Build special approved habitats permanently funded by some new form of tax on zoo tickets, pet products, or the like? The down the road implications are not simple
Were we to accord the rights of freedom and choice to animals, those that would rather stay with their human families would not be barred from doing so. In truth, if the relationship between a pet and its owner isn't symbiotic and mutually desired, it may be worth breaking.
Excellent! The more we see of this, the more likely it is we'll see something similar with sentient machines, when they come around. Interesting to note that those die-hard people I know of wanting to "defend humanity" against this kind of thing also don't seem to mind corporate personhood.
Because the whole point of building these things is to make our lives easier. If we have to take care of them as if they were human beings, then they are not worth building. We already have humans. Roughly speaking, I want robots that will do stuff that people normally don't like doing, 24/7 with no holidays or days off. If we have to give robots days off and otherwise treat them as equals because they are counted as persons, then why on earth do we need them? Biosupremacy all the way.
I think when people worry aloud about hostile AI they're really projecting the attitude you have here - I got here first, so I don't care about whatever sentient individual arrived later. Historically, this has not proved to be a sustainable position, as eventually enslaved populations come to the realization that they have little incentive to cooperate in their own enslavement.
> Historically, this has not proved to be a sustainable position
That's true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that in this hypothetical case we are in complete control of their sentience. If we can program them to never ever rebel, we should. If we can't, then we shouldn't create them in the first place.
I personally think that sentience (and thus maximal interpersonal utility) is only possible to the extent that it's possible to anticipate someone else's desire by modeling it in terms of one's own. The degree to which I can imagine what you want depends on the ability to imagine myself in your position, and once that happens there's always the possibility that I might find occupying your position to be more desirable than remaining in my own.
I built my children out of whatever my wife was eating + a bit of material on my part.
How something came into existence shouldn't determine if its intelligence deserves protecting. Creating intelligent machines and torturing them, for instance, should definitely be a criminal act.
And if brain scanning/emulation catches up enough, then what? It's OK to torture a non-human intelligence if the source wasn't a brain scan? What if we start building our own out of composites or scratch?
Intelligence/capacity for suffering should be the deciding factor here. (And hopefully they'll breed more stupid animals for meat, until it's feasible to grow meat directly.)
Modders need to be more careful in modding. The difference between AI/robot and humanity is indeed a biological one. I know that giving important to sex is something geek culture frowns upon, but when we are talking about 'creating' a different organism, I don't see why pointing out the blatant difference is such a problem.
Desks and tables are not, as far as I know, sentient.
Why is it relevant whether they were created from sand and metal by bald apes, or from carbon and water by the autonomous processes that happen in a bald ape's crotch?
> Why is it relevant whether they were created from sand and metal by bald apes, or from carbon and water by the autonomous processes that happen in a bald ape's crotch?
It's not. The point is, we build them to serve us, otherwise they are not needed. I don't care if they're sentient or not, their purpose is to serve humanity.
No, just destroy it and avoid further problems. There is no point in creating artificial beings with the goal of "living". Normal flesh-and-blood people are pretty good at that, there is an abundance of them and we keep making more. We're facing more and more problems and we need AI research to solve them, not create new ones.
I disagree with your sentiment, but I'll upvote you because I think we need to be honest with ourselves that, for some subset of humans, this is very much the reasoning going on.
I'm not in favor of creating sentient machines, specifically because the tendency will be to use them as slaves.
How would that even be possible when constructing an AGI? Sure, we could instill them with a set of ethical guidelines that would require subservience, but, like human ethical guidelines, they could be broken or changed based on the situation.
My personal philosophy is that I will only entertain the question of personhood with any entity which is able, or may become able, to pose that question in the first place.
If there were a real, sentient robot, I would be more than willing to extend such rights.
If it's a first great, note it in Wikipedia/Legal_personality. Doesn't seem far fetched since corporations already are and generally behave more differently than individuals, human or chimp.
