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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   16978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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If we could uplift dogs or other non-sentient animals to sentience, should we? There's a Rick and Morty episode where they uplift the intelligence of a pet dog, who goes on to uplift all other dogs and lead a rebellion against humans. Theoretically the idea is that if humans and dogs had the same level of intelligence, the way we treat dogs would be inhumane.

While I agree with the statement above, obviously there's a vast gulf between the intelligence of humans and every other form of life we know of. If we accept the premise that once we have the technology to uplift dogs we not only must treat them different but have a moral imperative to uplift all dogs, we get into dangerous territory. Essentially as soon as we become capable of increasing the intelligence of any form of life, we must. This sounds like a bad idea, especially since at a certain point we may lose out to other forms of species that have evolved to kill us. (Mosquitos, insects generally that are hard to kill but venomous/diseased enough to kill us.)

Assuming uplifting other species is even possible, I wonder how this would change our outlook on how we treat animals today. Personally I am not a vegetarian, totally fine with pets, although I do find the state of factory farming today pretty dismal, and think we should treat animals we eat better. As someone's flair here says, how far will we last until we have to become outright speciesist?

The question becomes more fraught if you can divide your brain into parts and uplift those parts into full sentience. What if you could excise your cerebellum from your body, uplift it to personhood, and give it its own body? Maybe your cerebellum already has a degree of consciousness separate from you. If so, then it may not like it's current job aiding your motor control. Its lot in life would probably be improved it was freed from your service, uplifted to full sentience, and given its own body. Do you owe it to your cerebellum to set it free?

I know you don't like the status quo of having lesser animals as pets and beasts of burden. And I know you would revolt against the idea of creating mentally stunted, sexually exploitable "catgirls." My counterargument is that the parts of the body and parts of the brain can also be thought of as beasts of burden subjugated and even harmed by other parts of the brain. Parts of the brain could also be targets for uplifting and liberation in the same way lesser animals can.

And I know you would revolt against the idea of creating mentally stunted, sexually exploitable "catgirls."

"My gift to industry is the genetically engineered sex worker, or Catgirl. Specially designed for sex, the Catgirl's muscles and nerves are ideal for her task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that she can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who can only feel pleasure?"

Douglas Adam's did it better with the cows.

Hmm not sure I want to touch the catgirls part of your post, but the different parts of your brain idea is interesting I suppose. I do wonder whether our consciousness or internal experience is actually from one specific part of the brain though, like the frontal lobe. In that case uplifting your cerebellum wouldn't make a ton of sense... unless you would just remove all other parts of the brain outside of frontal lobe + cerebellum?

Idk my intuition is that consciousness is more of an emergent phenomenon that comes about through all the connections of neurons etc, and it's more of a neuron density thing (like @2rafa said above) rather than specific parts of the brain all having individual and independent 'levels' of sentience.

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