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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   17188 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?

I mean, selectively breeding dogs for intelligence seems like it would be scientifically valuable. I just think uplifting dogs to human level sentience is obviously terrible.

Haven't we done precisely that already though?

We domesticated dogs, but they’re a standard deviation dumber than wolves IIRC. We’ve selectively bred dogs for all sorts of things, but I don’t think intelligence is one of them- although some breeds are generally smarter than others(notably, breeds that do not make good pets but have very real world uses as working dogs are smarter and lap dogs tend to be dumb. Which is a datapoint I intend to use in any discussion of human genetic engineering for intelligence- most people aren’t big on keeping border collies and Dobermans as pets).

IDK about border collies - most people just don't have the space for one to run around to its hearts content - but there are definitely dobermann fans, particularly because the dogs tend to bond extremely hard with their owners.

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