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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Me. It's not her child and she had signed a contract.

I'm glad you responded. But

It's not her child and she had signed a contract

The bio parents don't want the child. Even ignoring that a child isn't property and did not sign (at this point they're born, and even before then, I see abortion as a lesser evil); if somebody doesn't want something for themselves, why should they be allowed to deny others?

The fetus is absolutely their property. Should IVF clinics be allowed to use your frozen eggs without your consent if you don't need them?

By that logic, why not go full Murray Rothbard, and declare children to be the parents' property?

Because some of us think that fetuses are qualitatively different from children. Children meet my definition of sentient human beings, but fetuses don't.

You don't meet the definition either when you're unconcious.

Since you apparently presume to know my definition, can you state it in your own words?

Sorry, was reading too fast and parsed "my" as "the". Feel free to explain to me why you think you're sentient when you're unconcious.

As I said in a different subthread, for me "human" is more load-bearing than "sentient" here, so I don't particularly like abbreviating to the latter, but sure.

In short, I take humans' moral value to lie in the unique configuration that their hardware compresses the totality of their human life experience into - more poetically, their "memories and personality", and more mechanistically, in ML terms, the "weights" as opposed to the "architecture".

Slightly related to the common computationalist saying that compression is intelligence: many years worth of human qualia is a large pile of mildly interesting data, but that information lossily squeezed into ~1kg of meat in a way that enables the meat to act in interesting ways and reprocess/reproduce parts of that data is a marvel.

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