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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.

The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.

I will offer myself as an example of someone who believes that humans are special and have value in a way that a machine can never have, but who also believes that there are other reasons to grant personhood to machines (or other entities such as alien life). I've already given one: we're basically forced, in a Molochian sense, to grant personhood to anyone or anything whose allyship is important enough. This is analogous to how one can be a nationalist, yet treat foreigners as persons for pragmatic reasons.

All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.

I would not conflate having a theory for how personhood is granted in practice, with a "religious" belief. I'm open to being wrong about this theory; it's falsifiable.

Of course here we're straying from the idea of personhood as some innate quality and into some arbitrary social category. As someone who likes natural law it irks me. But alright.

I'm ready to debate the pragmatic argument for giving machines personhood, that one is indeed not a religious debate. But I still come on the side of the Butlerian Djihad here. I think extending moral consituency to objects is a terrible thing to do and strictly bad for humans.

Consider how someone could be executed for destroying a machine that isn't alive, as that would be murder. Unless you can make a compelling argument that this is a required compromise for humanity to even survive (which I'm not convinced we have enough data to even speculate on), how could you allow such a thing to happen? It seems as abominable to me as doing so for killing a pet.

I am convinced not even the smartest dog is worth one human life. Am wholly ready to extend this reasoning to aliens. And I would like to see the argument you can even make for machines.

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