Cognitive Thrift 15 – Smarts
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/25
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s one extension there into the life support systems. The direct Golden Rule goes to individuals with an increasing moral sphere of concern. Following from that, every entity exists in a context and requires some form of support system.
Computers require materials and electricity. Human beings require food, and air, and water, and a clean living, for instance. So, life support systems are also important in terms of proper treatment as an indirect form of that as well.
Rick Rosner: Yea – the context of existence also is a consideration – like, you cannot do a lot for salmon at the end of their life cycles. You might be able to do something for the salmon swimming upstream to do whatever they do when they get upstream to deposit then die. They evolved to be that way.
It is to some extent a bummer, and to some extent you must balance against it being – eventually we’re going to have to look at nature and see how much we want to meddle.
If – I imagine a science fiction-ey world, not one that is going to pass, 50, 80, 100 years from now with all animal being mentally actualized, everything is smarter – deers are smarter, bears are smarter, raccoons, dogs.
Everybody’s been smartened via some weird genetic plus some biotechnical tweaking, and in this world if a bear eats a deer. The bear is responsible for absorbing the deer’s life experience, and so now the deer is kind of riding piggyback inside the bear’s head as just one of the –
You can imagine a vampire story that’s like that. Vampires designed by some alien civilization to when they suck blood they are also sucking the life experience of the person whose blood they are sucking, and it is just an alien civilization’s way of gathering data on humans, which is all crazy ridiculous science fiction.
However, in a smartened-up world, there are going to be all sorts of things that are thinking and feeling that we don’t have right now. We are going to have to make decisions about how much consideration those things deserve.
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