Less human then cylons

First I want to apologise to the five people who actually read this blog. This is way too long to read (3 pages in Word – Arial 10) and incoherent. When I started to write I didn’t plan to go on and on rambling but now that I let it out I feel much better. Anyway feel free to skip this. It is just something that let me sort some thoughts about sentience, personhood and ability to make choices.

I’m fascinated by the SF ideas. The possible futures it presents. The possible technologies and how they may change our lives. After all we live in a very SF times when technology becomes an essential part of our everyday life. Most of those speculations are probably wrong but still they manage to reduce the future shock. Preparation for the weird.

One of the most popular SF themes lately is recording personalities. The many variations of recording one’s mind and then reloading it into a machine or a new body. You can become a virtual angel or a get a new life. Immorality for everyone.

New body can be a clone of your old one or something else entirely. And in some versions of the story the bodies can be recycled. I would prefer going back to my own body but that can be seen as just a old, technologically backwards people squeamishness. After all who wouldn’t want to try to be someone else? If you can chose your looks why not? Be who you want to be not what some genetic lottery made you. And getting yourself something form catalogue would probably be cheaper then having it custom made just for you.

These are the ideas I find exciting rather then wrong. I’m all for such future, even though I’m sure it’ll generate as many problem as it’ll solve. After all you can find what can go wrong in SF too. I, however, have no ethical problems with that technology in general. Actually, I want it.

But cloning and producing blank bodies is one thing. The memory transfer is another. The far future SF often treats it like one thing but these are two separate technologies coming from two different science fields. They don’t have to be developed simultaneously. And when we get one without the other many strange things can happen.

I never considered cloning people as something particularly wrong. Certainly not the ethic disaster media make it to be. After all clones would be people like any others. Do you think identical twins are less human then you? And what about the identical twins born years apart – as it happens with some of embryos from in vitro fertilisations even now – are they not both equally human? Clones are no different – just people who share your whole genetic code but are not you. The only problem I see (besides ‘what for’) is that the cloning is a very experimental technique that still has too many flaws. It can create sick, rapidly aging individuals and it is wrong to do that to your children on purpose. I think, however, that the research for cloning should be continued. It can give us cloned organs which would resolve problem of lack of donors and transplant rejection and give us meat without suffering of animals. And some day it may give us replacement bodies. But only if we learn how to transfer minds first.

The memory transfer has more technical and ethical problems involved. How to make sure it’s really you? Make sure that all is recorded, that no one hacks and changes you. And writing down is just one step. What happens with you afterwards is another thing. Just keep you stored till you can get new life? But for how long? Run your mind in a computer generated reality? Make it a VR personality/robot? But will you be the same person if you don’t have body with its hormones and tweaks? Would you think the same way without neurons and the ancient, lizard brain centres? How does physical platform affect personality? So many questions. So maybe it’d be best to be put in a body. But what if the tech to remake your body isn’t there yet? Maybe you’d have to get it from someone else.

Richard Morgan showed something similar in Altered Carbon – the society where someone’s body is treated like any other property one has and can be requisitioned for debt or taken away when one is in prison. And then can be rented or bought by someone else. It's an unfair world run by the big corporations where the profit is all that matters. Not right but legal. You can also imagine people selling time share for their bodies to the dead. One body and a collective of souls (I’ve read that too somewhere I think).

 

( Cut for lenght and Dollhouse spoilers )

 

This is what I love about SF most. As John Scalzi wrote – this is what SF is for. It can force us to think about ethical problems that don’t even exist yet. It certainly made me realise where I stand on some ethical issues.

All the thinky thoughts Dollhouse made me think. And this means I liked it. A lot.