From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@dsl.pipex.com)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 11:12:10 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> Now, my proposal was not in any way based on race or culture.
You presented an article on North Korea and concluded on the basis of
apparent cultural differences that it would be best to destroy them.
Your exact question was,
"How do extropians/transhumanists deal with very strong cultures with very
non-western priorities?"
Your solution was *destroying the culture in question*. That is genocide.
You keep making recourse to triage. So let's ask the unfortunate question,
"How does genocide differ from triage?" The argument I put forward in a
previous post, which you may not have seen, is simply that triage is
strongly situated, whereas your proposal (genocide) is not. For example, on
the battle field a doctor may have to choose who to treat first, this
requires a decision on the basis of the *relative* value of two or more
human lives. In the example you give of a NEO striking Earth, decisions
have to made based on *relative* valuations of the lives of thousands. In
your proposal, however, the situation isn't so clear. What is the situation
(or, more specifically, the threat) and how to do we establish relative
value between one human life and another? You introduce this rather awkward
idea of "potential life" to establish the threat: the threat is against the
creation of more life. An immediate problem is how open ended this is:
Isn't it always the case that "potential (more) life" is under threat?
Isn't this situation too vague, too general? Wouldn't we be doing this
"triage" all the time? At the very least, the situation is not clearly
delineated. Secondly, how do we establish relative value between one life
and another? This is where I think the real problem lies. You're not
establishing value between one life and another, you're establishing it
between life and *more* life. To me, this just seems like an awkward way of
asking, "What is the *absolute* value of human life?" And this is where you
step outside triage, because there is no situation, there is no relative
valuation of human life, there's just this un-situated, absolute value.
So, if we've established that this is *not* triage, there's still the open
question of what, precisely, is wrong with ascribing an absolute value to
life. I agree with you on two points: (1) the question you're asking *is*
"extropic," inasmuch as extropy seems to embrace an idea of life
(complexity, extropy) as an absolute Good and strives for its increase and
proliferation; and (2) simply invoking a base morality in response to the
question doesn't quite cut it. My own position on this is simply that the
extropian affirmation of life/complexity/extropy is incoherent. Complexity,
I would argue, is the very definition of something that is purely relative,
complexity is observed by complexity, observable complexity is probably
directly correlated to the complexity of the observer. And all this needs
to carry the disclaimer that I don't propose to know precisely what I mean
by "complexity" but have a general idea (I mean, of course,
life/complexity/extropy, that object of our affirmation, rather than, say,
algorithmic complexity, which might have something to do with it but is
clearly not the whole picture). Your mileage may vary.
BM
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