A history textbook will probably help then. The development of civilization has been one long history of extending moral rights to wider categories of persons based on being more honest about their capacities, based on them standing up and defending their dignity, based on long experience DEALING with other people and their interests: it isn't some amoral rule "anything genetically human is for no reason forbidden from being killed." If we discovered a sentient race of aliens, murder wouldn't be permissible simply because they don't technically fit the description. The point of morality is that it's supposed to be ABOUT something, not just random rules no one has any clue the purpose of.
I never mentioned genetics being the determining factor in this debate. That was a straw man you set up. And you're still avoiding the question. You said that you were "using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.". What is this concept (or definition) of humanity, and when was it developed? You say that our inclusion of people in the category of "human" has grown and expanded over history. That's arguably true, but show me a time when people didn't consider their developing children human.
False. No one knew anything about when anything began. The "moment" of conception didn't exist until people knew of the existence of sperm and eggs.
They knew sex caused babies. They knew that the fetus was *there* long before it was detectable (ever since they'd figured out animal husbandry, at least). No, they might not have known that the fetus ever existed as a single cell generated through the fusion of sperm and egg, but they had a vague idea of it being there.
In the case of your old man, it's horrible because the old man has concerns, cares, rights, and desires not to be killed, whether painlessly or no, and we can appreciate these things ourselves.
My dog has concerns, cares and desires not to be killed; the only thing lacking to make killing him murder then is "rights", which are nothing but legal definitions, or, as you put it, "amoral rules". What you're essentially saying then is that it's only wrong to murder someone who has "rights", and that we as a group get to decide who has those rights. So killing someone is only murder if everyone else agrees that they had a right to live. I don't know what view that is, but it's not the historical one. A human, generally, has been defined as the offspring of a human. How do you tell if someone is a human? Was their dad a human? Was their mum a human? Then they're human too. Historically, many societies have included the fetus in that category (in Jewish law, for example, the death of the fetus of a pregnant woman was treated as murder). They didn't have any real way to determine whether a zygote, or very young embryo was present, so we can't really look to their laws for precedent in the matter of dealing with the issue. The only difference between a zygote and a fetus is that of time - one will eventually grow into the other. A zygote is not like a fingernail cell, which will never grow into a human, nor like a sperm or egg, which, by itself, will never grow into a human.
Simply put, stem cells are basically instructions on how to go about building a human being and tiny but incomplete amount of the right raw materials. At their stage, the process has barely even begun. Stopping construction at that stage isn't in any way akin to destroying even a fetus.
Stem cells are, sure. I have no problem with culturing existing stem-cells. But the original stem cells were harvested from a embryo - a zygote that has divided at least once, generally many times before it was harvested. You form a zygote by putting together a sperm and an egg. And as soon as those two things are put together, they begin developing into a human embryo, and then on into a human fetus. Sure, if that fusion is performed in a laboratory, the embryo has no chance of developing, lacking esse
No we aren't. I'm using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.
Huh? Point me to some record of these historical ethics, as I'm not aware of anyone taking your stance on these issues until the twentieth century.
You are using a bizarre misreading of the concept by applying the word "human" to something the vast majority of people who worked out why human life is important never even knew existed in the first place.
Of course they knew it existed. They didn't know its particular makeup like we do today, but they knew where babies came from. They just didn't place any distinction between 1-hour old fetus, and 6-month old fetus.
Stem cells do not care about things, feel pain, have friends and relations, and so on. Not one of the things that makes murder so horrible applies.
So what you're saying is it'd be ok for me to kill the old guy down the street who lives alone and doesn't have any friends or relatives, as long as I do it painlessly? None of those things are what makes murder horrible, what makes murder horrible is the act itself.
Randomly calling something "human" for no reason other than genetics isn't ethics, it's just being a litteralist without any sense of why human life is important in the first place. It's nihilistic rule following without any sense of what the rules are for.
And I'd say denying a developmental human's humanity just for the pragmatic reason that you want its cells is abhorrent. Both of us are applying the labels of "human" and "non-human" fairly arbitrarily. The difference is that if I'm right, you're endorsing murder. Whereas if you're right, all I'm doing is slowing down a particular field of scientific endeavour. I know which I'd rather.
The only reason why some people say there's any ethical issue with doing research on discarded embryos from AI cases is because they've got a religious bee in their bonnet about getting a soul at conception and every sperm being sacred
It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with not wanting to murder people. It's not a case of "getting a soul at conception", it's a case of "being human at conception".
You say embryoes are not human life, and therefore killing them is not murder. Fine. Justify that statement. When does an embryo become human? What criteria determine when basic human rights accrue to an embryo, and why? These are the ethical questions, and they are entirely independant from any religion. Because so far, answers to those questions have not been backed up with any ethical reasoning.
As an aside, a future where the only music is that commissioned by movie moguls and television producers seems terrible.
Yeah, it does, but a future where the majority of music is commissioned by pools of fans seems less so, to me at least. After all, most of the music produced now is essentially being commissioned by the music industry - if you dont do it like they want it, you don't get signed. Of course, there are indies now, and there will probably be indies then. They are the "art-for-arts-sake" artists, and they'll always be there.
If you're going to extrapolate, you can't just stop at an arbitrary point.
Ok, so the abolition of copyright has lead to destruction of the music industry. Only the very few art-for-art's sake type musicians still release music.
Is there still a demand for music? Yes? Then there is the potential for a market. Obviously the market won't operate on the basis of selling a single song many times cheaply due to copyright. What would the artist do? Demand money up-front. Instead of working "on-spec", the artist works on commission. Either a rich guy commissions a song/album, or a coalition of moderately wealthy people (fans) pool their money to commission an album. End result: artist gets paid, music gets made.
Such a scheme wouldn't work know - why would any consumer go to that length of trouble when they can go to the CD store and just buy an album for $25? But if the current distribution method died, the commission-based system would become attractive as the only way to get new music. That sort of shift would also have a noticable effect on the end product. In the current model, artists must write to please studios, so they can get in to the global distribution and publicity network the studios offer. In the commission-based model, artists must write to please their fans, or they're not going to get another commission after the first. It would probably also put commercial radio out of business.
As long as there is significant demand for music - and there has been throughout all recorded history - then music will be made. What changes is how, why and how much.
No, humans will never allow themselves to suffer the losses that would lead to that sort of evolution. Humans no longer adapt to their environment, they adapt their environment to them. The "survival of the fittest" mechanic of evolution doesn't really apply to humans any more, at least, not to humans in the western world. We have social and technological props to make sure that our unfit members don't die. The only sort of evolution we're going to see is "reproduction of the sexiest", and given how quickly the shifts in fashion and beauty move, those sort of pressures aren't going to be anywhere near consistent enough to produce a cohesive change in the human species.
Your statement only really holds true if homosexuality and piety are genetic traits. If homosexuality and piety are results of social influence rather than genetic, then no particular genetic material is going to be selected against.
electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do.
It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. The point of hydrogen in this context isn't to produce energy more efficiently - it's to store and distribute it more efficiently. Your statement is like saying "charging a battery is a really, really dumb thing to do. It's much more efficient to run straight from mains".
And you probably would have landed the job instead of getting into a semantics discussion with someone who obviously doesn't understand the technology.
A bit of a tangent, but how do you judge whether a country is "third world" or "second world". These terms seem to have changed an awful lot since they were coined. Originally, the "first world" was the west, the "second world" were the Russians, and the "third world" were those countries that weren't involved in the Cold War (although "third world" had an independant meaning prior to this). What criteria do you use when you judge that a nation isn't a "third world" country anymore? What do they have to do to become "first world"?
I know just as many people who play the pokies endlessly because they want that thrill of the win. Many more people have given up their careers (not to mention their houses, their savings, the clothes of their back) for the sake of another toss of the dice/deal of the cards/roll of the slots. Balance is important; it's easy for your recreation activity to take over and dominate your life. Computer gaming is just another example of an existing phenomenon, not a new phenomenon itself.
So how is that different from a small company that sells filesystems? If the company goes belly-up, not only do you lose support, but if the code is proprietary, you lose the possibility of there ever being anyone else able to support it. There are no guarantees when it comes to dealing with companies, any more than there are when you're dealing with people. People can die at any time, and companies can close down at any time.
Most debit cards I know of (ones issued by St. George, IMB, ANZ) use the VISA network. I believe Commonwealth Bank debit cards use the Mastercard network. Anything that accepts payments by VISA/Mastercard can accept payments by these cards. It functions exactly the same as a credit transaction, except it debits your account instead of extending your credit.
When I was at school, I spent a ton of time on the computer. I wasn't just gaming, I was programming too, but I still spent an awful lot of time playing games. But I'm fairly sure that my constant use of a computer is what got me interested in programming, and ultimately determined my career. My grades were good enough to get me in to do what I wanted to do (which is the only point of grades anyway). If my parents had forbidden me from using the computer 5 days a week, I doubt I would be as competant in my field, or even in my field at all.
As in all these studies, they present a general view only. Trying to apply them blindly to a particular individual is utter stupidity. If your kid is damaging themselves or their prospects by an unhealthy focus on a particular aspect of life (be that entertainment, sport, fashion, their weight, hobbies, popularity, whatever), then you need to take corrective action. You don't just ban them from every single thing that they might possibly become over-interested in. That's futile, and in the end, self-defeating.
That's the basic idea behind beamed solar power - and I'm afraid it's been covered quite heavily in sci-fi, so you're idea's not totally original:)
The main problem has always been getting power from there to here, since standard methods of transmission would result in so high a loss of energy as to make the idea impractical.
If the technique is changing the spin of an electron, does this mean it could potentially be used to transmit energy? Could this be used as a way to make beamed power a reality, since power transmitted in this manner would not be attenuated by the atmosphere (since it doesn't pass through the atmosphere) or accidentally miss the receiver?
It depends on why you have brand loyalty. Personally, I prefer nVidia stuff because all the ATI gear I've bought has had annoying driver/software problems. I have loyalty to nVidia, not because I think they are better in some abstract sense, but because based on past experience, their products have delivered more of what I'm looking for. Same for AMD; I used to buy AMD because, again, based on past experience, I could get a similar performance from a cheap AMD cheap as an Intel. All other things being equal (cost, price, performance, etc), I am more likely to go with a brand to whom I'm loyal - but they've got to have earned that loyalty by having a history of quality products. The important thing is to realize why you have loyalty to a certain brand, and be willing to re-evaluate your position when the quality of the brand you favour starts dropping.
I must have imagined the two-thirds of the movie that dealt with the crew of the shuttle and the news reporter who broke the story of the meteor to the world then.
Slashdot Mirror
A history textbook will probably help then. The development of civilization has been one long history of extending moral rights to wider categories of persons based on being more honest about their capacities, based on them standing up and defending their dignity, based on long experience DEALING with other people and their interests: it isn't some amoral rule "anything genetically human is for no reason forbidden from being killed." If we discovered a sentient race of aliens, murder wouldn't be permissible simply because they don't technically fit the description. The point of morality is that it's supposed to be ABOUT something, not just random rules no one has any clue the purpose of.
I never mentioned genetics being the determining factor in this debate. That was a straw man you set up. And you're still avoiding the question. You said that you were "using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.". What is this concept (or definition) of humanity, and when was it developed? You say that our inclusion of people in the category of "human" has grown and expanded over history. That's arguably true, but show me a time when people didn't consider their developing children human.
False. No one knew anything about when anything began. The "moment" of conception didn't exist until people knew of the existence of sperm and eggs.
They knew sex caused babies. They knew that the fetus was *there* long before it was detectable (ever since they'd figured out animal husbandry, at least). No, they might not have known that the fetus ever existed as a single cell generated through the fusion of sperm and egg, but they had a vague idea of it being there.
In the case of your old man, it's horrible because the old man has concerns, cares, rights, and desires not to be killed, whether painlessly or no, and we can appreciate these things ourselves.
My dog has concerns, cares and desires not to be killed; the only thing lacking to make killing him murder then is "rights", which are nothing but legal definitions, or, as you put it, "amoral rules". What you're essentially saying then is that it's only wrong to murder someone who has "rights", and that we as a group get to decide who has those rights. So killing someone is only murder if everyone else agrees that they had a right to live. I don't know what view that is, but it's not the historical one. A human, generally, has been defined as the offspring of a human. How do you tell if someone is a human? Was their dad a human? Was their mum a human? Then they're human too. Historically, many societies have included the fetus in that category (in Jewish law, for example, the death of the fetus of a pregnant woman was treated as murder). They didn't have any real way to determine whether a zygote, or very young embryo was present, so we can't really look to their laws for precedent in the matter of dealing with the issue. The only difference between a zygote and a fetus is that of time - one will eventually grow into the other. A zygote is not like a fingernail cell, which will never grow into a human, nor like a sperm or egg, which, by itself, will never grow into a human.
Simply put, stem cells are basically instructions on how to go about building a human being and tiny but incomplete amount of the right raw materials. At their stage, the process has barely even begun. Stopping construction at that stage isn't in any way akin to destroying even a fetus.
Stem cells are, sure. I have no problem with culturing existing stem-cells. But the original stem cells were harvested from a embryo - a zygote that has divided at least once, generally many times before it was harvested. You form a zygote by putting together a sperm and an egg. And as soon as those two things are put together, they begin developing into a human embryo, and then on into a human fetus. Sure, if that fusion is performed in a laboratory, the embryo has no chance of developing, lacking esse
No we aren't. I'm using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.
Huh? Point me to some record of these historical ethics, as I'm not aware of anyone taking your stance on these issues until the twentieth century.
You are using a bizarre misreading of the concept by applying the word "human" to something the vast majority of people who worked out why human life is important never even knew existed in the first place.
Of course they knew it existed. They didn't know its particular makeup like we do today, but they knew where babies came from. They just didn't place any distinction between 1-hour old fetus, and 6-month old fetus.
Stem cells do not care about things, feel pain, have friends and relations, and so on. Not one of the things that makes murder so horrible applies.
So what you're saying is it'd be ok for me to kill the old guy down the street who lives alone and doesn't have any friends or relatives, as long as I do it painlessly? None of those things are what makes murder horrible, what makes murder horrible is the act itself.
Nope. Not unless you consider the FDA to be committing murder ten times a day.
Randomly calling something "human" for no reason other than genetics isn't ethics, it's just being a litteralist without any sense of why human life is important in the first place. It's nihilistic rule following without any sense of what the rules are for.
And I'd say denying a developmental human's humanity just for the pragmatic reason that you want its cells is abhorrent. Both of us are applying the labels of "human" and "non-human" fairly arbitrarily. The difference is that if I'm right, you're endorsing murder. Whereas if you're right, all I'm doing is slowing down a particular field of scientific endeavour. I know which I'd rather.
The only reason why some people say there's any ethical issue with doing research on discarded embryos from AI cases is because they've got a religious bee in their bonnet about getting a soul at conception and every sperm being sacred
It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with not wanting to murder people. It's not a case of "getting a soul at conception", it's a case of "being human at conception".
You say embryoes are not human life, and therefore killing them is not murder. Fine. Justify that statement. When does an embryo become human? What criteria determine when basic human rights accrue to an embryo, and why? These are the ethical questions, and they are entirely independant from any religion. Because so far, answers to those questions have not been backed up with any ethical reasoning.
Seems appropriate as the rest of the world mistakes US for US government!
Which isn't entirely unreasonable, seeing as the US votes in the US government, unlike China.
while the US sits and debates politics and/or religion
No, what they're debating is called ethics.
As an aside, a future where the only music is that commissioned by movie moguls and television producers seems terrible.
Yeah, it does, but a future where the majority of music is commissioned by pools of fans seems less so, to me at least. After all, most of the music produced now is essentially being commissioned by the music industry - if you dont do it like they want it, you don't get signed. Of course, there are indies now, and there will probably be indies then. They are the "art-for-arts-sake" artists, and they'll always be there.
If you're going to extrapolate, you can't just stop at an arbitrary point.
Ok, so the abolition of copyright has lead to destruction of the music industry. Only the very few art-for-art's sake type musicians still release music.
Is there still a demand for music? Yes? Then there is the potential for a market. Obviously the market won't operate on the basis of selling a single song many times cheaply due to copyright. What would the artist do? Demand money up-front. Instead of working "on-spec", the artist works on commission. Either a rich guy commissions a song/album, or a coalition of moderately wealthy people (fans) pool their money to commission an album. End result: artist gets paid, music gets made.
Such a scheme wouldn't work know - why would any consumer go to that length of trouble when they can go to the CD store and just buy an album for $25? But if the current distribution method died, the commission-based system would become attractive as the only way to get new music. That sort of shift would also have a noticable effect on the end product. In the current model, artists must write to please studios, so they can get in to the global distribution and publicity network the studios offer. In the commission-based model, artists must write to please their fans, or they're not going to get another commission after the first. It would probably also put commercial radio out of business.
As long as there is significant demand for music - and there has been throughout all recorded history - then music will be made. What changes is how, why and how much.
No, humans will never allow themselves to suffer the losses that would lead to that sort of evolution. Humans no longer adapt to their environment, they adapt their environment to them. The "survival of the fittest" mechanic of evolution doesn't really apply to humans any more, at least, not to humans in the western world. We have social and technological props to make sure that our unfit members don't die. The only sort of evolution we're going to see is "reproduction of the sexiest", and given how quickly the shifts in fashion and beauty move, those sort of pressures aren't going to be anywhere near consistent enough to produce a cohesive change in the human species.
Your statement only really holds true if homosexuality and piety are genetic traits. If homosexuality and piety are results of social influence rather than genetic, then no particular genetic material is going to be selected against.
Ever used vaseline?
99% of slashdot
electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do. It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. The point of hydrogen in this context isn't to produce energy more efficiently - it's to store and distribute it more efficiently. Your statement is like saying "charging a battery is a really, really dumb thing to do. It's much more efficient to run straight from mains".
And you probably would have landed the job instead of getting into a semantics discussion with someone who obviously doesn't understand the technology.
This is supposed to be a good thing?
A bit of a tangent, but how do you judge whether a country is "third world" or "second world". These terms seem to have changed an awful lot since they were coined. Originally, the "first world" was the west, the "second world" were the Russians, and the "third world" were those countries that weren't involved in the Cold War (although "third world" had an independant meaning prior to this). What criteria do you use when you judge that a nation isn't a "third world" country anymore? What do they have to do to become "first world"?
I know just as many people who play the pokies endlessly because they want that thrill of the win. Many more people have given up their careers (not to mention their houses, their savings, the clothes of their back) for the sake of another toss of the dice/deal of the cards/roll of the slots. Balance is important; it's easy for your recreation activity to take over and dominate your life. Computer gaming is just another example of an existing phenomenon, not a new phenomenon itself.
So how is that different from a small company that sells filesystems? If the company goes belly-up, not only do you lose support, but if the code is proprietary, you lose the possibility of there ever being anyone else able to support it. There are no guarantees when it comes to dealing with companies, any more than there are when you're dealing with people. People can die at any time, and companies can close down at any time.
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
- E. C. Stanton
Most debit cards I know of (ones issued by St. George, IMB, ANZ) use the VISA network. I believe Commonwealth Bank debit cards use the Mastercard network. Anything that accepts payments by VISA/Mastercard can accept payments by these cards. It functions exactly the same as a credit transaction, except it debits your account instead of extending your credit.
When I was at school, I spent a ton of time on the computer. I wasn't just gaming, I was programming too, but I still spent an awful lot of time playing games. But I'm fairly sure that my constant use of a computer is what got me interested in programming, and ultimately determined my career. My grades were good enough to get me in to do what I wanted to do (which is the only point of grades anyway). If my parents had forbidden me from using the computer 5 days a week, I doubt I would be as competant in my field, or even in my field at all.
As in all these studies, they present a general view only. Trying to apply them blindly to a particular individual is utter stupidity. If your kid is damaging themselves or their prospects by an unhealthy focus on a particular aspect of life (be that entertainment, sport, fashion, their weight, hobbies, popularity, whatever), then you need to take corrective action. You don't just ban them from every single thing that they might possibly become over-interested in. That's futile, and in the end, self-defeating.
That's the basic idea behind beamed solar power - and I'm afraid it's been covered quite heavily in sci-fi, so you're idea's not totally original :)
The main problem has always been getting power from there to here, since standard methods of transmission would result in so high a loss of energy as to make the idea impractical.
If the technique is changing the spin of an electron, does this mean it could potentially be used to transmit energy? Could this be used as a way to make beamed power a reality, since power transmitted in this manner would not be attenuated by the atmosphere (since it doesn't pass through the atmosphere) or accidentally miss the receiver?
It depends on why you have brand loyalty. Personally, I prefer nVidia stuff because all the ATI gear I've bought has had annoying driver/software problems. I have loyalty to nVidia, not because I think they are better in some abstract sense, but because based on past experience, their products have delivered more of what I'm looking for. Same for AMD; I used to buy AMD because, again, based on past experience, I could get a similar performance from a cheap AMD cheap as an Intel. All other things being equal (cost, price, performance, etc), I am more likely to go with a brand to whom I'm loyal - but they've got to have earned that loyalty by having a history of quality products. The important thing is to realize why you have loyalty to a certain brand, and be willing to re-evaluate your position when the quality of the brand you favour starts dropping.
I must have imagined the two-thirds of the movie that dealt with the crew of the shuttle and the news reporter who broke the story of the meteor to the world then.