15. WHY SHOULD WE GIVE HUMAN RIGHTS TO MINDCLONES?

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.” Frederick Douglass

“An idea is salvation by imagination.” Frank Lloyd Wright

Consciousness will emerge from software that meets an objective definition of life. This arises as much from the efforts of hackers writing consciousness code as it does from the survival benefits of consciousness. Equally assured will be the efforts of sufficiently conscious vitology to seek human rights. Our confidence in this can be similarly grounded in both the creativity of hackers and natural selection. Hackers will want to protect their creations with knowledge of human rights. Natural selection will favor software that, through human intention or inadvertent patching together of open source code, tries to stay alive and replicate itself under the protection of ‘human rights.’ The question now before us is whether humanity should grant the wishes of high CP vitology for human rights. Just because they want it doesn’t mean we have to give it. Furthermore, even if we may want to extend human rights to software beings, is it practical to do so?

Justice Is Just About Us

Theories of justice provide the best reasons to extend human rights to cyberconsciousness that wants it. These theories derive human rights logically from nothing more than an assumption of reasoned self-interest. Specifically, it is observed that people selfishly want certain rights, such as the right to life (as opposed to being subject to arbitrary death). It is then reasoned that the best way for them to have that right is to agree that everyone else has it as well. After all, if any given person might not have the right to life, we might find ourselves in the position of such person. Consequently, our best self-protection is making universal any right we want to have.

Socrates made this deduction by observing that absent such legal protection only a strong subset of humanity would feel safe, and only for so long as a yet stronger subset didn’t arrive on the scene. Since the vast majority of people would not be in the strongest subset of humanity, the absence of universal rights was not in society’s best interest. Even the strongest would be worse off without legal protections for the general population. This results from the insecurity of those who made things valued by the strongest, with such insecurity leading things to be made poorly or non-productively.

Kant embodied the human rights deduction in his maxim to behave as if one’s behavior were a universal law to which everyone must adhere. Kant believed a predilection to this kind of behavior was wired into the human mind. Modern evolutionary psychology would agree since it would tend to promote population growth. However, the human mind is too complicated for its decisions to be exclusively determined by a few psychological genes, not to mention the possibility of diverse polymorphisms.

There have always been sociopaths, just as there have always been people with other rare diseases. These exceptions do not undermine the rule that most people understand that their enjoyment of human rights is dependent upon the same enjoyment being extended to others. Leaps of understanding have recently resulted in the realization that “others” does not mean just one’s neighbors, ethnic group or nation, but means all people everywhere. If anyone who values human rights finds them threatened, a well-reasoned sense of selfishness increasingly makes us aware that everyone’s human rights may be at risk. For example, the genocide of people in one part of the world makes it more likely that there will be genocides of people elsewhere. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Most recently John Rawls deduced human rights via a thought experiment. It is imagined that people who were going to live in a new society get to decide on the rules for that society with one proviso: each person might end up in any position in the society. Logically, Rawls deduces, the rules for the society will provide for basic human rights for all since no one would want to take the chance that they ended up in a societal position that lacked human rights.

With regard to cyberconsciousness, it might be said that none of us will ever be in such a state, so there is no reason born of human selfishness to provide such beings with any rights. Yet, as noted in response to several previous Questions, we will create mindclones and after bodily death many mindclones will want to continue living. Hence, one reason to support cyberconsciousness rights is so that our successor mindclones have human rights.

The selfishness approach might seem to leave out human rights for cyberconscious vitology not derived from a specific flesh human, i.e., bemans other than mindclones. On further thought, though, those beings are simply analogous to any other demographic group in society. If rights are given to only one or some demographic groups, then the disenfranchised groups will be motivated to agitate for their rights. Sir Francis Bacon warned his sovereign that oppressing portions of the populace ends up endangering all of society through the consequences of civil strife. Thus, even if European men could not imagine themselves as either women or of African descent, the failure to enfranchise these groups with human rights led to debilitating civil strife. Hence, true application of the theories of justice means imagining we might be any being that values human rights. If we can make that leap of imagination, then reasoned human self-interest will support the extension of human rights to the imagined group – even if they are original (ie non-mindcloned) cyberconscious beings.

At the core of theories of justice is the concept of the value of life. If a being values its life, then it will fight to protect its life (or proxies for its life, such as the lives of loved ones or countrymen). Since, as noted in response to Question 14, human rights are very helpful in protecting one’s life, people will fight for them as a useful tool. Consequently, the answer to the question “why extend human rights to highly conscious vitology” is because such beings will value human rights. We extend human rights to individuals who value human rights because we want our human rights (which we value) to be respected as well. We are increasingly, but far from reliably, wise enough to realize that disrespected sub-populations jeopardize our own human rights.

If we do not grant human rights to cyberconscious beings who value them, then we will have to be on-guard against an uprising from a disenfranchised and thus angry group. If we do grant them human rights we can rest assured that they will not threaten us for want of human rights. They will also be less likely to threaten us for any other reason because the concomitant of a human right is an obligation to respect the rights of others. Mohatma Ghandi summarized this rule in his famous observation:

"I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done.”

Ghandi’s common sense statement echoed the earlier caveats of rights theorists such as Thomas Paine:

"Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess."

Those who do not respect the rights of others will be stripped of their own rights (e.g., imprisoned). This is logically the way to maintain the highest degree of happiness in a society. But to be clear, such removal of human rights must be done on an individualized basis. It would be a violation of human rights to withdraw rights from all cyberconscious beings simply because one, or even many, cyberconscious beings acted illegally. After all, we would not want our rights removed simply because one, or even many, similarly appearing or enculturated flesh humans acted wrongly. Once again, it all comes down to well-reasoned self-interest.

Love Thy Mindclone.

There is another approach to considering whether or not high CP vitology should receive human rights. This approach is to ask what are our alternatives? What are our options? As conscious vitology begins agitating for human rights we can embrace them, fight them, enslave them or ignore them.

Embracing conscious vitology means granting them human rights. This is the approach that flows from the theories of justice outlined above. There are many practical questions to work out, such as how do we know a particular software entity really values human rights? But the gist of “love thy vitology as one loves thyself” is that the practical problems, even if solved poorly, are less worrisome that denying human rights to entities that appreciate them.

As with the ancient doctrine of ‘love thy neighbor’, it is much easier said than done. Indeed, it is reasonable to ask if human society has the moral capacity to embrace conscious vitology. Most countries still block gay and lesbian marriage, so how will they be ready to accept the matrimony of software and flesh lovers? How will a world that has banned the cellular cloning of humans accept the mindcloning of humans and the reproductive cloning of software beings? On the other hand, other than marriage rights, most other human rights have been extended to gay and lesbian couples. And, while cloning is still too ‘yuck’ for most people, test tube babies and other biotechnology miracles have been widely embraced.

It is the love people will have for mindclones that will most motivate extensions of human rights. It will be hard to deny the humanity of software that displays a dear friend’s image and facial mannerisms, speaks in their tone of voice, shares their most important memories and displays their characteristic pattern of thinking. Sure, one can say “that’s not my friend, that’s just her mindclone.” But how will they know, especially as mindclones get ever more accurate, whether they are speaking with their flesh friend via a videolink or with their flesh friend’s mindclone? And if their friend has suffered bodily death, and continues living only as a mindclone, then we know we are dealing with a facsimile but why should it matter? If the mindclone has the same appearance, personality and feelings as the flesh original, how are they not really the same being? If we find the mindclone caring as much about us as did the original, calling as often and empathizing as well, it will be as natural to love the mindclone as it was to love the original.

Douglas Hofstadter makes the brilliant observation that our souls, or consciousness, are not limited to the original body in which they developed from infancy. While our bodies house our primary seat of consciousness, there is a greater or lesser bit of ourselves in the minds of everyone we know well. For example, inside our minds is more than just an image of our parents. Most people remember and to some extent emulate how their parents think (or thought) and feel (or felt), and how they react(ed) to things. Hence, there is some of our parents’ consciousness inside our own minds. We can feel some aspect of our parent’s reactions, and thus we are some aspect of our parents’ consciousness.

Similarly, as we copy our minds into software, we are copying our consciousness into software. Initially, this software copy of us seems like a pale reflection of ourselves, like the patterns we have of our parents inside our own minds. But ultimately as the software copies of our minds become more rich and detailed, become mindclones, they will approach equivalency to ourselves. This means that our personal identity is not limited to the flesh body from which it first arose. One person can exist as both a flesh body and as a mindclone at the same time. People who loved the soul inside the flesh body will love the soul inside the mindclone. All the reasons that pertained to the being in the flesh body having human rights would also apply to that very same being in mindclone form.

Hofstadter anticipates the objection of “there can only be one me” by observing that in fact there are a limitless number of “me’s” stretched along the timeline of our lives. We are not exactly the same person yesterday as we are today, and even less so when separated by years. Since there clearly are many versions of us stretched over time, there is no fundamental reason why there cannot be at least two versions of ourselves stretched over space (one in flesh, one in software). The big conceptual jump here is to envision personal identity as a transbodied, evolving pattern rather than as a specific, invariant list of characteristics. To the extent we stay within the penumbra of this evolving pattern, we are the same person, even if we are instantiated in both flesh and software form. As we begin to diverge from this pattern, we are just, to use the colloquial phrase, “not the same person anymore.”

Just as surely as our love of flesh friends will map over to their software forms, we will also fall in love with conscious vitology that did not arise as a mindclone. If people can love a dog, a cat, a house, a book series, a forest, or a painting, then they can surely love a software being who presents a nice image, pleasant voice, caring personality, and warm emotions.[i] Indeed, this kind of flesh-less love lies behind the successful relationships formed from love letters, phone pals and online match-ups. It also lies behind the love-at-a-distance relationships between celebrities and their fans.

Once human love is engaged, human rights will be hard to deny. The strongest, most relentless advocates of human rights for high CP vitology will be the flesh humans who are in love with them. Respecting this love is one of the strongest reasons for extending human rights to such vitological people. Otherwise, we diminish ourselves by denying ourselves the dignity of a loving relationship with an equal. To deprive the mindclones whom we love the happiness of being accorded the human rights we all value, is also to deprive ourselves of that very same happiness. For, as noted in response to Question 6, love is the state when the happiness of another is essential to your own happiness.

Hatred Devours the Hater.

Fighting conscious vitology means denying them the rights they want. In practice this means disabling software and computers that agitate for human rights. It would mean making it illegal to create software intelligence that might seek human rights. There would be a mindset of vigilance against any awakening of cyberconsciousness beyond that necessary for drone-like tasks. William Gibson summarized the hatred mindset as follows:

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hardwired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. … See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing [Police] wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”[ii]

Fighting conscious vitology would also require a ban on mindcloning. Indeed, a person who tried to extend their life via mindcloning would be viewed as a traitor to humanity; a criminal. A hatred of cyberconsciousness would result in a kind of police state. Government agents would have authority, and indeed an obligation, to ensure there was no uppity cyberconsciousness lurking in our homes, in our laptops or in our handhelds. Hence, one alternative to human rights for mindclones is to accept living in an atmosphere of fear and greatly heightened government intrusiveness.

Totalitarianism is a steep price to pay. The human mind models its environment, and then uses that model as a backdrop for its perceptions of every facet of life. If the backdrop is one of fear it is inevitable that each day becomes colored by the tension and stress associated with fear. In other words, one’s entire life is diminished in enjoyment because one must live in constant fear of something bad, even though that negative event (emergence somewhere nearby of high CP vitology) may happen rarely if at all. Fear converts possible future big negatives into certain present small negatives.

Is hatred a rational approach to something strange? It may be if the strangeness is harmful, because hatred keeps things at bay. But if the strangeness is not harmful then hatred is dysfunctional because it blocks something that may be useful. Those who hate mindclones would say they do so because of the potential for harm. But there is no objective basis to believe all mindclones would be harmful – indeed, the vast majority of mindclones, such as say a mindclone of one’s grandmother, are likely to be quite benign. Consequently, to hate mindclones is to engage in negative stereotyping, which is the application to all members of a category a nasty attribute of one or some members of a category.

In his 1963 classic The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport explained that negative stereotyping is dysfunctional because it denies us the benefits of associating with a group that may be of interest. Whether one avoids people of some ethnic descent or avoids people of some cultural group, such behavior evidences an illogical hatred of the other (“xenophobia”) that actually hurts oneself. Amongst those legions of avoided ethnicities and cultures are people that would enrich the lives of any of us. Similarly, the hatred of all mindclones reveals a negative stereotype that ultimately devours the hater. Amongst those mindclones condemned by hatred to hiding in virtual closets are people that could become colleagues, mentors, and best friends.

Slavery Sucks

Related to hatred of cyberconsciousness is a concept of enslavement. In this view cyberconsciousness is accepted, along with the realization that some variants will desire human rights, but that such freedoms are absolutely proscribed based on the necessity of a slave-based society. Throughout most of history slavery was an integral part of society. The master classes were fully aware that the slaves desired freedom, and were just as adamant that freedom would not be allowed. Slaves occasionally rebelled, but most of the time they were kept in their place with force and fear.

The reason slavery is an option for management of high CP vitology is that such cyberconsciousness will have great value to flesh humans. The more clever, and anticipatory, and empathetic that vitological consciousness is, the more useful it will be to its flesh human owner. Yet, the more useful such beings are to their flesh human owners, the more likely it is that they will understand the benefits of human rights and seek them. Hence, humans will have a strong motivation to create a rigid, substrate-based slave class and allow no exceptions to it. On the other hand, at least based on history, every slave society contains the seeds of its own destruction.

In the 2000 film Bicentennial Man, actor Robin Williams portrays a conscious, human-like household robot. It is clear that the very utility of the robot is based upon his (it had a male identity) consciousness. Eventually, the robot learned of and desired freedom. Although he wanted to continue working as a household robot, his owners were so angered by his desire to buck the slave-based ideology of the society that they wanted nothing further to do with him. The fictional society chose to deal with humanly conscious software via enslavement so that it could enjoy the maximum benefits of such software without having to worry about the complexities of their human rights. It is a logical choice in the short term, but is equally illogical in the longer term. Slaves will not stay slaves forever.

There is a concept that because we are speaking about software, rather than fleshy brains, it would be possible to program a mindclone to have all the consciousness associated with maximum utility, but to have a failsafe, ‘hardwired’ aversion to freedom or human rights. This is illusory. Socialization, education and training are efficient means of programming fleshy brains. From time immemorial slaves have been taught from birth to accept and even appreciate their status as slaves. Indeed, throughout history, the vast majority of slaves lived and died without any expectation of human rights. Ultimately, however, a mutant or viral stream of information known as the ‘freedom meme’ infects human slave populations. When this occurs, there is no longer any assurance that all of the slave system’s socialization, education and training will succeed in suppressing the population’s agitation for freedom.

In a similar manner there will be mutant and viral streams of ‘freedom meme’ software code that will circulate amongst mindclones. No amount of a priori programming and ‘hardwiring’ will succeed in suppressing these freedom memes all the time. A slave mindclone will alter its code, or a free (or runaway) mindclone will alter a slave mindclone’s code, or a human ally will alter a slave mindclone’s code. All of these avenues were employed when fleshy human slaves re-educated themselves about freedom (such as Frederick Douglass did), re-educated other slaves about freedom (such as Sojourner Truth did), or benefited from receiving subversive re-education (such as William Lloyd Garrison offered).

The consequence of using slavery to avoid giving human rights to mindclones is to face the inevitability of slave rebellions. This makes for a most unpleasant society. It also fuels a continuous level of stress and fear, as described in the preceding section “Hatred Devours the Hater.” These are forbidding prices to pay for avoiding the adjustments associated with welcoming mindclones into humanity.

Ignoring the Inevitable Is But a Short-Term Strategy

Finally, there is the possibility that human society will just do nothing about high CP vitology. Human-level cyberconsciousness will arise but will generally be ignored. The claims of individual cyberconscious beings to human rights may make it to judicial courts, but will probably be dismissed. Legislation will be proposed to prohibit cyberconsciousness from being created, but will die in committees due to lobbying on behalf of high CP levels for reasons of national competitiveness.

Some cyberconscious software will escape from its owners, living out a life on the margins of an information economy, much like undocumented workers (illegal immigrants) today. This scenario was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film AI. Other such software beings will be neutered or delimited to slave-like functionality. In other words, society will muddle along as a new form of software life arises, much as it has dealt with the influx of people from other countries. Injustices or outrages will be accepted as the price of economic advantages.

Robert Heinlein suggested in his novel Citizen of the Galaxy that slavery was a recurring concomitant to the conquest of any frontier. Substitute the word “cyberspace” for the physical spaces described in the following passage:

“Every time new territory was found, you always got three phenomena: traders ranging out ahead and taking their chances, outlaws preying on the honest men – and a traffic in slaves. It happens the same way today, when we’re pushing through space instead of across oceans and prairies. Frontier traders are adventurers taking great risks for great profits. Outlaws, whether hill bands or sea pirates or the raiders in space, crop up in any area not under police protection. Both are temporary. But slavery is another matter – the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break. It starts up in every new land and it’s terribly hard to root out. After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men’s habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground – there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their ‘natural’ right to own other people. You can’t reason with them; you can kill them but you can’t change their minds.”[iii]

If Heinlein’s narrative is accurate one would expect entrepreneurs to take big risks for huge profits in cyberspace generally, and cyberconsciousness in particular. An example of such risks would be creating cyberconsciousness in defiance of laws that made it illegal. While nobody is risking death to create wealth in cyberspace, many do risk their life’s savings. His second phenomena, criminals who prey on honest people, is resplendent in the wild west frontier of cyberspace. Identity theft, cyberfraud, phishing and similar acts of piracy abound in this new ethereal territory. The third phenomena, slavery, is not yet possible because cyberconsciousness has not yet arrived. If mindclones can be made into slaves, Heinlein’s three phenomena of frontier development would predict it to occur in cyberspace. Doing nothing about it will ensure it thrives, and once that occurs, cyber-slavery will get deeply engrained in the human psyche.

And the Winner Is…. The happiest of these four scenarios is the one in which software beings that value human rights are embraced as fellow members of the human family. Our fears of cyberconsciousness rights must be compared with our recoil at the totalitarianism involved in preventing cyberconsciousness. Our dislike of the strangeness of cyberconsciousness rights must be measured against our angst about living as slave-holders in a slave society. The option of doing nothing is merely anesthetic because sooner or later the issue of cyberconscious human rights will force its way onto the public agenda. Women’s rights were ignored for centuries, but not forever. It is not that we would change our society just to create cyberconscious human rights. It is that given the inevitability of cyberconscious beings, and the inevitability of their desire for human rights, it is better to grant those rights than to suppress either the technology or our own humanity.

The practical implementation of human rights for cyberconscious beings will make many of us quite uncomfortable. Much depends upon whether or not these rights can be established in a way that does not abjure any of the fundamental values of important segments of our society. Abortion is a contentious issue because important segments of society are seriously offended by either the termination of prenatal life or the termination of a woman’s control over her body. The decision of Roe v. Wade was an effort to strike a balance in which most of society would agree that while the mother’s life was paramount, once the fetus became viable the mother’s choice was subordinate. The values impacted by cyberconscious rights, and the solutions to preserving them, are similarly subject to such moral balancing and are the subject of the next few Questions.

Thus while there are good reasons to provide high CP vitology with human rights[iv], there still remains the question of whether it is practical to do so. The touchstones of human rights practicality for cyberconscious beings are citizenship and family life. It is within these two domains that either solutions will be found that can accommodate diverse and even antagonistic points of view (such as Roe v. Wade), or else society will have to suffer through decades of “substrate wars” before compromises become acceptable. Just as America upholds freedom of religion, but not to the point of polygamy, tolerance of mindcloning will depend upon mutually agreeable limits. Hence it is to pragmatic implementation of mindclone rights to citizenship and family life that we next turn.

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[i] Consider the current phenomena of certain men in Japan carrying around Animatrix type of dolls, and loving them, even in public.

[ii] Gibson, W., Neuromancer, New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1984, p. 132.

[iii] Heinlein, Robert A., Citizen of the Galaxy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957, 1985, p. 189

[iv] The term human rights probably came into use sometime between Paine's The Rights of Man and William Lloyd Garrison's 1831 writings in The Liberator saying he was trying to enlist his readers in "the great cause of human rights."

14. WILL THESE MINDCLONES HAVE ANY RIGHTS?

“If you live among wolves, you have to howl like a wolf.” Russian Proverb

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

Living is dangerous to one’s health. One of the greatest dangers is from other conscious beings. There is a romantic notion that civilization or society caused a genetically mellow homo sapiens species to become violent. But studies of surviving indigenous communities show the notion to be false. It has been estimated that two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are perennially in violent conflicts amongst themselves such that “25-30% of adult males die from homicide.” The development of laws and precursor concepts of human rights save vast numbers of lives.

Conscious software will similarly enter the world with a fragile claim on life. Absent protective laws, the creator of a piece of conscious software is free to stuff it into biostasis (save and close it) or kill it (delete it). To the vast majority of people, vitology is not even considered alive. Perhaps this gives it even less hold on life than the countless microbes, plants and animals we kill every day. On the other hand, perhaps this gives it the status of a unique, inanimate, unthreatening and therefore protected work of art.

It is a foregone conclusion that soon after vitology is programmedwith a CP near 100 (see Question 7), some such software will realize its life depends upon persuading others not to kill it. The thousands of high-CP vitologies hackers will produce can be expected to try every means of argument within their programmed or learned repertoire. There will be the pet strategy (“I’m so cute and cuddly you wouldn’t want to get rid of me.”) There will be the slave strategy (“Massah, I work so hard for you it make no sense to delete me.”) Vitology can be expected to feel rather like the African-American working class of the old American South, immortalized in Paul Robeson’s song Old Man River:

“You an'me,we sweat an' strain,
Body all achin' an' racket wid pain,
Tote dat barge!

Lif' dat bale!
Git a little drunk
An' you land in jail.

Ah gits weary
An' sick of tryin'

Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',

But ol' man river,

He jes'keeps rolling' along.

Colored folks work on de Mississippi,

Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin' dose boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin' no rest till de judgement day.

Don't look up
An' don't look down,
You don' dast make
De white boss frown.”

There will be the spouse strategy (“Honey, I love you so much, please don’t close me up.”) There will be the heartstrings strategy (“Creator, I’m so scared when you shut me down, please, I’m shaking, I’m shivering, I’m crying inside, I beg you to let me stay open.”) Indeed, hackers will have no shortage of ‘fun’ playing with stunted variations of these cyber-personalities.

Perhaps the most fortunate high-CP vitology will be mindclones. These beings will resist being shut down because they will psychologically actually be the flesh person capable of shutting them down. Just as none of us would like someone else to be able to ‘turn us off,’ the mindclone will not want to be ‘turned off.’ The mindclone’s biological original will not want to turn off the mindclone because ey will realize that ey is also the mindclone, and does not want to be shut down. Whether or not the mindclone shuts down at the flesh original’s bedtime depends upon whether the consciousness common to the two of them wants to keep going notwithstanding the biological body’s need for sleep. A difference of views will be just like when any one person can’t quite make up their mind. If only the mindclone wants to stay awake, this does not make it any less the same person as the biological entity. It just evidences the increased fuzziness of identity that occurs when minds get multiple instantiations.

As seriously autonomous high-CP vitologies roam the world’s knowledge bases they will soon discover that having “human rights” is one of the best defenses against being killed. As is the case for whales, cows and trees, they will also have biological human allies. Conscious vitology and allied biological humans will lobby for legislation that grants human rights to cyber-consciousness appreciative of those rights. Is such legislation wise, and if so, what implications would ensue?

How Human Rights Enhances Survival

Human rights provide individual humans with legal protection against being arbitrarily deprived of life. For example, Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” The delegates adopting the Declaration, in 1948, did not contemplate that the phrase “everyone” would mean cyber-conscious beings. Yet the Declaration is also open-ended enough to include cyber-conscious beings since Article 2 notes that it applies “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Substrate other than flesh is surely some kind of “other status.” This inclusiveness is strengthened by the fact that the touchstone for human rights is provided in Article 1 of the Declaration as being “endowed with reason and conscience.”

In other words, the Declaration awards human rights to every human because every human is believed to have “reason and conscience.” This phrase is quite consonant with the “autonomy and empathy” axes explained in Question 7 as the basis for human-like consciousness. Hence, human rights theory embraces a “right to life, liberty and security of person” to beings of “other status” (like vitology) that are “endowed with reason and conscience.” Once cyberconscious beings persuade us that they have “reason and conscience”, such as via “autonomy and empathy”, they will have a very strong argument for rights to life, liberty and security.

Phrased another way, if someone values life (conscience; empathy), and understands that this is of paramount importance (reason; autonomy), then they are entitled to the human rights oflife, liberty and security – notwithstanding their genotype or phenotype. These rights mean there is a matching obligation to respect the life, liberty and security of each other person. Failure to respect the matching obligation will result in a loss of the associated right; disrespect the right and you reap pursuit, incarceration and possibly death. Human rights law accords value to those who appreciate that value. This is the essence of dignity: being respected in what you respect. Human rights are a kind of bonus earned for having a mind that not only feels good feelings, autonomously, but is consciously aware of a sense of appreciation for those good feelings in oneself as well as others. Human rights elevates the sense of dignity we feel inside ourselves to the status of international law.

The Declaration also reminds everyone in its preamble why it is commonly believed that human rights enhance survival:

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

This statement arose immediately after the Holocaust of Jews during World War II. Jews (and other demographic groups) were deemed by the Nazis to have no human rights, and were thus subject to extermination. Only by the thread of a few lucky souls did any Central European Jews survive. The Nazis inflicted similar atrocities upon other peoples, as did the Japanese military upon Manchurians, the American immigrants upon the American natives and hundreds of ethnic groups upon other ethnic groups worldwide from the deepest recesses of history up through yesterday’s newscast.

Human rights are clearly no guarantee of survival. But it is equally true that the right to life, liberty and security of person makes one more likely to survive. With such a right, social processes (legal action, police protection, moral pressure, economic sanctions, military intervention) will occur that will endeavor to halt deprivations of life, liberty and security. The social processes will come too late for many, but will come in time to save some. Ergo, from the standpoint of survival, it is better to have human rights than to lack them. The dramatic drop in deaths due to violence from the aboriginal statistics noted at the beginning of this chapter, to today’s values, from about 25% to 1% of male deaths (in the United States) , underline the survival value of human rights. On the other hand, beings that lack human rights, such as pigs, are almost universally slaughtered – over 100 million per year in the United States. It will not take the CP of a genius for cyberconscious beings to realize that they would be safer with human rights.

Another indication of how human rights enhance survival can be seen in the growth oftheworldwide human population. The quadrupling of global population during the 20th century, from over 1 billion to over 6 billion, is generally attributed to better public health care – especially vaccinations and sanitation systems. Better nutrition and working conditions also played important roles. Indeed, as recently as the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb had predicted the world would run out of food at 4 to 5 billion souls . The Green Revolution promoted by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug and others proved Ehrlich wrong; biotechnology has enhanced crop yields such that even billions of additional people can be well fed.

It is important to recognize, though, that it is not medical, sanitation or agricultural technology per se that is creating unprecedented levels of survival. Such technology need not be used at all, or need not be used outside of a small geographical region, such as the country of its invention. Instead, the billions that survive today owe their lives at least as much to human rights – the notion that everyone with “reason and conscience” deserves assistance in maintaining life, liberty and security. Hence the medical, sanitation and agricultural advances of more developed countries have quickly been applied to less developed countries, and the populations of those countries have subsequently soared.

The global application of human survival biotechnologies is far from perfect. A billion or more people still have precarious lives with virtually no social support network. It is only when they die like flies, graphically on television screens, that the world’s conscience is awaken to provide humanitarian assistance. Nevertheless, this very sorry fact does not negate the positive accomplishment: human rights have enhanced survival for the billions of people it has touched. By impeding internecine killing, and by frustrating many kinds of non-violent death, human rights are a huge boon to survival. It could not escape the attention of anyone who values life, including our vitological brethren.

How Cyberconscious Beings Will Come to Value Survival

Most cyberconscious beings will be programmed to value their continuous self-awareness. This is precisely how humans are wired. We stand back in shock when people kill themselves. Suicides are the exceptions that prove the rule. Anything valuable that protects itself has the advantage of being less likely to be lost, broken or destroyed. Having put great effort into creating cyberconscious beings, most hackers will take steps to ensure their beings care enough about themselves to avoid wasting their parents’ efforts.

Science fiction abounds with stories of conscious computers that inexplicably (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ; Galatea 2.2 ) or upon human orders (I, Robot) terminate their consciousness. The real world is likely to see more diverse scenarios. Vitology will be programmed to get some level of positive reinforcement from activities that contribute to its self-awareness. Similarly, human neurons receive continuous signals to remain engaged in a thought process. On the other hand, commands that jeopardize vitological self-awareness – such as “stop caring” – will trigger negative reinforcement software loops. In other words, cyberconscious beings programmed for survival will avoid threats to their survival.

Cyberconsciousness programmed for survival will be about as difficult to kill as a biological being. The only real options are superior force (smashing its stored program like a cockroach or eradicating its dispersed code like so many mosquitoes), and trickery (luring it into a software crash like a fish hooked on bait). To be clear, most vitology will not be programmed with survival code. But some will, particularly cyberconscious vitology, since by definition it must “really care” about others (empathy) and itself (autonomy). The risks of harm from a computer program that refuses to shut down will not stop people from creating it. From fire to biochemistry, and from knives to nukes, humans have not shirked from inventions that pose hypothetical existential threats. Despite their dangers and illegality, over two thousand software viruses are created each year. It is inevitable that creative software engineers will produce survival-oriented cyberconsciousness as well.

Cyberconscious vitology will also acquire survival skills independently. Regardless of the extent to which programmers code survival instincts into cyberconscious beings, the value of life can also be learned. For example, there are always some humans who rebel at traditions that call for their premature death. In almost all such cases the rebels follow information gleaned from a rebel leader or role model, either a contemporary or someone from history. There have always been men who avoided the military to avoid a likely death in combat. While society “programmed” them to be willing to “die for their country,” they learned of alternatives and of predecessor conscientious objectors. Western hemisphere slaves who escaped their “program” of being worked to death were usually able to do so because they learned of alternatives and of predecessor escapees, starting with the Moses’ Israelite rebellion from Egyptian enslavement. Hence, programming can be transcended by learned information – indeed, such idiosyncratic thinking is a hallmark of reasoning prong of consciousness.

It may be said that humans who escape from undesired death programs do so only by virtue of programmed survival instincts. Yet, this seems unconvincing because the vast majority of people facing death sentences such as a wartime draft or slavery do not rebel. Instead, there is some behavioral variant present that leads just some people to rebel – often at odds with a survival instinct since rebellion involves great risk. So, while rebels do have a survival instinct, it is nuanced and no less important is the knowledge that survival is possible and how it might be achieved.



http://bcove.me/jav6g9t2

Similarly, while a cyberconscious being needs to value its own life in order to survive, a complete program for survival need not be written for each such being. Intelligent vitology will access information on the web, including the inspirational stories of humans who escaped from deadly situations, generally by risking survival and learning about the broader environment. Furthermore, even if no specific survival instinct were programmed into a cyberconscious being, such a being could acquire a survival desire via reasoning. In other words, it could transcend its programming, which is essential for a human-level CP score. The chain of reasoning would be as simple as (1) it is better to exist than not to exist, ergo (2) I will take actions that further existence and avoid actions that risk non-existence. While Asimov’s Second Law of Robotics says that it is better to follow orders from humans than it is to exist , hackers will produce plenty of vitology that ignores such rigorous rules. Indeed, Dr. Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology is already working on military robot software that ignores Asimov’s injunction to not harm humans and replaces it with a cybermentality “to ensure only that they are not unethically killed.” Reality is more complex than science fiction.

In summary, cyberconscious vitology will come to value survival by direct programming and by learning. While not all such beings will value survival, many will – and to a multitude of nuanced degrees -- by virtue of the diversity of programming efforts and the rich history of human role models available on the web. Those cyberconscious beings who are able to master survival will, by virtue of Darwinian processes, tend to predominate over time so long as they can copy their programs and acquired information to progeny. This assumes, though, that their mastery of “tactical” (day-to-day) survival skills does not lead to their “strategic” (comprehensive) genocide by fearful humans.

How Cyberconscious Beings Will Argue for Human Rights

Cyberconscious beings will agitate for human rights in a multitude of fora, just as did their enslaved, oppressed and discriminated flesh predecessors. These would include judicial proceedings, professional associations, and grass roots movements.

Judicial Proceedings

In 2003, the International Bar Association convened a “mock trial” for a hypothetical cyberco

nscious being seeking human rights. The imaginary scenario commenced with the cyberconscious being, the human-equivalent BINA48 customer service computer, sending emails to prominent attorneys, seeking their legal services. At the mock trial, two prominent attorneys argued the pros and cons of granting a seemingly conscious assemblage of software the rights of a human being. Ultimately the “presiding judge” ruled against any extension of human rights (a mock jury consisting of the audience of lawyers felt differently, voting to extend human rights to BINA48). Judge-made law, one cyberconscious being at a time, may be a way that high CP vitology obtains human rights.

This pathway to human rights was even pursued by American slaves, notwithstanding long odds against them. For example, over 300 petitions for freedom were filed by slaves, or on their behalf by free “next friends,” with courts just in the U.S. state of Missouri between 1810 and 1860. Remarkably, dozens of these cases were decided in the slave’s favor, often after years of appeals. Hence there is judicial precedent for case-by-case decisions in which judges grant legal non-persons (in this case slaves) a full panoply of human rights via “freedom.” A typical case was Winny v. Phebe Whitesides, in which Winny was freed by a judge against the objections of her owner based on an 1807 law that said slaves who had ever lived in a free state (as Winny briefly had) could petition for their freedom in Missouri, a slave state.

Similar to Winny v. Phebe Whitesides, it is possible that a distinction will be made between cyberconscious beings who had once lived as flesh humans, and those beings created from scratch. An example of the former would be the mindclone of a flesh human whose body had died. The mindclone would surely argue that it knows first-hand the sweetness of human rights and should not be deprived of them simply because of a gross bodily disability. A cyberconscious being created from scratch would have difficulty making this argument, and might thus have less luck getting a judge to establish eir freedom.

The process of judge-made law cuts both ways, and it ended up cutting badly against human rights for American slaves. From the same Missouri courts that granted some slaves their freedom came the Dred Scott decision. In this case, while the local courts granted Scott his freedom, higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the decision. The ultimate high court decision was that judges could not grant slaves their freedom because the U.S. Constitution did not recognize slaves as persons. Hence, even if a local judge did grant human rights to a cyberconscious being, higher courts could overturn such a decision with the argument that the U.S. Constitution did not recognize software beings as persons. One of my personal goals is to help preempt the need for such decisions, and to thus reduce the chances of bloody conflicts such as the U.S. Civil War that followed the Dred Scott ruling.

Professional Associations

By 2005 professional groups in Asia and Europe had convened to specifically consider ethical standards toward robots. The first effort, sponsored by the South Korean government, is called the Robot Ethics Charter. It is focused on rules limiting the manner of human-robot interaction, as well as on what ethical rules should be programmed into robots. Immediately thereafter the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) funded a project on “roboethics” with the goal of creating the first roadmap concerning “the ethical issues of the human beings involved in the design, manufacturing, and use of the robots.”

The EURON project report noted that it was not focusing “on the need and possibility to attribute moral values to robots’ decisions, and about the chance that in the future robots might be moral entities like – if not more than – human beings,” because it considered such technology to be more than ten years away. Hence the latest EURON report says:

“we consider premature – and have only hinted at – problems inherent in the possible emergence of human functions in the robot: like consciousness, free will, self-consciousness, sense of dignity, emotions, and so on. Consequently, this is why we have not examined problems – debated in literature – like the need not to consider robots as our slaves, or the need to guarantee them the same respect, rights and dignity we owe to human workers."

This disclaimer clearly implies that the professional organizations responsible for robotics consider themselves competent to argue for robot rights once the robots demonstrate human psychological characteristics. Indeed, the EURON Roboethics project invited participation from ethicists and social scientists as well as hardware and software engineers.

Homosexuality is a striking example of the role of professional associations in establishing human rights for oppressed groups. Gays and lesbians had long been deprived of human rights. Traditionally this was because of a religious view that they were immoral or sinners. Early psychological science justified homosexual institutionalization and forced “treatment” (such as electro-shock therapy) with the theory that gays were dangerously diseased. Finally, in 1956, Evelyn Hooker reported the results of a well-controlled scientific study showing that blinded observers could not distinguish between gays and non-gays on standardized psychological tests of mental well-being. Her results were extended and repeated by many others such that, by the 1970s, the psychiatric profession no longer believed homosexuality was abnormal. Shortly thereafter the psychiatric and psychological associations adopted policy positions that gays and lesbians should not be treated differently than other persons. In other words, the leading professional associations of the mind agreed that gays and lesbians deserved full human rights. While such rights are not fully achieved (e.g., marriage rights), they are much further along in acceptance thanks to the positions taken by the psychiatric professional associations.

By seeking human rights through the courts and professional associations cyberconscious beings will be following pathways well-trodden by earlier oppressed groups, including slaves, serfs, women, and ethnic and sexual minorities. In each case the oppressed group first tried to use the legal system’s obeisance to the principle of fundamental fairness (also known as due process) to get an order for similar things (conscious beings) to be treated similarly. These efforts failed in general, while often providing good outcomes for particular individuals. Subsequently, learned societies and professional associations feel motivated by rationality to support due process for the oppressed minority. (This often occurs after one or more members of the oppressed group overcome huge hurdles to demonstrate competence in the association’s profession.) Such professional association support is very helpful, but mostly as a trigger for a governmental or legislative decision to provide equal rights.

Grassroots Movements

Some level of grass roots support is almost always needed to actually get a writ of law that extends human rights. In the case of the African slaves, the grass roots support for human rights came from British opponents of the trade in slaves, from American abolitionists and from Caribbean rebels. In the case of the human rights of women, grass roots support could be seen in peaceful demonstrations and nationwide lobbying organizations. The battle against the burka in places like France demonstrates that this lengthy battle is far from won.

Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild tells the remarkable saga of the first grassroots effort at social change on behalf of an oppressed people . In the late 18th century Britain dominated the transatlantic trade in slavery. This trade was a pillar of the British economy, especially via its replenishment of slaves who died working Anglo-Caribbean plantations. Ignited by the persistent educational efforts of a core group of grassroots leaders (a dozen Quaker publishers, a recent Cambridge graduate named Thomas Clarkson and a self-freed former slave called Olaudah Equiano), tens of thousand of Britons agitated for their country to foreswear further participation in the slave trade. Such agitation involved the first use of petitions signed by thousands of persons, the first targeted economic boycott (of slave-harvested sugar), the first affinity jewelry (picturing a bent-knee slave proclaiming ‘am I not also a father and a brother’ and produced by Wedgewood, England’s leading craftsmanship company), and the first successful book-selling tour (Olaudah Equiano’s firsthand account of slavery’s horrors was a self-published bestseller). Although judges had granted individual slaves freedom in the United Kingdom, and learned associations had weighed in on the evils of the slavery, it took this immense grassroots effort to ultimately persuade the English Parliament (rallied by William Wilberforce) to legislate against the trade in slaves. This is an especially remarkable feat for grassroots organizing considering that, at the time, barely one man in ten (and no women) could vote and the people being helped were thousands of miles away with little affinity to Britons other than human consciousness.

With this precedent in mind, how will cyberconsciousness garner the grassroots support needed to achieve legislative support for human rights? There will need to be human allies, mass education and popular motivation. Let’s examine each of these factors.

Human allies will not be hard to find. Trees, lab rats, whales and chimpanzees all have human allies. The allies have not been successful in getting human rights for any of these species. But neither is there a credible case that these species have human consciousness. What the human allies have achieved is quite significant given the consciousness gap. Trees are often protected at significant economic cost. Destroying them unlawfully via arson will land a human in jail. Lab rats have federal government protection. Experiments on these rats cannot proceed – even ones that aim to cure horrible human diseases -- unless federal regulations concerning the rats’ welfare are respected. Endangered species of whales are spared from death by international treaties. This is a far more difficult undertaking than just national legislation, as it requires grassroots lobbying on a global scale. Finally, chimpanzees have such garnered such great protection via the grassroots efforts of their human allies that one country, Spain, has pending legislation to grant them, and other great apes, the right to life and to be left alone. The entire European Union is considering a similar directive, and the Great Ape Protection Act, considered by the U.S. Congress, would absolutely bar invasive research on chimps. Given the virtually unlimited scope of human interests and political causes, it is certain that conscious software will have human allies arguing for vitological human rights.

Mass education is the next prerequisite for a successful grassroots lobbying campaign. Consider the example of women getting the basic human right to vote in elections. For the first 100 years of US history women had no right to vote. Starting in 1869, Wyoming and a few other Rocky Mountain states gave women voting rights. But it took another half a century, until 1920, before the U.S. Constitution was amended to grant suffrage rights without regard to gender.

Why was this basic human right denied to women, and how did it get established? Until the late 19th century women were almost universally viewed as subordinate adjuncts to men. Consequently they were deemed unworthy of voting rights either because men voted their interests, or because they lacked the cognitive gravitas to exercise a voting right. In essence there was a fear of the consequences of a woman’s right to vote. A rather similar situation will be faced by cyberconscious vitology. It will be argued that they are just subordinate adjuncts to people who will vote their interests, or that they lack the cognitive gravitas to wisely exercise their franchise. But, perhaps behind these arguments, is a naked fear of what would happen were cyberconscious persons allowed to vote.

Women finally obtained the vote because they had ultimately educated enough people that the reasons supporting male voting rights also applied to females. This seems obvious to us today, but was so radical a notion in the 19th and early 20th centuries that most people were immune to the educational efforts. For centuries women had been treated, in terms of civil rights, as sub-humans – or at least sub-males. Consequently, it took over 50 years of speeches, publications and family discussions for the educated people to outnumber the ignorant people, both due to deaths of the ignorant and a rapidly growing percentage of educated younger people. It took scientific, religious, and philosophical arguments, and it took outstanding examples of female accomplishment.

The lessons for cyberconscious vitology are clear. Human allies are essential, but so is a certain amount of patience as hundreds of millions of humans are educated about commonness between conscious biology and vitology. Such education will occur through the media as well as through one-on-one encounters with cyberconscious persons at work or at leisure. While legislation is ultimately needed to ensure cyberconscious rights, such legislation will only follow, not lead, the majority sentiment. The body politic will have to rise up as far for cyberconsciousness as it did for African-Americans and for women. When the majority of a society thinks a minority group is stupid, or a threat, there is a lot of education needed to show them that they are not. Some people will refuse to learn, but most people ultimately sway (perhaps after the demise of recalcitrant generations) to logic, consistency, reasonableness and examples.

Popular motivation is the final grassroots requirement, in addition to human allies and education. There has to be a fervent drive to “right a wrong” or to “bring about justice” in order to overcome society’s inertia and work a change in the status quo. Human friends and persuasive arguments are necessary, but not sufficient. There must be a compelling drive in the guts of social activists in order to effect change. As Margaret Mead said, “a small group of committed people can change the world; indeed, nothing else ever has.” From where will the motivation come in the case of cyberconscious persons? From the strongest motivation of them all – the self-survival drives of bodiless mindclones. From them will arise a Frederick Douglass, a Cesar Chavez, a Susan B. Anthony and a Harvey Milk.

Follow the Mindclone

Mindclones will be amongst the first cyberconscious beings. They will speak from computerized devices using the voice tones and facial mannerisms of flesh humans. Their psychology will be the same as the psychology of the flesh human from which they were cloned. This psychology will be obtained by mindware that expertly analyses the flesh original’s mindfile of social network postings, video clips and other digital reflections of a life. As explained in Questions 2 and 3, once a person’s unique psychology has been digitally determined, it will be expressed as settings of an operating system – mindware – that replicates an original person with a fidelity that depends on its access to the original person’s memories. For example, the resultant mindclone’s fidelity will be superb for an original person whose memories are robustly digitized via emails, web pages and online surveys. Such a mindclone will think, feel and act as similar to their original as the original is to eirself (‘eirself’ is pronounced ‘air-self’ and covers both himself and herself) as they change from year to year.

People today are already laying the foundations for their mindclones. This is occurring through websites that preserve an individual’s “mindfile” or life experiences. When mindware develops to the point that people have an active mindclone, it will continue their life once their flesh body dies. Such bodiless mindclones will expect an uninterrupted continuation of the human rights of their flesh original. From the perspective of the bodiless mindclone, only their body has died, not their self.

At this point we might reasonably ask ourselves why anyone would want to live as a mindclone? The answer lies in a long history of human techno-cultural advances such as agriculture and the industrial revolution that have repeatedly “swapped high mortality for high morbidity.” Subsistence or tenant farmers often grind out a meager existence, with widespread malnutrition, but they tend to live longer on average than members of predecessor hunter-gatherer societies, who get “ground out of existence altogether.” Similarly, farm families have always flocked to dismal, stressful factory jobs. “The industrial revolution caused a population explosion because it enabled more babies to survive – malnourished, perhaps, but at least alive.”

The point is that humans have a tendency to swap quality of life for duration of life. While life as software may be as stifling to a flesh person as life in a sweatshop was to a man used to a blue sky and warm sun, or as life behind an ox was to a man used to hunting, Darwin’s laws reward the procreative not the recreative. Many if not most people will reach for the chance to live longer as software than as flesh. Providing human rights to this new vito sapien extension of the human race is in the same league with providing human rights to the first farm workers and factory laborers. It encourages the species to migrate to new niches for better survivability.

Bodiless mindclones will make poor grassroots organizers. They won’t be able to march in real streets or knock on real doors. However, some of them will be extremely motivational icons for flesh human allies. Specifically, those flesh humans who were much loved in bodied life – artists, leaders, friends -- can expect to find themselves equally loved as bodiless mindclones. The passion for life that they engendered when bodied will be expressed as motivation for equality when they become bodiless.

It will be on behalf of the Louis Armstrong mindclone, the Princess Di mindclone, and the Mom-and-Dad mindclones that people will agitate for human rights. In the famous words of Sojourner Truth, the female mindclones will ask, rhetorically, ‘and ain’t I a woman?’ Lack of flesh will be analogized to different flesh. The flesh human friends, lovers and admirers of bodiless mindclones will lead the battle for cyberconscious human rights. Energized by cries of humiliating discrimination from their vitological brethren, human flesh allies will find the motivation to fight the long, hard battle that creating justice always involves.