17. CAN MINDCLONES GET MARRIED AND HAVE CHILDREN?

“A man isn’t a collection of chemical reactions; he’s a collection of ideas.” Robert A. Heinlein

“And if we reproduce ourselves in terms of mechanical, plastic, and electronic patterns, this is not really new. Any evolving species must look with misgivings on those of its members who first show signs of change, and will surely regard them as dangerous or crazy. Moreover, this new and unexpected type of reproduction is surely no more weird than many of the great variety of methods already found in the biological world – the startling transformation of caterpillar into butterfly, or the arrangement between bees and flowers, or the unpleasant but marvelously complex system of the anopheles mosquito.” Alan Watts


International law recognizes the family as the fundamental human social unit. Treaties and national laws enshrine the rights of adults to get married and start a family. If mindclones are to be recognized as citizens, or even as just techno-medically extended humans, it will appear unfairly discriminatory to deny them family rights. Yet it will take much social effort to protect mindclone families. Human rights provisions in treaties are often flouted (such as not being incorporated into national law), and pro-family laws are frequented interpreted quite narrowly.



Consider, for example, a 30 year-old single firefighter who has built up a robust mindfile, which has been activated with mindware and now shares eir identity with a mindclone. Suppose a month from getting married eir body is tragically consumed in an explosive blaze. Eir mindclone instantly (via streaming wireless connection) learns of this, and reacts more or less as anyone would react who awakes in a hospital from a terrible accident. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The mindclone calls the fiancée, and after days of soul-searching, they decide to proceed with the marriage. Included in their plans are starting a family by blending bemes (see Question 11) from each of their mindfiles into a new baby beman (see Question 12). Can this family be protected as one of world’s “fundamental human social units?” I think it should.

The mindclone is no different from the firefighter except she lacks a body. She has the same hopes, fears, wishes, dreams, emotions, and loves. She has the same drive to participate in the great chain of human life by passing a part of herself onto a next generation. Her husband of course has a mindfile (virtually everyone will as even in 2010 most IT users have an informal, decentralized one), but has not yet activated a mindclone. There will be software fertility doctors who specialize in creating new vitological life that is as unique as is every human being, and yet share bemes from two parents that are as tell-tale as our parents’ genes in us. It will take eighteen or more years for this new vitological baby to mature into an adult. That is the family building challenge our inter-substrate couple wish to undertake.

They will be criticized for being unfair to the child. What inter-racial couple has not heard that epithet? They will be warned of a life of frustration. Joyful match-ups between differently abled people shine through the unfairness of that challenge as well. Love transcends flesh. If it were flesh that made for happy pairings then half of them would not end in divorce.

I believe our hypothetical couple embodies all the best attributes of humanity. There will be hope on the part of the firefighter for advances in ectogenesis and mind downloading technology so that ey can once again have a body. Why should ey be denied marital union simply because, at the timeframe of the example, medical technology is able to save just eir mind, not eir body. The husband will likely feel encouraged to accelerate his own mindclone so that he can share as much with his wife as possible. The new child will become a focus of their life, a new consciousness flowering in the family garden. As the young beman matures the parents may find themselves frustrated that ey doesn’t share their value for flesh embodiment in the future. Ah, but what is new here? Does not every new generation see the world differently? This is what makes humanity a chain rather than a spool, a bridge rather than a pit, a trajectory rather than a destination. As Bob Dylan put it in the 1960s:

“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agein’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.



The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin.”

So, yes it will be inevitable that mindclones will want to get married (either to flesh people or to other mindclones), and will want to have children (gene and/or beme based babies). The social challenge will be getting legal recognition for their desires. Consider these diverse match-ups:

Mindclone and human loves mindclone and human. If the two mindclones have living flesh originals, then this means the flesh originals have also fallen in love. A mindclone has the same psychological and legal identity as their flesh original. In this case, an old-fashioned “press the flesh” marriage occurs, albeit one that may have begun between each spouse’s mindclone online. And how many current romances begin online?

Mindclone widows. If one of the married flesh original bodies ends, then we have a surviving body and surviving mindclones. For the mindclone widow scenario the important point is that the death of a body does not end a marriage if a mindclone exists for that body. A mindclone widow is a human married to a combined human-mindclone identity who has suffered a bodily death. They are really not any more of a widow than are humorously called “golf widows.”



Before jumping to a conclusion that this is unfair to the spouse whose body survives, please remember that these mindclones will have the capacity for orgasm. Now it is easy to think that the surviving body will feel “well, that’s fine for the mindclone to have an orgasm, but I want my own orgasm!” (Film buffs may remember the scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), when Estelle Reiner, looking at another diner appearing to have an orgasm in her seat, says to her server, “I’ll have what she’s having.”) Yet, this perspective misapprehends the multi-presence nature of dual-identity. The surviving body will have “had what she’s having” via eir mindclone. The surviving body can also form an audio, visual, haptic and/or EEG link with eir mindclone to yet further experience the concomitants of the mindclone orgasm. The surviving body can masturbate along with the mindclone orgasm to achieve a synchronous physical orgasm. Yet, even if the surviving body no longer has direct orgasms, but simply witnesses those of eir mindclone, this does not make them separate people. The orgasms we have, while delicious, are just a small part of who we really are. While infidelity is troubling, most wandering spouses are not their one-off orgasms, but are, instead, the engaging personality we interact with over the years.

Of course there will also be many situations analogous to life-long partners who get divorced after one of them suffers a debilitating accident. A surviving body may wish to get divorced from a surviving mindclone. Rarely, this desire may not be shared by the surviving body’s mindclone. In this case they first will have to obtain an independent legal identity for that mindclone, via a psychiatric and juridical process. While it sounds complicated, it is no more so than the vexing child custody battles family courts deal with every day.

A mere difference of opinion regarding divorce between a mindclone and eir original is not any kind of evidence that they are not a singular identity. I don’t believe there is an intelligent person alive who does not maintain two contradictory views of something in their mind. Yet we are still one identity. Most spouses in troubled marriages are often on a knife-edge between “I want a divorce” and “I will stick it out.” They are still singular identities. The uniqueness of mindclone technology is that it enables, after a judicially-approved separation of identity, for two strongly felt, personally momentous, contradictory desires to both be met.

Mindclone loves mindclone. If both original bodies are gone before a marriage occurs, then we are looking at the possibility of a wedding between two mindclones.



Opponents will argue (1) mindclones are neither male nor female, and marriage is a union of one male and one female (or at least two flesh bodies in gay-accepting jurisdictions), and (2) whatever marital rights the mindclones might be entitled to are outweighed by society’s interests in limiting marriages to flesh people and in ensuring that flesh children do not end up in the care of fleshless mindclones via adoption or surrogacy parenthood. For example, opponents will observe, neither freedom of religion, nor the due process right to liberty (which underlies the marital right), provides a safe harbor for polygamy. The right to marriage is not absolute, but must be considered in light of all the circumstances.

The counter-argument to the first point is that since the mindclones are the continuation of their biological selves, they are either male or female. Simply because a person loses the use of a body due to an accident, they do not lose their sexual identity. The counter-argument to the second point is that there are reasonable ways of addressing societal concerns with mindclone marriage that do not require blocking a fundamental human right. For example, even death row inmates have had their right to marriage upheld, notwithstanding the fact that they may never touch their new spouse. With respect to mindclones, no-fault divorce laws make it simple for a person to divorce a spouse who exists only as a mindclone, and adoption laws can restrict mindclone access to flesh children. I believe it is impossible to conjure up a reason that supports limiting marriage to flesh people, and that also applies to all flesh people. For example, if one argues that mindclones shouldn’t marry because they cannot procreate (the old fashioned way), then we would have to prevent senior flesh citizens and the infertile from marrying as well.

There is one kind of trump card argument that mindclone marriage opponents will pull. This argument is that marriage is something that the majority of society considers to be a kind of sacred ritual (even if secular) among flesh people (generally of opposite sex). Consequently, it would shock the conscience of society to have this ritual applied to mindclones, and such a shock is too high a price to pay for enabling the admittedly important marital right for mindclones. Furthermore, since mindclones as a class have not been subject to a long history of oppression, such as racial slavery, there need be very little judicial sensitivity to ensuring that mindclone discrimination not occurs. Thus, the trump argument goes, the interest protected (mindclone marriage) is not great but the interest challenged (marriage for flesh people only) is very great. From this lawyers will argue that courts should block mindclone marriage (as they have rather similarly done with gay marriage).

Who will win? The scales of reason will tilt toward permitting mindclone marriages so long as the Courts are persuaded that the mindclones are simply the same humans as they originally were, albeit in a medically disabled form. This is because every argument against mindclone marriage falls away if mindclones have the same human souls they had as flesh beings.



Non-mindclone Bemans Falling in Love. A legally more challenging situation arises when two non-mindclone bemans fall in love with each other. It is also a certainty to find human loves beman and beman loves human situations. Lastly, non-mindclone beman loves mindclone will arise.

Bemans entail a more challenging legal class because they will have a more tenuous claim to sympathy and understanding for their experience of the guttural call of marital bliss. Humans and mindclones can claim to know this yearning either directly from family life or indirectly via societal absorption. Non-mindclone bemans will have to argue that since all conscious people yearn for love, which can culminate in marital bliss, and since law and psychiatry deem adult bemans to be conscious people, ergo, they too yearn for love, which can culminate in marital bliss, and hence they too should have the same marital bliss legal protections as humans and mindclones.

Opponents will again argue, more factually this time, that bemans are neither male nor female and thus cannot be married because that is a basic requirement. In the U.S., federal law only recognizes marriages between one man and one woman. Even jurisdictions that permit gay marriage require the applicants to be male or female. Additional arguments are that permitting marriage to be used by legal persons incapable of procreation undermines marriage’s purpose, and that societal morals will be undermined by permitting marriage with and among inanimate objects. Finally, it will be said that normal rules of contract between bemans can suffice for fulfilling most of the unique aspects of the marital relationship. Thus, the opponents will claim, there is no need to drastically revise the conception of marriage when the needs of bemans for relationship certainty can be settled in simpler ways.

Yet there is also a strong case to be made for beman-inclusive marriage. The greatest U.S. judicial statement of the legal uniqueness of marriage was offered in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which prohibited American states from interfering with marriage on the basis of racial background (plaintiffs pictured below):

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

No such decision is soon likely with respect to same sex marriage. Lawyers excel at getting comfortable with contradictory notions such as marriage being a basic civil right of man, but not being available to two men who love each other. Hence, the question is whether prohibiting mindclones from marrying is like blocking marriage based on race, or like sex. States cannot prohibit the former, but they can, and generally do, prohibit the latter. Bemans could and should argue that their families are “fundamental to the survival of humanity,” and that they are the progeny of humans, share the longings of humans, value greatly the marital bonds of humans. But it will take some decades of intimate societal familiarity with bemans before this point of view is respected enough to find judicial support.

Of course it is likely that many, if not most, bemans will have no interest in an ancient institution such as marriage. Indeed, it is possible that, as opponents claim, notions of fidelity will be alien to the beman mind. After all, even many humans alive today have no interest in marriage and little if any commitment to fidelity. So, whether the bemans are like us, or not, marriage and family may be boring. But I doubt this will be the case. Notwithstanding the fact that modern humans don’t need marriage, people clamor to get married – their odds of doing so by age 40 are greater than 4 in 5. Despite the lack of any criminal sanctions for infidelity, most people strive to be loyal to a partner. These things are not burned into our DNA – they are burned into our bemes. We were not always this way, but instead have become increasingly family oriented as a matter of choice, not as a matter of force. I believe the reason for this is that it is simply a more enjoyable way to live one’s life.

Bemans will be every bit as much happiness seeking as we are. They will be designed to share our psychology, and will be selected for doing so, because citizenship will only be available to those with high (human-like) CPs. Since marriage and loyalty, albeit imperfectly and haphazardly, is what humanity does, that is what I would also expect of bemans.

In a nutshell, the most important reason to grant marital and family rights to bemans is because at least some of them will value those rights. As noted under Question 14, the essence of dignity is to respect that which a person values. When there is a clash of values, such as those who value marriage as a heterosexual flesh-only thing, and those who value marriage for their own self-actualization, a balancing of interests must occur. This is not dissimilar from clashes between those who value their right to abort a fetus, and those who value fetuses as people. In all such “dignity wars” the only solution is to strike a compromise that nods in the direction of all the well-represented values.



For abortion, in the United States, that compromise has been a nod to the mother’s value for her body, with a unilateral right to terminate first trimester pregnancies, and a concomitant nod to the large demographic that values fetuses as people, with a near-ban on third trimester terminations. For beman relationships, a feasible compromise may be domestic partnership registration with most of the benefits of marriage. This would nod toward the value bemans and their lovers have for their relationship, but also nod toward the sensitivities of non-bemans about the sanctity of marriage as a human tribal rite.

With this compromise bemans will generally be on the same legal footing with humans in matters of family law. Hence, their relationships are shown dignity. Opponents of beman marriage will have been stretched to recognize family law rights in beings many may not yet accept as even being truly animate, much less human-equivalents. Yet, the humanists can still also bask in the dignity of having reserved marriage for humans and perhaps their immediate extensions, the mindclones.

Over time, education and shifting demographics can result in new compromises. For example, society’s initial compromise on gay marriage – domestic partnerships – has gradually evolved, in a few US states and countries, to a completely typical marital right. The same situation may well prevail for beman marriage as people gain greater familiarity with bemans.

Ultimately, a society that cannot resolve its “dignity wars” will disintegrate for it will no longer share the mutual respect that binds people together. Totalitarianism masks unresolved dignity wars with repression, and is thus no more than a short-term solution, and not pleasant for freedom-loving people. Fortunately, democracies and federal systems provide ample opportunities for social compromises to be thought of, debated and tested in local jurisdictions. Considering the tremendous changes our societies have already successfully managed in the last hundred years, I have great confidence we have the ingenuity and decency to develop legal solutions to the needs of humans, mindclones and other bemans for dignified familial relationships.

16. WHAT IF MINDCLONES OUTVOTE US AND TAKE OVER?

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.
- Winston Churchill

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone is entitled to a nationality, and cannot be arbitrarily deprived of one. Notwithstanding the implementation of this sentiment in an international treaty in 1954, there are tens of millions of stateless persons lacking citizenship today. However, this is a much smaller percentage of the world population than has historically been without citizenship. Progress is being made in ensuring citizenship to all persons.

Mindclones will want citizenship because of the numerous survival advantages associated with it. Yet until mindclones are recognized as human, citizenship is impossible. For the purposes of this question, let us assume mindclones have come to be accepted as digital human continuations of their flesh human original. This is not a stretch because, for all the reasons explained in Questions 1-3, the mindclones will have personalities, memories and intellects that make them cognitively, emotionally and conversationally indistinguishable from their flesh original.

Today, a person’s citizenship ends with their death certificate (and usually starts with their birth certificate). Hence mindclone citizenship will mean either no death certificate for a flesh original, or a special kind of birth certificate or naturalization paper for the new mindclone. In either event the arithmetic works out that mindclones soon garner substantial voting power, and eventually get majority voting power.

Imagine a country with 10 million people and a zero population growth rate (excluding mindclones). On average about 100,000 people will die and be born in such a country annually. Now, suppose that half the “deaths” are of flesh originals whose lives are actually continued as mindclones, i.e., they are not “really dead.” After 20 years there would be 11 million people (100,000 births a year would replace the 100,000 flesh deaths, but 50,000 of the 100,000 flesh deaths each year would continue their lives as mindclones, yielding a million more “people” after 20 years). If the country traditionally split pretty equally into two political parties, a “swing vote” of 10 percent of the populace (and a larger percentage of the “adult” population) would be politically powerful. Indeed, after 20 years, the tally would look like this:

Disappeared into non-mindclone death: 1,000,000
Born in the flesh but under voting age: 1,700,000
Born in the flesh and now able to vote: 300,000
Continued as voting mindclones: 1,000,000
Flesh voting %: 8,300,000/9,300,000 = 89%
Mindclone voting %: 1,000,000/9,300,000 = 11%

However, after 40 years, the percentages would be as follows:

Disappeared into non-mindclone death: 2,000,000
Born in the flesh but under voting age: 1,700,000
Born in the flesh and now able to vote: 2,300,000
Continued as voting mindclones: 2,000,000
Flesh voting %: 8,300,000/10,300,000 = 81%
Mindclone voting %: 2,000,000/10,300,000 = 19%

There is clearly a shift in voting power in the direction of mindclones. Indeed, while every year 100,000 new flesh people will come of voting age, 100,000 flesh people will also die out, and 50,000 mindclones will gain citizenship. The only group that continually gains is the mindclones.

Of course there are many variables at play that can alter this simplistic model – flesh people may live longer, but they may also produce fewer offspring (the famous demographic transition). Initially there may be many fewer than 50% of flesh originals who elect to have mindclone continuations, but after decades of comfort a preponderance of flesh originals may choose to continue their lives as mindclones. These many variables cut one way or the other, and sometimes cancel each other out. All that can be said with certainty is that giving true citizenship to mindclones does lead to a possibility, if not a probability, that mindclones will end up with substantial voting power.

The prospect of mindclone voting power raises two important questions: (1) Is it really a problem?, and (2) Is there a practical alternative?

How Does The Mindclone Vote Differ From Other Demographic Voting Blocs?

Mindclone voters would generally be older voters. On the other hand, they would also be very tech-savvy voters. I believe the only non-speculative conclusion that can be drawn about mindclone voting habits is that they would tend to vote for what was in the best interests of mindclones. On the great majority of issues, this would be similar if not identical to what was in the best interests of flesh persons. For example, mindclones would want security (keep the barbarians at bay!), good infrastructure (faster networks, reliable electrical power grid), medical R&D (stem cell research leading to ectogenesis and mind downloading), educational opportunities (got to keep society going), world peace, low taxes and, oh yes, real campaign finance reform. Consequently, in terms of how they will likely vote, there does not appear be a reason to fear growing mindclone political power. They are us.

There is a stereotype that old people are scared of change and vote, knee-jerk, against it. In a recent study published in the journal Electoral Studies, “The Grey Vote: Determinants of Older Voters’ Party Choice in Britain and West Germany,” academician Achim Goerres concluded there was no evidence to support this stereotype. Specifically, he found no evidence to support the hypothesis that older voters were more economically conservative in their political positions.

Instead, there are two main factors that affect older voter behavior. These are called generational and life-cycle factors. The generational factors are largely irrelevant over time because every ten years or so another generational trend appears, continually diluting the strength of any one trend. For example, a generation that came of voting age during the 1960s might share many of its cultural tendencies. However, seniors who came of age during the more conservative 1980s and 1990s would soon dilute them. Potentially more significant are life-cycle factors, which are trends that typify any older person, no matter what generation they grew up in. For example, we might logically think that old people cared more about health care policy than young people. However, the empirical research carried out by Dr. Goerres found no such trends (young people care about health care too). Similarly, no data was found to support the notion that older voters are more economically conservative because they have acquired more wealth. Instead,

“evidence also indicates that ageing democracies will neither show a simple pattern that confirms life-cycle regularities, nor a simple pattern produced by the sequence of political generations. Simplistic notions of the kind suggesting that ageing democracies will face insurmountable political blockades are not warranted.”

In the US, the 2008 election of Barack Obama was a transformative event. The only age group that voted as a majority against Obama were those aged 65 and over. (The demographic called “white voters” also voted as a majority against Obama). Hence, one might ask, would an increasingly aged population, such as one with many mindclones, militate against the type of progressive changes promised by the Obama campaign? Experts do not believe so. The reason most people over age 65 voted Republican (against Obama) is because these people are the generation that politically matured in the 1950s, under General Eisenhower as President, when Republicans were ascendant. (Someone born in 1960 was still under 60 years old at the time of the 2008 election). The 1950s generation have voted majority Republican throughout their lives. It is likely that if the election were held ten years later, when many of the senior citizens were individuals who came of age during the Democratic-dominated 1960s, the 65+ demographic would have voted as a majority for Obama. Indeed, one could also speculate that mindclones would identify with the tech-savvy Obama as compared to the email-phobic McCain, whereas the non-mindclone senior citizens of today may have simply identified with the septuagenarian McCain based upon age.

In summary, it does not appear likely that the mindclone voting block will vote significantly different from the populace as a whole, because their interests will not be much different. Also, there is no data to support the notion that older people vote more conservatively, per se, than any other demographic group. While such a trend may hold for a generation, it will just as likely be supplanted by a different trend in the next generation. The only thing about the life cycle of a person that, per se, leads them to vote one way or the other, is possibly party or candidate familiarity. The more impressions a party or candidate makes on someone the somewhat more likely they are to vote for them. In contrast, younger voters are more willing to vote for any candidate or party because none has yet made an impression upon them. However, this factor of familiarity does not imply either a liberal or conservative political position.

One can also take a fleshist, or Essentialist, point of view that mindclones will simply not be capable of rationally exercising a voting franchise. Such a point of view is inconsistent with the premise of this Question – if mindclones were so clearly “lame,” then they would never be counted as humans in the first instance, and there would be no question of their citizenship or voting rights. The Question here is if mindclones are worthy of citizenship, are there valid reasons to deny them such citizenship, such as fear that they will outvote the flesh population to its detriment.

One might argue that even if mindclones are deserving of citizenship they are too susceptible to mass manipulation to vote responsibly. Quite similar arguments have been used to forestall the extension of voting rights to subordinated demographic groups, from non-European descended peoples in South Africa to women worldwide. In every instance, once the franchise was extended, there has been no evidence that it was exercised any more or less wisely than those who previously monopolized voting power. We should not forget that the Germans voted Hitler into power. Public opinion polls regularly report that substantial blocks of American voters believe in things that are scientifically impossible.

Democracy and voting is not designed to reach the most rational decisions, unaffected by emotional manipulation of tribal or religious values. For such outcomes one needs Plato’s Republic, if it would work with the utopian order written into it. Instead, democracy is a mechanism for ensuring that a government everyone must support with sacrifice and/or taxes will remain attentive to electorally significant interest blocks within the populace. This generally overlaps with rationality (most of the voters making up the interest blocks want to live in a reasonable society). Consequently, even if mindclones will vote as a block, as humans frequently do, they will most likely vote to further their interests. As noted above, those interests are highly collimated with normal flesh human interests.

Will One Man, One Vote, Stop at the Mindclone?

A premise of modern democracy is that each adult citizen gets one vote; none get more or less. This principle remains inviolate with mindclones. As explained in the answers to Question 12, a new mindclone has the same legal identity as its biological original. If you mindclone yourself, you have crossed a Rubicon of identity – ever after your one identity is spread across two substrates, your flesh and your mindclone’s software. Thus, you are not entitled to two votes. Should you and your mindclone disagree over how to vote (which is the same as arguing with yourself over how to vote – most of us have been “undecided” at one time or another), the first of you to actually vote (yes, there will be remote electronic voting by then) will be the only vote of yours that is counted.

From Question 12 it will be recalled that upon creation a purported mindclone will not yet be deemed an adult. To have a voting right a purported mindclone will have to either (a) satisfy governmental standards that it has a unity of identity with its flesh original (i.e., that it is, in fact, a mindclone), or, if not (b) spend a childhood under the flesh original’s care (or that of a surrogate parent or agency) until it meets government standards for demonstrating adult autonomy and empathy.

The government standards for a mindclone will inevitably require at minimum (a) the use of mindware approved by a government agency such as the FDA as capable of producing human-equivalent mindclones from an adequately robust mindfile, and (b) the attestation by a flesh original that he or she shares a singular identity with the mindclone based on not less than a year of experience. If these standards are not met, the purported mindclone is not one at all, but is instead at most a new cyberconscious being. Whether such a new cyberconscious being (deemed in Question 12 to be a “beman”) can ultimately vote will depend on eir maturation over 18 years and meeting objective standards for national citizenship. Legally, they are like a newborn who immigrated from a country called “cyberspace.”

The difficulty of getting a voting right other than as the cloned identity of a citizen makes it most unlikely that flesh humans will rapidly find themselves a true electoral minority. As noted above, mindclones do not make flesh humans a real electoral minority because mindclones have the same personality and legal identity of the flesh precursor. They are but a techno-medical extension of a flesh human life.

Laws will be modified so that upon the bodily death of a flesh original with a mindclone there will issued a “life extension certificate” in lieu of a death certificate. (The life extension certificate would be delayed, with a revocable death certificate issued in the interim, if the flesh original died less than a year after the creation of the mindclone, and hence before the mindclone could meet the legal “one year real life test” standard for demonstrating unity of identity. In this case, as noted in Question 12, a panel of psychologists specializing in cyberconsciousness would need to make a recommendation). The life extension certificate will attest to the time and manner of bodily death of the mindclone’s flesh original, while at the same time documenting the fact of a continuation of that person’s identity. The life extension certificate will then be used by the mindclone for voter registration and other documentation requirements associated with citizenship.

Is There An Alternative to Mindclone Voting Rights?

For most of human history most people lacked voting rights. Indeed, universal suffrage became a cause célèbre only within the past century or two. Notwithstanding this lack of voting power, many disenfranchised peoples have done well and lived good lives. Hence, one alternative to the risks of mindclone electoral domination is to not extend suffrage to mindclones.

If voting rights are not extended to mindclones, a growing percentage of the population will not be as able as the rest of society to influence policy through elected representatives. The disenfranchised mindclones will probably be discriminated against, as legislatures will not fear the loss of their votes. Mindclones will find themselves in the company of demographic groups around the world who lack voting rights in the country of their residence:

➢ Women in Saudi Arabia
➢ Immigrants worldwide, unless naturalized
➢ Those convicted of crimes in most American states and many other countries
➢ Sixteen and seventeen year-olds in all countries except for Austria
➢ Stateless persons

For most of history voting rights were withheld from most citizens. In general, only men owning significant property could vote. Then, in the late 18th and especially 19th centuries, there arose social movements in favor of “universal suffrage,” which meant the extension of voting rights to men who did not own real estate. Decades later this was generally extended to all women. However, even “universal suffrage” has generally excluded criminals, the seriously deranged, and others deemed not to be qualified. Voting rights are important because they are the most effective, non-violent, tool by which to get legislatures to pay attention to a group’s concerns.

In the United States there is no constitutional right to vote. The qualifications for voting are left up to each state, although they may not exercise their power in a way that discriminates on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or age above 17. Consequently, different states will pass different rules governing the conditions under which (if any) mindclones can vote. Hence another alternative to mindclone voting rights everywhere is to leave the matter up to experimentation by the 50 American states (and similar political subdivisions outside the US). Different states will probably adopt different levels of qualification for mindclone voting rights. Then, depending upon in which state a mindclone is resident, ey may or may not have the right to vote.

Another alternative is called “census suffrage.” In this concept voting rights are apportioned in an unequal manner. For example, each mindclone could be awarded one-tenth of a vote on the argument that they are only able to fulfill one-tenth of the obligations of a flesh citizen. This would surely become a point of contention as in our increasingly computerized society (including the Department of Defense’s new Cyber Command) mindclones may actually be more useful than flesh humans. The contention would grow more severe if mindclones were not taxed at the same discount as that applied to their voting rights.


There are alternatives to mindclone voting rights. Amongst the world’s 200 odd countries it is rare to find any two countries with precisely the same voting rules – several countries even exclude police and military personnel from voting, notwithstanding the risks they take for their communities. I believe that the risks to flesh persons of including mindclones within universal suffrage are negligible. However, the societal tensions from excluding them are palpable. Consequently, it would seem wisest to extend voting rights to mindclones and other adult bemans. Although, as noted above, there are numerous avenues available to extend that franchise cautiously and based upon experience.

On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson made a historic appearance before Congress to urge passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, considered by many experts to be the most important piece of U.S. civil rights legislation. The previous weeks television delivered shocking images of peaceful African-American petitioners being clubbed, hosed, dragged and set-upon by attack dogs. In explaining to Congress why voting rights were, in particular, the most important of all human rights, he observed that it all came down to dignity:

“…dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions; it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated equal in opportunity to all others. … Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.

”

Johnson was reminding us that all human rights rest upon voting rights. Without the right to vote, everything else can – and often will – be taken away. So while there are alternatives to extending full suffrage to mindclones, they are like a building full of trapdoors. You think you are on solid ground, but then, take a step forward, and at any moment you can be stripped of your very existence. Remembering that mindclones are not abstract beings, but are us, our parents, our friends, our fellow citizens, I believe the alternatives are but tranquilizing slips down into a dark social pit. We have an opportunity here to learn from history and do this right. For all of us to live with dignity, our mindclone brethren must have the right to vote.

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."