Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

You may not be giving the millions of years of biological r/d credit.  I’m already as compelled as I could possibly be- to the detriment of my own life even in the case of strangers.

Is that a bad thing, though?  Now or then?  Then but not now?  What am I waiting -for- that isn’t already in effect today?  We already agree on animals rights on this seeming business.  Chiefly, human ones.  It seems to me that it would be inconsistent to deny the next seemer what we’ve granted the last seemer.

Okay, let's consider the evolutionary narrative.  I consider evolution from a non-life perspective-- in any system where there are (1) sufficiently complex elements that they may form a great number of compounds, which themselves may also form new compounds of even greater complexity; (2) the flow of time, such that some compounds may persist longer than others-- then evolution not only can happen, but necessarily will.  So I'd refer to the initial forming of proteins in a primordial soup "evolution," not just DNA and how animals negotiate their persistence through life-and-death interactions.

In evolution, then, what really persists?  Information, I'd argue-- about the Earth's environment, about the state of trillions of individual animals, about how persistent information of one animal interacts with that of another.

So what happens if we get "squeed" into supporting Googalina, giving her rights and so on?  Well, I suppose technically an AI is an evolved system with a different mechanism, but its body is currently only whyatever we give it access to.  If AI is ever powered with the ability to replicate materially as well as informationally, say by directing teams of robots to mine resources and build robot factories, then its a done deal.

After all, that, though, I'd still wonder-- is Googalina really experiencing?  If I could know, for sure, that she was, I might accept the demise of humanity to a massively-greater and more capable information-processing evolutionary system. Nietzsche said, "God is dead," but I wonder if he knew he was telling our fortunes as a species?