Hi Guys,
I’ve been dealing with the issue of identity and type classification for modular self assembling machines be they biological or artificial. I’d like some feedback on this issue.
Like you guys I see living organisms are biological machines, but we are also a multi modular (cellular) self assembling collective. Now traditionally identity revolves around functionality when we assign classification, but this has important ramifications for Homo sapiens when considering our identity/classification.
Before I go into the problem and argument can I get feedback on my stance of a phase initiator of a self assembler?
The initiator phase is just the initial or starting configuration of a self assembler, so that if we had a self assembling house that starts off the size of a piece of luggage, its identity is still as a self assembling house, even though at that stage obviously it isn’t a house one can occupy. It can be considered just one stage or configuration the self assembler will go through until its finale configuration /stage. The point being that it has at least two fundamental functional identifiers, that of a house and of being a self assembler. So even though it may not look at a house it is still a self assembling house.
I hope there are no objections there.
No would that change if it was a modular self assembling house where it is made up of smaller differentiated modules?
The initiator would build daughter modules that would replicate building copies that would themselves make up the structure of the house. Essentially it replicates the way biological organisms self assemble. To my mind growing is self assembly.
Now the initiator phase functionally and organisationally is a self assembler, but even while in one way the smaller component modules are very similar to the design of the initiator-again we are essentially replicating cells-, their role is completely different in that they are constituent parts of a organisational whole, therefore they cannot be designated the identity of the collective or type.
Therefore concerning identity the initiator is a self assembler, the developmental stages are self assemblers as seen as a organisational collective, as well as the final configuration, while the individual modular constituents, while they may be very similar in many physical respects, aren’t self assemblers of that identity type like a self assembling house.
Any thoughts objections.
Regards
Simon
Hi Simon,
I'm with you so far...
One of the reasons I like A-life is that it really messes up people's cozy notions of the world. Most of us believe that there's a cut-off point between alive and dead, things with moral rights and things without, individual and group, etc. A-life helps show how blurred those boundaries are.
We shouldn't really need showing, though. Just look at jellyfish - is a jellyfish medusa a single organism or a collection of free-living polyps? The answer is both. One polyp divides to become many, but these are symbiotic 'organs', acting as parts of a single, coherent, differentiated organism. Then the medusa splits up into individual polyps that swim freely and live out another life as individuals, before dividing and creating new medusae.
And it should be obvious (but sadly isn't) to most people that a human being is really a collective of ten trillion single-celled creatures that just happen to be descended from the same ancester (an egg) and just happen to be glued together, differentiated into tissues and acting 'with one mind'. A white blood cell is basically a free-swimming amoeba that eats bacteria. A neuron or a muscle cell is more anchored and more dependent on its neighbours but it's still a complete living thing in its own right.
And those ten trillion cells are only ten percent of a human anyway - the other 90% (bacteria, molds and protozoans) that live in our gut, on our skin, inside our lungs - aren't even genetically related to us, but we can't live without them.
You can see this process of aggregation, and the merging of many identities into one, when you look at bacterial mats and biofilms. If bacteria happen to exude a goo, they'll stick together. As the mat gets bigger, its internal environment changes compared to the surface, so bacteria on the inside need to switch on different genes so as to metabolise successfully in this new milieu. If the bacteria on the inside live on the waste products produced by those around them, and those on the outside benefit in some way from the activities of the inner cells, then you've basically got a multicellular creature - a coherent, inter-dependent, inter-related, differentiated collective.
It's only a comparatively small step from such a gooey mass of differentiating bacteria to a fully differentiated, rigidly shaped, multicellular organism with a conscious mind of its own.
The human mind is predisposed to divide the world into discrete objects, but this doesn't mean they exist. Reality is a blurry, messy goo, to which we attach labels at our peril!
Interesting topic. I look forward to seeing where you go with it!
Best,
Steve
Well that is a nice change to get at least someone who understands the concept of what a self assembler entails for many philosophers don’t and it appears unless you are dealing with a embryologist many biologists don’t consider a human zygote a Homo sapiens. If anyone can provide more info on this it would be greatly appreciated.
Ok one way to approach this is to consider it within a larger context of moral rights for A.I.
My question concerns the a Actuality or Capacity problem concerning moral rights using cognitive personhood centred around self awareness and other higher cognitive capacities. If a physical entity has the capacity for personhood at what stage of its physical existence should it be granted moral rights?
You would be surprised to learn this hasn’t really be cleared up yet in philosophy.
Questions like you have a competed hardwired A.I. computer, is it a person only while turned on or –actuality or first use- or just having the capacity if turned off sufficient?
We could just concentrate on this but I wish to expand it to regard self assembling A.I.’s.
The short of it is if we grant moral rights to ourselves –being biological machines, I use bio-mecha vs tech-mecha,- and to our developmental phases that don’t exhibit personhood, and we in fact have a self assembling A.I., then whether it is in its initiator phase, is switched off, is booting up before full A.I., is still assembling itself with no A.I. capacity or in full A.I. configuration then we grant it equal moral rights.
I’m not going into detail about the reasoning behind this I’ll let the reader come to their own conclusion without any indepth coaxing.
Don't feed your inner Troll.
> The short of it is if we grant moral rights to ourselves –being biological machines, I use bio-mecha vs tech-mecha,- and to our developmental phases that don’t exhibit personhood, and we in fact have a self assembling A.I., then whether it is in its initiator phase, is switched off, is booting up before full A.I., is still assembling itself with no A.I. capacity or in full A.I. configuration then we grant it equal moral rights.
But as far as I know, we don't grant ourselves moral rights on the basis of us being biological machines but as CONSCIOUS machines.
People seem intuitively to believe in some kind of hierarchy of consciousness, and ascribe moral rights in proportion to an organism's position on that hierarchy. Granted it's a pretty naive hierarchy in most case -- things with eyelashes are given higher moral status than things without, or animals are given higher status than plants, in the case of vegans (who don't seem to have a good answer for what to do with fungi, which are neither animal nor plant but are closer to animals than they appear). Some people -- often (mis-)guided by judeo-christian teachings -- draw the line specifically between humans and all other animals, as if orangutans were not the slightest bit conscious. They would presumably find it inconceivable that any machine, self-assembling or otherwise, could have moral rights.
So your question should perhaps only be addressed to conscious AIs, whatever that means (and I realize I'm opening up an even bigger philosophical sore here).
Again, this is partly why I do AL and AI -- because it gives me a chance to screw up people's cozy certainties and make them think. Personally I would draw a fuzzy boundary between potentially conscious and actually conscious, and assign different levels of morality (aka respect) to each. But then everything in my head is pretty fuzzy -- most people draw much sharper lines and insist on more definitive categories than me. I'm basically a utilitarian. I have no difficulty assigning rights to a painting, even -- it seems wrong to me to destroy a work of art, just not nearly as wrong as it is to destroy a living being who has hopes and plans and fears.
- Steve
Sorry I wasn't clear, no I think the reason that many in the West give moral consideration to many Homo sapiens is that they are persons with self awareness and other higher cognitive abilities. Now when we compare ourselves –being biological self assembling machines- with a future artificial self assembling machine we will further question the personhood criteria.
My argument is that we currently give personhood moral rights to Homo Sapiens that don’t have current functional /capacity for cognitive personhood i.e. some infants the mentally handicapped and some age cognitively deteriorated elderly. Some even argue we aren’t persons when sleeping but that is a side issue.
If we are to give this right to Homo sapiens that have a design capacity but not current capacity for cognitive personhood, we will have to do the same for design capacity A.I. -when they are organisationally complete - be they turned off, self assembling or booting up.
The other point I’m trying to make is when an entity is a self assembler it is irrelevant whether its later developmental capacity is operational or not, for in its early stages an being a self assembly entails it is just as much the signify or type of thing at that less developed stage, as when it achieves a later fully developed capacity.
For example any tree as signifier type species name, now given it is a self assembling biological entity is its just as much is species name as a acorn as when it a sapling or fully grown tree. I would argue this is as much the same for a Homo sapiens biological self assembler as it is for any artificial self assembling A.I.
Is this clear?
Don't feed your inner Troll.
Yep, that's clear.
> If we are to give this right to Homo sapiens that have a design capacity but not current capacity for cognitive personhood, we will have to do the same for design capacity A.I.
As long as the end result is conscious, though. That was all I was saying. Self-assembly alone isn't enough, or perhaps necessary. Morality applies to consciousness independently of how that consciousness arises. This may be important.
But I agree with your raw proposition. *IF* we assign moral rights to, say, a foetus, then we'd have to assign them to the early stages of a self-assembling conscious AI as well. How valid that IF clause might be is a moot point, of course. People are generally happy to assign moral rights to a baby in the womb some months before it is born. Some insist that even a 16-cell embryo has rights too. Fewer would suggest that an egg has rights, much less a sperm, thus implicitly (and without foundation) believing that fertilization marks some kind of moral threshold. Even the most hardened anti-abortionist wouldn't insist that the individual molecules that come and go inside the ovum as it metabolises and maintains itself were deserving of rights, so here they seem to be applying some intuitive definition of "living" as a cut-off point. After all, self-maintenance is equivalent to self-assembly and we don't regard water with moral respect even though we drink it and it eventually becomes a vital part of us. At the other extreme, some would say that a foetus is still an organ of its mother and so the rights accrue to her, not the child, at least up to some arbitrary stage (and hence abortion is a morally defensible prospect). It's a fuzzy area and I don't think most of us have thought it through.
How that intuitive logic would translate in people's minds to a self-assembling (conscious) AI I don't know. If it was a von Neumann replicator then it arises in more or less one step from a bunch of nonliving, non-intelligent components, assembled by a smart pick-and-place machine (a robot that can build robots like itself). The components are definitely not morally-deserving (any transistor will do, so why would the ones chosen to be part of the replicator's offspring be special?) but the end result would be morally-deserving. But you're talking about SELF-assembly. Is that fundamentally different from a von Neumann replicator? Do the constituent parts deserve rights if they are capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps into something that is conscious? If so then would those parts still deserve rights if they were not constituents of a self-organizing machine but something else? Presumably you're saying that the parts AS A COMMUNITY deserve respect, not the parts as individuals.
It seems to me that your argument is perfectly valid: *IF* people assign rights to the initial phase of a self-organising human then they should do so to the initial phase of a self-organising, conscious machine. But I think people are making a mistake - not with machines but with humans: there is no distinct cut-off point between things that are morally-deserving and those that are not. It's not an all-or-nothing affair.
But I can feel that you have a specific point to make. Your proposition is clearly just the first step in an argument. So what's the denouement?
- Steve
Steve you get it, most people I’ve brought this up with don’t!!
I’m quite well acquainted with the abortion and personhood debate and for me this dovetails nicely into many questions about the moral rights of A.I.’s., be they self assemblers or not.
I think this deals with the actuality vs. capacity question regarding personhood but not in a way the current philosophers would appreciate. As you stipulate 'if' moral in-group consideration is based on personhood, what I propose automatically follows.
But many philosopher either won’t except that a human zygote is a Homo Sapiens just as much as a post partum human, getting themselves in a pickle over potential persons. They also confuse constituent parts that may be genetically Homo Sapiens but cannot differentiate between those parts and the collective/organisational whole. Or they won’t fully acknowledge that some post partum humans aren’t persons and come up with some lame excuses to scrape by.
Interestingly you could consider the egg and sperm as bootstrapper biological assemblers of a self assembler, and that we aren’t exact numerical replicators but type replicators as our offspring aren’t clones. Are we organic von Neumann replicators, I think so but I’m not 100% sure.
Basically you’ve stumped me as I’ve had to battle to try to get this across and you’ve done it with a small about of info.
There are some obvious consequences concerning both abortion, rights for non human animals as well as A.I.’s.
IMO there will be a moral paradigm shift with the advent of self assemblers, von Neumann replicators, A.I. and artificial wombs that will fundamentally change the way we currently see moral worth for ourselves and other self aware entities. Abortions and many types of assisted pregnancy will be outlawed, but that won’t matter to people as artificial wombs will take the burden away from women. All non human persons will be given as much consideration as the cognitive level equivalent Homo Sapiens, and the field of robotic self aware or A.I. workers will create the same sort of problems slavery caused in an earlier time.
-Simon
Don't feed your inner Troll.
The continuity paradox can't be addressed until we have a cybernetic stand-in for brains
While that route will work for some my new account fixes those paradoxes. Maybe I'll should use this site to publish :)
Most of the info is already out there you only have to see the big picture.
Here's a tip we aren't ontologically speaking, just animals nor are we just persons or brains.
Don't feed your inner Troll.
> All non human persons will be given as much consideration as the cognitive level equivalent Homo Sapiens, and the field of robotic self aware or A.I. workers will create the same sort of problems slavery caused in an earlier time.
Pessimistically, I doubt that non-human persons will be given equal consideration. I imagine that for a long while they will be seen as "inferior" Frankenstein's-Monsters type beings. That or "We created them, therefore they should do as we say". Basically it will be the race-rights issue all over again. People don't learn from the past as well as you'd hope.
I would hope that eventually there will be a paradigm shift, but I would expect our "creations" will have a long uphill struggle ahead of them. It might be "nicer" to only create things that aren't intelligent, so that we never run into this issue. On the other hand, at what point does something stop being intelligent? Or at what point does it start?
I totally agree on the slavey how can you create an A.I. that qualifies as a person and then treat it as a slave? I have read a paper talking about 'engineering' the A.I. to want to be a slave, but the obvious objection is that this should in principle justify doing the same to Homo Sapiens.
Regardless it maybe artificial self assemblers that create the biggest philosophical impact. This is another paper I hope to do, though it might be hard to provide much depth to the concept that self assemblers are by definition already themselves. It will be interesting to see how the philosophical community react when I illustrate the identity consequences of compound A.I. self assemblers.
This is apart from the fact that the whole idea of personhood as a foundation for moral inclusion -esp for self assemblers– is deeply flawed. A whole new investigation of moral in-group grounding will be needed.
Don't feed your inner Troll.