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If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
by rtatay 6y ago
If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
- hoyd 6y agoIt would certainly be called reverse engineering.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI don't think so. Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered. I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
- Ericson2314 6y agohypothetical hyper-vegans must always bootstrap from source, because vendored binaries that exceed the size of small small genomes is heterotrophy.
- dudeman13 6y ago>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.
- phkahler 6y agoNot really. They'll just say a chemistry experiment isnt life.
- chess_buster 6y agoOnce the "chemical experiment" escapes its petri-dish and replicates in the laboratory's drain, taking over whole beach resorts and a third of the Pacific ocean, people will rethink!
- whimsicalism 6y agoI think it's pretty optimistic (? or pessimistic) to assume that the "chemical experiment" would have a chance in hell against the bacterial super-predators that have spent billions of years evolving to adapt to this environment.
- tjchear 6y agoI don't think there will be any consequences of importance, for a different, simple reason: people generally resist changing their worldview and will do mental gymnastics to preserve it.
- goodthenandnow 6y agoExactly. Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dudeman13 6y agoThat's an argument I think is valid for a possible lack of consequences of importance. Unlike thinking there won't be consequences of importance because of a belief that < 1% of humanity even thought of maybe possibly having
- matz1 6y agoI don't believe in hard barrier between life and non life but interestingly the barrier between human and non human animal are seemingly very discrete.
- pnut 6y agoConsidering the radical diversity in the spectrum of human cognitive capabilities, I'm not so sure it's a discrete transition from non-human to human. What is a human?
- posterboy 6y agoAlong with gender, being human is a socially defined concept. It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either. Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled. In that sense I can agree with your sentiment, because I am not sure how much man's success is really controled and not just the result of sheer luck, despite horrible accidents and individual failure. On another note, this isn't your websearch box. I went on to write an essay because I tried to take the question serious. This became invariably self centered and thus potentially dehumanizing to everyone else, trying to reclaim the terminus because failing to find an interesting definition which would rest on intricate topics in current research and traditional philosophy, I felt rather insecure, dumb and worried if a strong definition of humanhood would eventually exclude myself, whereas too weak a definition would have barely any utility to anyone. It is quite poetic, here's the climax: "The collective memory greatly expands that capacify, so it can remain out of the question if an individual ape has a low mental capacity, if you won't ever find enough monkeys assembled around a typewriter as you can find humans in the market place trying to dictate the value of life." To double down on that, let's say the appropriate question goes who is.... Whereas what rather goes along as relative pronoun to denote possession. What has a human, well, a typical human has many humans around them, above and below. Whereas a single human is practically dead, if not conserved in living memory. Next up: Human rights for Artifical General intelligence and bionic hind brains for poor hackernews commentators, where to draw the line.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoGood job, thinking like a machine. Let's see if they'll have mercy on you when they decide your organs are harvestable.
- sydd 6y agoI don't think so either. We will likely be able to create something that self-replicates under similar circumtances what we think were in the primordial soup. And we will call this thing (or after some more research things) as possible first evolution steps.
- m12k 6y agoWhat do you think the ethical consequences will be? Genuinely curious, because I don't really see what they would be, or why there would be any. At least not compared to something like e.g. creating an actual artificial intelligence, and then needing to decide if it has rights, and what kind and so on. Creating a novel type of microorganism out of non-living components doesn't really seem to come with the same kind of can of worms, but maybe I'm overlooking something?
- mannykannot 6y agoWell, for those whose ethics are founded on their religious beliefs and whose religious beliefs are dependent on the premise that only God can create life, then there might be some adjustment to be made - but people are very good at dealing with inconvenient facts in ways both rational and irrational.
- originalvichy 6y agoI think goal posts will rightly move towards creating a universe. I guess agnostics have already ”given up” with the thought that a creator was needed for biological life. A creator for a universe is a greater question.
- postalrat 6y agoI think that goal post has already been moved. Big bang theory created a perfect point to separate god the natural world.
- NateEag 6y agoAs a Christian that has read the Bible probably a dozen times, I know of nothing in the book that says only God can create life. Can you point me to a spot where it says that?
- jddj 6y agoIt depends. For me it would be incredibly interesting. If we take that life plausibly "started" as as one single-celled individual who then "reproduced" through cell division (let's call him Luca), then he's effectively never died - in the same way that we consider ourselves to have not died despite regularly cycling tissues and cells. All life as we know it, if viewed like that, is one organism whose chain of cell division has never been broken as he's grown over billions of years. Variation between those cells (kingdoms, species, plant / animal etc) become like skin, hair and brain / liver cells within the human body. It would be like taking a runner grass or banana tree and trying to draw a line around true individuals. If we created life outside of that unbroken chain of cell division, we would have created something which is definitely "other than Luca" and that feels philosophically significant.
- proc0 6y agoNot much different than previous big discoveries that make us as human less special than we once thought.
- glouwbug 6y agoBut we already do know how, through means of reproduction, and that on it's own already has millions of philosophical, ethical, and theological debates
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoEvery time we do genetic engineering, we're creating life. And the consequences have not been insane. We just accept and move on.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoTheology is not based on facts. It's based on faith. So no major consequences.
- csomar 6y agoThere are no consequences. We are already eating fish and chicken, which are pretty alive by any definition.