4 ms·

There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back

by smeej 1y ago

There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now. When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" that could suddenly be killed?

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
Look, up front, I get what you're saying. But people actually make decisions like this about procreation all the time. We do genetic testing of parents to make sure they don't pass on devastation to their kids. People who want kids get sterilized to intentionally halt their genetic lines all the time. People choose their sexual partners by selection criteria. This is different only by degrees. > When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" Consciousness. The "think" part of "I think therefore I am". The part that makes humans human at all. Life experience. Presumably many years of it. You aren't even the same person you were yesterday let alone the cluster of cells that never experienced consciousness. > I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now Stopping there is arbitrary. If some rockslide hadn't happened a million years ago then your parents wouldn't have been born. It's causal chains and forking paths all the way down. How much do you debate the morality of rockslides? We have the power as a species to stop them now. Do we stop them? Do we never stop them? Both paths are genocide, just of different groups of people who will never be. Which group is the one we should choose to support?
- smeej 1y ago
  Consciousness? That seems...arbitrary? How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization, but when was it? And what level of consciousness matters? There are severely disabled adults who have never been as "conscious" as some of the more advanced other animals. Do they just not count? I don't think we are talking about a difference of degrees. That's what makes me viscerally uncomfortable about it. If this tech had been commonplace when my parents decided they wanted to have a baby and conceived me, they would have had to look at this graded set of their offspring, one of which was me, and pick me out of the group--the group of...what? The group of other embryos basically just like me. Genetically speaking, my brothers and sisters. And then they pick me (or don't pick me!) and the rest just...die. Or languish, frozen, in case they chose one that didn't work out, or they want more later. The ordinary process of IVF is weird enough to me. Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future and disposing of the rest makes my skin crawl.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    Rest assured though; one in four of all your friends and neighbors are already dead! They never survived to birth. So if you and your teacher enjoyed a class size of 30 in 5th grade, for example, that would have been 40 kids if it weren’t for the dead ones. I mean that is great news when you get into the job market, right? Instead of 400 applicants for that job you need, only competing against 300 — dead babies don’t need to work!!!
    - smeej 1y ago
      It is not, and never should be, reassuring that we can use technology to kill far more people than nature kills on its own. This obviously isn't true of adults (cf. every "never again" event in history). Why should it be true of any other stage of development?
  - BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
    > How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization Good. Done. Problem solved. We agree that we don't need to know exactly when it was to know when it definitely wasn't. > Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future IMO you should stick with this part and forget about the embryo part. You can be worried about the process and outcomes of eugenics without focusing on any hypothetical unselected individual.
    - smeej 1y ago
      > Problem solved. Not remotely. You provide no defense whatsoever of consciousness as a valid distinction between "you" and "not you yet," so it doesn't matter whether it's present at the beginning of your development or not. Whether one arbitrary feature you think is decisive is present at a particular point is completely irrelevant to anybody else, unless you can defend that that feature actually matters. I'm looking forward to hearing your case for it. The undisputed reality is that every human adult was once a specific human embryo. "Embryo" is one stage of human development, just like "infant," "adolescent," or "adult." There might be an argument for dismissing and eliminating certain embryonic humans en masse because of some trait they have or don't have, but you'd really need to pick one and make an argument for it, and it'd be a good idea to make sure the distinction doesn't apply to humans at other stages too if you don't want to have to argue that it'd be fine to kill toddlers, adolescents, or adults if they happened to have the same trait. It would probably also be important to make sure it's empirically verifiable, unless you're fine with whatever argument you make being used to justify killing toddlers, adolescents, or adults who might be thought to have/not have that trait. But if such an argument does exist, you certainly haven't made it yet here.

by smeej 1y ago

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago

Look, up front, I get what you're saying. But people actually make decisions like this about procreation all the time. We do genetic testing of parents to make sure they don't pass on devastation to their kids. People who want kids get sterilized to intentionally halt their genetic lines all the time. People choose their sexual partners by selection criteria. This is different only by degrees. > When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" Consciousness. The "think" part of "I think therefore I am". The part that makes humans human at all. Life experience. Presumably many years of it. You aren't even the same person you were yesterday let alone the cluster of cells that never experienced consciousness. > I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now Stopping there is arbitrary. If some rockslide hadn't happened a million years ago then your parents wouldn't have been born. It's causal chains and forking paths all the way down. How much do you debate the morality of rockslides? We have the power as a species to stop them now. Do we stop them? Do we never stop them? Both paths are genocide, just of different groups of people who will never be. Which group is the one we should choose to support?

smeej 1y ago
Consciousness? That seems...arbitrary? How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization, but when was it? And what level of consciousness matters? There are severely disabled adults who have never been as "conscious" as some of the more advanced other animals. Do they just not count? I don't think we are talking about a difference of degrees. That's what makes me viscerally uncomfortable about it. If this tech had been commonplace when my parents decided they wanted to have a baby and conceived me, they would have had to look at this graded set of their offspring, one of which was me, and pick me out of the group--the group of...what? The group of other embryos basically just like me. Genetically speaking, my brothers and sisters. And then they pick me (or don't pick me!) and the rest just...die. Or languish, frozen, in case they chose one that didn't work out, or they want more later. The ordinary process of IVF is weird enough to me. Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future and disposing of the rest makes my skin crawl.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Rest assured though; one in four of all your friends and neighbors are already dead! They never survived to birth. So if you and your teacher enjoyed a class size of 30 in 5th grade, for example, that would have been 40 kids if it weren’t for the dead ones. I mean that is great news when you get into the job market, right? Instead of 400 applicants for that job you need, only competing against 300 — dead babies don’t need to work!!!
  - smeej 1y ago
    It is not, and never should be, reassuring that we can use technology to kill far more people than nature kills on its own. This obviously isn't true of adults (cf. every "never again" event in history). Why should it be true of any other stage of development?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  > How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization Good. Done. Problem solved. We agree that we don't need to know exactly when it was to know when it definitely wasn't. > Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future IMO you should stick with this part and forget about the embryo part. You can be worried about the process and outcomes of eugenics without focusing on any hypothetical unselected individual.
  - smeej 1y ago
    > Problem solved. Not remotely. You provide no defense whatsoever of consciousness as a valid distinction between "you" and "not you yet," so it doesn't matter whether it's present at the beginning of your development or not. Whether one arbitrary feature you think is decisive is present at a particular point is completely irrelevant to anybody else, unless you can defend that that feature actually matters. I'm looking forward to hearing your case for it. The undisputed reality is that every human adult was once a specific human embryo. "Embryo" is one stage of human development, just like "infant," "adolescent," or "adult." There might be an argument for dismissing and eliminating certain embryonic humans en masse because of some trait they have or don't have, but you'd really need to pick one and make an argument for it, and it'd be a good idea to make sure the distinction doesn't apply to humans at other stages too if you don't want to have to argue that it'd be fine to kill toddlers, adolescents, or adults if they happened to have the same trait. It would probably also be important to make sure it's empirically verifiable, unless you're fine with whatever argument you make being used to justify killing toddlers, adolescents, or adults who might be thought to have/not have that trait. But if such an argument does exist, you certainly haven't made it yet here.