Sunday, February 24, 2013
Gomez & Infinite Regression
Gomez's definition of what it means to be conscious is inclusive of first, second, and third person awareness. His contention of a beings ability to have mutual awareness, whereby they can recognize other intelligent agents is enough to show the existence of a conscious being. He limits human bias of being self-aware which is a step beyond just being conscious. Going a step beyond conscious can be abstracted to infinite regress if we persist to add higher layers of consciousness. This will not only lead to infinite regress, but it will also create a species bias in that humans will be the ones capable of the higher layers.
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Related to the problem if the infinite regress, is the possibility of transhumanism and of other intelligent life forms.
ReplyDeleteIf we place value on something that falls into the infinite regress, as you mentioned, our system of ethics leaves itself open to the problem of devaluing a life purely on the basis of the existence of a more aware-life form.
Transhumanism - the augmentation of humans through technology and different sciences - brings the possibility of humans who have higher order thinking skills that would be better than ours and would therefore supersede our moral rights. So, if we value C+1, a being with C+2 could make C+2 the cut-off line for value.
The notion of transhumanism in general is useful in ethics because it places humans in a place that is similar to the marginal cases; human capacities will be marginal compared to transhumans.
You make a very good point, I actually had a question as well about Gomez's idea of second persons. He claims that "apes are capable of adopting a second-person attitude", but he also mentions that being a second person does not in any way make them "cheap versions of persons". This I believe is what you are getting at, even though he is not looking to, he is devaluing a life in some way as Brandon mentioned. The idea of personhood does not mean anything if this is the case, at least to me it does not seem it would.
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