Oh goody. Living human tissue, mimicking an embryo if not a baby, without consciousness or soul, grown and molded for our purposes and pleasures in a lab. This is excellent news everyone. A clear sign that we're winning the fight against the Antichrist (per Peter Thiel). It does kind of make you wonder though, what life is going to be like when absolutely nothing is sacred.
There is no shortage of taboos in modern society, only the concrete focus shifts as generations change. Some things lose their sacredness and others gain it.
It was probably completely safe to draw a Muhammad cartoon and sign it in the West of 1950. Doing this now is a recipe for spending the rest of your life under police protection.
The explosion of hate speech laws all over the West is another instance thereof, though much less sanguinary.
It's predicting the next token by statistical approximation. Hallucination vs fact is an ad-hoc distinction we impose on the result to suit our purpose.
So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink), or drive home from work (GPS), or cure cancer (various ISS research), or survive as a species, or mine space rocks so we don't fight nor pollute land for some scarce resource, or inspire children to dream big, materials science, water purification/generation, satellite communication, faster travel, physics, and a few more.
> So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink),
People have been posting on chat / message boards for a few decades now. This is not novel. Not sure the quality of discussion has improved since the modem days (14.4k was my first).
> or drive home from work (GPS)
Tens of millions of us learned how to read maps and road signs once upon a time. You can actually fit several states' worth of maps into most car glove compartments, it is quite wild.
> or cure cancer (various ISS research)
There has been lots of cheering of all the cuts that DOGE made, including cancer and other disease related research and prevention, so this seems a rather moot point.
> survive as a species
Oh yes! First crewed mission to mars according to Musk is just what, 3 years away now?
I don't think being able to comment here is that valuable, GPS is fine but so were maps, curing cancer won't save anyone from dying anyway, surviving as a species is useless for an individual, mining space rocks won't stop fighting or polluting, I don't see how any of this would inspire children, etc etc. The answer should be obvious and easy to muster, instead we have to dig hard to come up with vague possibilities. That should tell you something.
I'm a bit sad that this question is downvoted, because it's a valid question, even if a bit pointed.
First, we don't really know what's there. Because the entirety of the rest of the world is there, and that's a lot!
Second, it's also a bit of a cold war-like thing. A kind of power can be asserted from space. This power can be used for military purposes (just like any other power), and the possibility of this power is real, so, existing, capable powers must ensure that they don't lose their power to the power coming from this new territory. So basically, defense is another purpose.
Third, research doesn't often have an immediate commercial or welfare goal attached to it. Simply because we don't know what we'll find, and how that'll be useful. In this way, one could argue that research is pointless, but I think that would lead to the pointlessness of life itself, philosophically.
Fourth, successful space missions elevate morale, by providing inspiration. It's also a tool for diplomacy, a way to connect nations via a joint effort.
Except for point 2 these are cliches. Thanks to science we pretty much know what's in space and it's not very interesting. So sure, we'll put weapons up there as "defence". But that's not very interesting is it?
This is great. I have my doubts about Trump but I have to admit, he is keeping his promises. I thought there was no way he would do something like this with the tech oligarchs swarming around him, but it seems they are firmly under his thumb. Sometimes you just need a Caesar.
Mosley was an anachronism but his time seems to be coming. Shying away from it isn't the answer. Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms. The left is weak, and these spasms of violence like the Kirk assassination are symptoms of that. Let's hope this right wing energy can be released productively and some of their grievances addressed before it builds further.
> Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
It isn't. That's just projection from the left who are dismayed that the young generation are not as enthusiastic as they are about the arbitrary, opaque and ever changing social justice causes that they love. "luxury beliefs".
Put another way, the left wing, particularly in the US has a single, holistic philosophy with very little tolerance for anyone who doesn't support every aspect of it and the young generation cannot see how that vision can substantially improve their lives.
You even said it yourself
>traditional values and group
identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
What on earth does that have to do with facism? Not a personal criticism, to be clear, just a general observation.
Nazis made fascists temporarily embarrassed. We had Mosley, the business plot and American Nazi rallies, last one was German fascism which wouldn't really have worked but its back and draped in the American flag and christianity, they even have their boogeyman.
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
> it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self
I think we would call this "without ego" and not "without consciousness". I think it's totally possible to be conscious without ego. And perhaps bats do have an ego however small - some may be more greedy than others, etc.
I think what consciousness nominally means is an awareness of things in relation to a self, a subject-object relation. If there is such a thing as awareness without subject object content, I'd love to hear more, like how would you even know you have it.
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals
If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so
IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity
Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.
Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process
I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.
I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.
Saying it might be on a continuum just obfuscates things. What do you mean exactly?
If there is no sense of self or personal identity, how is that different than a block of wood or a computer? That there might be "mental" functions performed doesn't give it subjectivity if there is no subject performing them. And if there is no persistent reflective self there is no subject. You could call instincts or trained behaviors mental, activities of a kind of mind if you wanted to. But if it's not self aware it's not a moral subject.
