If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
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.
That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.
Not really the same thing, but if alien life was found on Europe or Enceladus, religions would resist to change their theologies.
Unlike thinking there won't be consequences of importance because of a belief that < 1% of humanity even thought of maybe possibly having
What is a human?
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.
This is priceless))
It's recently became a loaded term (much like gender) due to people in general using the term like that. See expressions like "humane" or "transhuman".
I would prefer if they used some other word instead of overloading the method, but oh well.
Yes, this is what I mean. There is seemingly no organism/species that I would confuse whether to classify it as human or not human but I'm pretty sure there are species/organism albeit is rare that I would be in hard time categorizing it as cat or not cat.
Another example is human male and human female, albeit is rare but there is some human population that I would have a hard time deciding which category to put.
Ideally we should clone enough to see if we can connect us and bonobos in a species complex (no hard boundaries of infertility).
I'm salivating over all the ethical choas that this would cause.
Can you point me to a spot where it says that?
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.
That's quite an assumption. I think there were 42 original proto-organisms spread over all the aeons. Creating a 43rd artificially is not a big deal.
Otherwise, I still think that it would be.
To clarify, though: I'm not at all against the creation of another individual.
So no major consequences.