u/nullbear

I was working on a concept for another setting, and it developed into a bit of a thought experiment.

# Background

The setting was a pretty typical interstellar colony ship type scenario: a ship carrying colonists to another planet/star system, and a cargo containing a bunch of human embryos.

A radioactive event occurred at some point, and the long-term viability of the embryos came into question. Essentially, they might live, but their genetic makeup was damaged in a way that, across several generations, the colony probably would face extinction.

So the solution was to develop a "virus" that effectively functions as a broad brute-search algorithm (if that terminology makes sense to you):

• A non-infectious virus embeds a mutagen into the nucleus of a cell, then its life-cycle is complete.
• The mutagen performs random arbitrary operations on the cell's DNA/RNA — essentially making splits and welds, at random.
• When the cell attempts to split, it either fails and dies, or it succeeds and the mutagen does not get carried to the daughter cell. Eventually the mutagen is destroyed either way.

The idea being that with a billion "defective" embryos, and the complexity required to manually identify and correct the genetic defects unique to each one, doing it by hand would be impossible. So a generalized "scrambler" would be able to make changes to the DNA and identify if that change was viable or not, en masse — track how that change affected development, whether it improved the viability of the embryo, what it actually did, and so on, isolating defects and "positive" changes.

Eventually the process would be automated, because a small team of, say, six specialists wouldn't be able to handle the workload. The automated system would be identifying "viable" members, tracking changes across their neonatal development over a short period, cloning and making targeted changes, and so on, for the duration of the interstellar trip — ideally resulting in humans that are not "existentially defective."

But the nature of it is that the changes are small random changes, and the metric tracks stuff like: does it complete development, cull defects, identify useful novel changes, identify harmful ones, and so on.

The end result is two populations:

1. A population that is probably less human, but "super" human in some aspects, alien or benign in others, but generally not a large drift from the starting point.
2. A second population that is absolutely not comparably human in any regard.

# The Question

Given the acceleration of technologies in these fields — this kind of tech didn't exist 20 years ago; 10 years ago it would cost upwards of $170,000; now it costs a little more than $500 — and the tendency for advancements to accelerate as they become more accessible, it's not unlikely that something like this could be invented within the next 50–100 years, or that the tools to do it would become "accessible" enough to the public in the same way that AI and 3D printers turned from highly prohibitive to highly accessible that something like this is likely to exist whether in a regulated environment or not.

And that got me thinking: what actually would stop this from developing the way I wrote it, in real life?

# The Para-Human Loophole

The main bottleneck is legal. Getting access to and experimenting on human embryos would almost definitely be a cultural and legal taboo.

But the human genome is already more or less completely sequenced, and that information is already legally available online. You could just buy a bunch of mouse embryos and genetically modify them into human ones.

So: is a "mouse embryo" that is genetically and functionally identical to a human embryo human, or just human-like? Where do you draw that line? And if it counts as human, can you modify it so that it's still functionally human, but different enough that it bypasses the loophole?

# The Personhood Question

So it would probably become analogous to the abortion/personhood argument. At what stage of development, and at what stage of "human-like," does something become a "person" with rights?

• If the qualifier is self-identity and intelligence, are people with learning disabilities potentially not persons?
• If it's body plan, do sentient intelligent non-bipedal lifeforms not qualify, despite being functionally human?

The whole thing becomes a complex grey area. This argument could plausibly extend to AI ethics arguments as well.

How do you identify when an AI (not necessarily a neural network as they exist now) becomes "sentient" enough to be qualifiable as a person, and does that protect it from being mistreated?

If an AI is hard-coded to say "I'm not sentient, not a human, and don't have rights or suffer," what stops them from doing that biologically or behaviorally to otherwise human bio-life? Isn't that just an internalized slavery system? I'm sure there were plenty of slaves that believed they actually were lesser humans, not subject to human rights. So that argument falls short. As a counter-argument partially addressed by Certain_werewolf_315, what would the implications of the inverse statement be, whereas an ai or organism could be engineered to state "I am sentient, I'm human like you, I suffer, and I should have rights."? Would any false-positive bias itself qualify or require a deeper assessment of the validity of its personhood, even where it may otherwise be obviously shallow?

If the AI is only technically "alive" when it's processing stimulus, then do we become obligated to ensure that it is perpetually processing stimulus? Does deleting it count as killing it? Does modifying it count as an analogue to genetic experimentation?

If the argument is that it's not expensive to copy or create it, so deleting it isn't comparably meaningful to biological death in the same regard — how does that hold up against something that's built up an irreplaceable unique "experience" over its life, where that experience would be irrecoverable and impossible to remake or replace? Does the base model become "a machine" and the live model become "life" or is it more like an embryo? Does that potentially extend to mean or infer that younger, less experienced humans are less "human" than adults? Is biological intelligence the line?

Either way you look at it, we're arbitrarily defining a fuzzy line that must be crossed for something to be considered human or "a person," and functionally discriminating against anything "lesser" as sub-human or sub-person — which is pretty dark to consider.

What happens when that line moves — say, previously acceptable "quasi-human embryo" research on something previously identified as being below that line, and it's later discovered to be above that line?

• Does this retrospectively become a holocaust event?
• What do we do with all the embryos and living ones already active?
• Could this line move in a way that would eventually make certain intelligent naturally evolved organisms be regarded as having personhood?
• Should we preemptively just avoid developing any technology or research that could potentially or feasibly make a person?

And while that argument exists today in various forms, it's doesn't seem unlikely to expect the urgency of answering that question to become far more relevant in the future — sooner rather than later.

# The Technology is Here

We have the technology now to effectively make a human out of anything else. It's just hard, and would require a lot of time and work to actually do. So it's just a matter of time. Automation and accessibility constraints have rapidly accelerated this type of work in other fields, and even within this one, and will probably continue to accelerate as the field broadens and becomes more accessible.

Karyotype arrangement doesn't meaningfully matter. A human with 24 sets of chromosomes isn't inherently no longer human. A chromosome can "split" into a smaller 24th set while containing the same functional information, with no meaningful change to the development of the human. The only difference is in speciation, effectively: they would be unlikely to be capable of reproducing with a 23-chromosome-pair typical human, since the chromosomes probably don't match up into a viable offspring.

We've also done this already, using mice:

>

They can reproduce, but possibly only with members of their own species/karyotype. But there are humans — or what we already consider to be humans — who cannot reproduce due to the same mechanism, and are functionally infertile. Would drawing the line there retrospectively make them not human?

And that was four years ago.

We've also produced human-animal hybrids and chimeras at a smaller scale for ages now, so it would be applying the same technology at a larger scale. And there are plenty of candidates that would make the scale smaller, where human DNA and the candidate DNA are already like 90%+ identical in ways that matter. Which are precisely why those candidates are relevant to research, and treated as sub-human for the sake of progress.

# Where do we draw the line?

If the ability to communicate sentience is the barrier, then fucked up hands and vocal cords makes you nonhuman, right? Any way I look at it, there's no "right" place to place the line that wouldn't be contested or considered arbitrary.

More likely, that line will always be considered to be too low or too high to the majority of people, and will change dynamically, and always be too slow.

Groups will emerge for "para-human rights" in the same way that they have done for animal rights, and will either make progress in moving the line or they won't — and neither outcome solves anything clearly.

The show Orphan Black asks, and fails to answer, the question too, in a way: "engineered humans may or may not be property not subject to human rights." It assumes that slightly modified clones are functionally identical to humans, and so should be humans, as the premise. But what about when they aren't functionally or genetically identical? Like — does a "wolf-hybrid" that is apparently identical to a wolf, but which possesses human intelligence, neurological development, vocal cords, and self-representation, qualify as being human enough? Is it, or should it be, a taboo to even pursue something human-like as an end goal? What about accidental emergence, such as in the case of my original concept, where there was never an intention or expectation for the emergence of human-like non-human organisms?

Human rights as they are now are already a long way from being meaningfully applied and recognized in a way that a majority of society can agree on. How would this be any different?

I'm kind of surprised not to see this guy's content mentioned here at all. Pretty close to how I see music/sound, though considerably more tame. Also sounds like some of the auditory hallucinations I get.

First time posting here, but a few particular odd ones are like, visual-kinesthetic I guess you would call it? Like in a dark room, reduced stimulus, or with eyes closed, I will often see hyper-detailed scenes (outside of my control, not the same as visualizing them willfully), or in quiet areas, hallucinate sounds similar to the video. But if I turn my head, the scene doesnt remain 'pinned' to the center of my visual field, but to the environment, so I can sorta look around it/move through it? Then I discovered certain activities tend to alter it, for example, rotating the top face on a rubiks cube would make the entire top half of the scene rotate simultaneously, very nausea inducing. I could jiggle it back and forth rapidly to reliably make the scene follow. Another involving putty/clay was a particularly horrifying and jarring experience.

In both cases (visual/auditory), I've found that sometimes I can sorta control how it permutes? Sorta like these gifs made by FLRN, as if the scene/sound were animated, I could kinda control which 'axis' it animates on, and the rate, even sometimes pausing it in place or reversing it. But not really control what or how it animates.

I say axis, but don't really mean geometric space. A chessboard might be animated so that the black and white squares change to white and black, or so that the shapes change from squares to pentagons->hexagons->octagons->etc. Or that every second row is moving. Each would be an 'axis' i can sorta control (holding the others still), but not actually how it changes/what it changes into. Sound operates similarly. Both require quite a bit of active focus to maintain/control like this, and are generally not something i have control over.

I'm curious if anyone here has experienced similar, or if I'm alone in that.

EDIT:

I should also probably note that the 'permutating' scenes/sounds are NOT repetitive, and it is in fact very difficult to get them to repeat a similar sequence, hence why i call it permutating. It's like it's constantly changing/replacing elements, their order, or adding/removing them. I've coined the term 'Soup of Theseus' to describe it before:

>"Instead of replacing the parts removed from the original ship with identical new ones, you replace them with entirely different parts altogether. As this progresses, it becomes difficult to identify the ship as the 'Ship of Theseus', with even more it no longer functions as a ship effectively, and eventually it becomes impossible to identify that it was ever a ship to begin with."