J:This was not a great week. A
friend's house just a block away caught fire (the old
candle-in-the-bathroom trick). He wasn't hurt and didn't lose
everything but his house was trashed by fire, smoke, and firefighters.
On Sunday Lori and I, along with a small contingent of friends and
family, pulled everything out of his house and deposited stuff in one
of two piles-- salvage and trash. Then we tore up all the carpet and
took it out, so the wood floors underneath wouldn't get too much water
damage. The stuff in the salvage pile was carted off to a storage
place. By the end of the day my arm muscles were knotting up and
refusing to work anymore, and I could feel a thin crusty layer of smoke
and dust on my face. But we finished the job...
Please be careful with your candles; make sure someone is always in the
room if there is a lit candle there. Our friend had just stepped out
for a minute and returned to find his house on fire. Candles are
pretty, but they are also dangerous, and should be treated will lots of
respect and little trust.
The weekly rant: I went to two
interesting lectures at NASA this week, both had to do with
consciousness. One,
by Christoph Koch, had to do with experiments that determine the nature
and extent of conscious thought. The other
was by Owen Holland, whose team is attempting to eventually build a
conscious robot. Dr. Holland finished with a slide that had a quote
from another scientist (I wish I could remember who it was) who
questioned whether it was ethical to create a robot with consciousness,
since it is consciousness that lets us experience suffering, and that
one may not be able to exist without the other. I thought it was a good
point, and one that is similar to a theme in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein.
It's also similar to one of my reasons I chose not to have children. I
consider the purposeful creation of a being that will suffer to be
morally incorrect. By the same reasoning, all children -- those who
didn't ask to be created -- should be treated with great love and
kindness, and should be taught to live in this world as best as
possible. This is what we owe our creations. Indeed, the same reasoning
leads me to the conclusion that adoption is morally preferable to
creation.
Hell, I might have come to the wrong conclusions (I certainly don't
have much here to work with), but at least I faced the problem. I think
it's a fairly serious one since the existence or absence of a thinking,
conscious,
self aware entity (and many thousands of potential decedents) is riding
on my careful considerations. I'm sure many people might look at the
same problem and come up with different answers, along with a different
set of morals. That's fine with me as long as the question is given a
thorough mulling over.
Most people, I gather, do not think much at all about such matters. The
decision to procreate carries a massive responsibility, but procreation
is so commonplace, so simple, and so much a part of our biological
programming that the philosophical issues of such decisions are largely
ignored, or filtered out by societal norms-- or even made taboo. I
wouldn't be surprised if some people find my childfree decision
blasphemous or rude.
Stipulating that we can analyze the
mechanics of consciousness and are on the
brink of being able to actually engineer conscious beings, we should
start looking at such ethical questions seriously, and subsequently we
might evaluate our own biological standards of reproduction from a more
enlightened viewpoint. Just a thought.