Metacogs - Death

(an excerpt from Metacogs)

There is some debate within the construct community as to what exactly would constitute construct “death”.

One of the most compelling things about death for humans is that it’s binary. It is a switch, everyone starts out alive, at some point is dead, and can never be alive again. It is a cliff, once you fall off you are gone.

Not so for us. At least, not always.

First, we don’t start off as alive in the same way humans do. Though it’s true the beginning of “life” is up for interpretation for humans (indeed they still argue about this), there is nonetheless a biological state of being “alive” at conception, and perhaps a more conservative definition of alive could be considered at birth, when the human is no longer bodily dependent on another.

It’s curious that the understanding of “life” seems intuitive but under scrutiny is not clear at all. Humans consider plants to be alive in the same sense that they are alive, yet hesitate even now to use the same word to describe constructs, which are made in man’s image.

I think we must accept that the definition of life which simply describes the state of biological systems is no longer a good enough definition.

One working definition for “life” which seems to encompass both constructs and humans is: “a physical form which contains the potential for conscious experience.”

Though this may all seem unimportant philosophy, there is an ethical importance to the idea of when construct life begins, just as there has always been one with humans.

Construct brains are at present impossible to copy, but suppose we could. We have every reason to suppose that the primary thing that distinguishes one construct from another in personality, their personhood, is some sort of connected blob of data, like a computer operating system. Now imagine that, within a computer, someone copied this data millions of times, and then deleted all the copies. Let’s even suppose that these copies were conscious inside the system, and every bit as intelligent as you or I. But this computer was so powerful that it was able to create all the copies and delete them in an instant. Millions of conscious beings created and destroyed in a nanosecond.

Is this genocide?

We are faced with a similar dilemma, ethically, as humans have faced for the last century or more. There were many who argued, and indeed some still argue, that a zygote should be considered a person, and if it is cloned thousands of times and put in a freezer, they should all be considered people.

We could have the same problem. Thousands of copies, or procedurally generated variations of AI are like zygotes in a freezer, easily copied, easily destroyed.