The Sleeping Beast of Nihilism and the End of a Morally Clouded Era.
Genetically Engineered
by Igor Gembitsky
With humanity’s excelling acquisition of biotechnological savvy, we are quickly approaching an era where the traditional limitations of biological and genetic destiny need not apply. People who have never been able to see before, are for the first time able to make out shapes and colors through digital optic nerves installed in the place of their damages organic ones; amputees are able to play the piano with new-age prosthetics; and new organs are being printed out of three-dimensional printers who’s ink has been replaced by cells, and who’s paper has been replaced by a biodegradable gel which holds the cells in place long enough for them to fuse. This is, however, only the tip of an iceberg whose unforeseen future implications has dented the hull of our moral Titanic.
The real heart of the matter is our growing intimacy with the code of life. As we unravel the mysteries of the highly selected and refined haphazard collections of nature’s genetic code, a whole new world of possibility beckons. There are scientists all over the world feverishly working to identify and catalog the function of every gene in the recently completed sequencing of the human genome. Already, we are able to apply what we have learned to modify crops to new levels of efficiency, and with genetic screening, we could identify and treat several diseases before they become damaging. Parents can now test to show whether or not an embryo in a womb has a debilitating, like Down’s syndrome, or life threatening, such as Tay Sachs, disease and have the option of terminating the pregnancy in such a case to ease the psychological suffering of the parents who would otherwise have to watch their child suffer and/or die. Eventually, we will perhaps be able to modify our own human germ-line to eliminate the haphazard of random trait selection in prenatal development, and instead be confident in the results of the child bearing investment that we make, at least genetically.
Unfortunately, returning to my Titanic analogy, this cruise-ship of possibility has found itself in an ice-berg field of uncertainty. Is it ethical to screen people for genetic diseases if they cannot be cured or treated due to economic or technological limitations? What if genetic screening were to be used by private insurance providers to discriminate against those likely to be of greater financial liability? Wouldn’t the ability to selectively determine the traits of a child only benefit those rich enough to afford such procedures, and would the result be an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor? Could genetic discrimination lead to a new era of eugenics?
Each one of these questions warrants an entire paper for discussion, but I will attempt to address every one of these issues briefly. I will also beg a deeper question of the origins and future of mankind, the absurdity of our existence, and the reason why we can’t let moralistic ethics get in the way of progress.
The first question I’ll address is the one that I feel is most imminent; that being the question of genetic screening for insurance eligibility. Surely it is not fair to deny a person medical coverage for something which is completely out of their control, namely their genetic inheritance. The problems of disparity which would arise are too complicated a moral issue to deal with. People’s genetic codes cannot dictate their fates. It is because we cannot, as a society, sit by and watch people die from a disease because they cannot afford to pay for treatment. Eventually we are obligated to provide them with emergency care, most often un-reimbursed. As a result, it actually becomes more expensive a societal burden to be providing emergency care to so many people whose uninsured conditions have escalated to life threatening. It becomes reasonable for us to move away from private insurance care, into a more prophylactic care system. Universal Prophylactic Healthcare, to prescreen and treat people who have predestined genetic malfunction, would in fact, be cheaper and more effective than our current system of private healthcare.
Currently, the United States is spending more money on healthcare than any other nation. We spend 15.3% of our total annual GDP on healthcare . One might think that since we’re making such a large investment, we would be buying ourselves one of the best health care services in the world, but in fact we are rated as being 37th in quality among the nations of the world, according to the World Health Organization, just one place below Costa Rica, actually.
According to the National Coalition on Health Care, there were 46 million uninsured Americans in 2004, or nearly 16% of the population. This is a rise of 6 million since 2000. Health Insurance premiums for many employers are becoming too expensive to handle. Insurance premiums are rising much faster than the rate of inflation, and this is causing the gap of uninsured to steadily rise.
As a result of the immense number of uninsured, $34 billion worth of Hospital service goes uncompensated every year. An additional $37 billion is paid by tax payers and charities to provide assistance to the uninsured. Then there is the $26 billion that is paid out of pocket by the uninsured themselves. Emergency care tends to be the most expensive, and those who are uninsured are 30-50% more likely to receive their care from an emergency room than the uninsured, mostly for conditions which are preventable or could be treated more cheaply and effectively through earlier diagnosis. Early diagnosis, however, is a luxury set aside for the insured.
In effect, there are 36 nations who pay less per capita on universal healthcare and get higher quality care than Americans do for their private administrative system. By embracing universal healthcare coupled with genetic screening for early diagnosis, we could give more incentive for people to seek prophylactic care, and thus cut major costs from our healthcare system. At the same time, the fear of genetic discrimination would be alleviated because access to healthcare would be universal.
Next, I wish to address the issue of ethics in genetically screening a person whose condition cannot be treated. Some have suggested that no such genetic screening should be allowed, unless there is an option of treatment available for the person being screened. The argument follows that the psychological implication of being helplessly diseased is more damaging than beneficial. I could not disagree more with this line of thinking. I am a hardened advocate of freedom. There must be no law set forth that would limit people’s consensual right to know more about themselves and their genetic make-up. Just because there is no treatment, does not mean that there can be no treatment in the future. People who are armed with the knowledge that there is something specifically wrong with them, could start to advocate for more research in that disease, and could start signing themselves up for related research studies. It seems to me a fundamental right, the right to know, and I maintain that such a right must never be abridged.
Then there is the exciting question of the future of genetically engineered children. Is it wrong for us to play God with the code of life? I believe that not only is it right for us to do so, it is our destiny to do so. Of course, we must proceed with caution. Our techniques must be flawlessly tuned, and our wits must be greatly sharpened before we can move into actually toying with the human genome. All the necessary tests much be run in abundance on animals first. But eventually, it seems no question to me that diseased genes should be removed, and resistance genes should be added. We should aid in the evolution of our species as much as possible by cleaning up the mess of mutation that is plaguing our gene pool.
But would not only the rich be able to benefit from such breakthroughs in genetic engineering? Surely they would at first, as the rich are always the first to benefit from new procedures and technologies, such as cosmetic surgery, artificial insemination, birth control, organ transplant, eye glasses, prosthesis, and a plethora or others. But eventually, all of these technologies become cheaper and more effective, and by the virtues of capitalism, trickle down to a broader base of consumers. By offering the procedure to more people at a cheaper price, the profit margin rises, and thus it is logical that it will eventually become far more accessible to most.
The very heart of my paper, the central argument that trumps all others and encompasses all questions posed in this essay, is that because morality is by definition subjective to people’s personal believes, it must never be used to legislate. The morality that I am referring to is restrictive based on personal belief. It is entirely too intuitive, and unscientific. It is a very dangerous idea that one’s beliefs should be imposed on another, and therefore the only logical resolution is to ensure people’s freedom to seek out their own morals and virtues. The limit of one’s freedom can only be drawn at a point in which their freedom impedes on another’s. If someone believes it is unethical to be screened for genetic disease that can’t be cured, they can choose to opt out of such a procedure. But in no way should that person’s belief be imposed on someone who does want to know, regardless of the possibility for a cure. This is the idea of amoralistic legislation, and would change a lot of our conservative social policy in regards to any legislation against drugs, abortion, gay marriage, genetic screening, and any other repressive moralist legislation.
The problem with moralism is because there is no inherent right or wrong. To drive the point home, I would like to step back for a moment and take a deconstructive and nihilistic look at humanity.
The beast awakens and the era dusks.
Why do humans think? Why did consciousness evolve? Let us muse about the necessity for consciousness as an element essential for our survival. Consciousness could be thought of as a byproduct of premeditative planning. It is a complicated offshoot from the ability to avoid danger and acquire the material necessary for self-preservation through manipulation of the environment, but its purposes are no different, at least biologically speaking.
The ability to plan ahead, to premeditate, is really nothing more than a collage of biochemical pathways, which form to create a pattern of neurons that can be used as a template for response to stimulation based on previous stimulation. The pattern is a haphazard Rube Goldberg machine, which was created based on the premise that given an infinite amount of time in a variable environment (like our universe) filled with atoms and molecules, all possibilities of interaction will haphazardly be tried. One Rube Goldberg machine will, by sheer virtue of probability, create a copy of itself. The one which satisfies the conditions necessary to carry on its reconstruction in its environment will spread on until new haphazard additions to its building technique cause it to malfunction or advance. The rest will remain unchanged and unorganized. This is a form of primordial premeditation, although based entirely on extremely unlikely situations (i.e. the situations necessary for the formation of life), which would lead to the chain reaction of life. So here I begin to equate premeditation with life.
The ability to premeditate is clearly not unique to humans; simply our capacity to do so is unmatched. We have the supreme ability to plan, not by way of slow and arduous trial and error of mutation and evolution, or by the exclusive use of our chemical hard-drives (memory), but by externalizing our thoughts and ideas through language and, more importantly, literature. We have, in essence, began a process of the evolution of thoughts and ideas.
It is this new type of evolution that has separated us from any other life on earth. We’re able to hold on to history, and build on top of it. We’re able to lead ideas into fruition.
But is our premeditation really all that different from the mechanistic premeditation of the simplest forms of life? That is, is there something that we have, namely consciousness, that is fundamentally different from the act/react mechanisms of simple life forms? Surely we wouldn’t say that the DNA, and other components, of a cell think before transcribing and translating an enzyme to digest lactose, but it simply and mechanistically responds to the presence of lactose. Although we can agree that human consciousness is more complex, but is it different in terms of mechanism?
Let us consider John Searle’s China Room Argument . This is essentially an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. But why is that? Why is it impossible to be able to make a conscious being using computer circuits rather than neurons? The analogy of the China Room is an excellent break down of the theory. Suppose you sitting in a room completely isolated from the outside with nothing but a manual on the rules of the Chinese language. No actual translations, but simply blueprints to constructing Chinese sentences. There are algorithms in the book which describe the proper way to respond to certain orders of words and punctuation. People on the outside think there is a Chinese person inside the room where you, completely oblivious to Chinese, are. They attempt to communicate by writing you letters with messages such as “hello, how are you?” and slipping them under the door. You examine the letters and refer to your manual, and write down a response that fits and slip it back out the door. The people would be reading a variable response like “Howdy, I’m great! How’s the weather?” or whatever other possible answer would fit the question, and would think they’re communicating with a fellow Chinese person on the other side. They could keep asking you questions and you would keep responding based on the instructions in the Chinese grammar manual. You will not really be having a meaningful conversation with them, you would simply be executing algorithmic operations over and over again, while outside the room it will appear as though a real, thinking, Chinese person is on the other side of the door. It would be impossible to verify that you do not actually understand Chinese, because you’ll be able to answer every question that comes your way, though without actually having any idea what you’re saying. The outside will be convinced, and as long as the questions keep coming, you will continue to appear genuine.
A more contemporary way to look at it is to imagine the future of internet messenger chat bots. IM Chat Bots are interactive programs which emulate online human conversation behavior. They’re programmed respond to queries and interact in a whole variety of ways. You can get into verbal disagreements, or erotic chit-chat with these programs, and they will respond as though a real person is typing through them. They are programmed to deconstruct your input sentences and respond in an intelligible way. It logs its responses to generate consistency, and by doing so, establishes a personality. If you insult it, it will claim to you its feelings are hurt. If you threaten to delete it, it will beg for its life. Eventually, these programs will be un-differentiable from online humans, which will no doubt usher in a new era of online advertising but that’s a whole other paper.
The main point in both analogies is that no matter how conscious and aware these interactions may appear, they are, in fact, nothing but mechanical responses. They are indefinite and variable, that is, the responses are not directly determinist, although still completely mechanistic . More plainly, the answers are not predetermined, but the mechanism for preparing the answers is. And to claim that an execution of an algorithm is conscious is contrary to our conventional ideas of consciousness. Clearly, a calculator is not conscious.
Our notions of what we are - are generally quite warped. We think, intuitively, that we, the conscious self, are like a homunculus sitting at the helm of complex array of sensory probes. We are like observers of input that our bodies collect from the environment, witnessing a continuous stream of input from reality. This idea, as rational as it sounds based on experience, has been proven to be flawed through psychological experimentation.
Consider the following:
When subjects scan a picture, they are quite often unaware of changes made in the objects in the scene if the changes are made during eye movements. Subjects can be told that some objects might shift while they are looking at the pictures and to indicate immediately when this happens. The changes can be quite dramatic and can even occur with objects that a subject has just fixated upon. Still they remain unnoticed. For example, a prominent building in a city skyline became 25% larger and 100% of the subjects failed to detect any change. One hundred percent also failed to notice that two men exchanged hats of different colors and styles. Ninety-two percent did not detect that a third of a crowd of 30 puffins disappeared. Eighty-three percent did not see that in a playground scene, a child is moved forward about five meters and enlarged by 30%. Most strikingly, 58% of subjects did not notice that the swimsuit of one of four people in an advertisement for a swimsuit changed from bright pink to bright green, even though they began viewing the picture fixated on the green suit.
If we were to assume that the conscious mind is really an autonomous observer who responds to stimuli, then surely we would be able to notice such stark changes in what we’re observing. Instead, our brain manipulates our perceptions based on what it receives, consequently deleting our previous perception if it is in conflict with what we are seeing. What I am saying is: we cannot notice a blatant change that happens right in front of our noses. Our brain actually interferes with our conscious perception. To me, that is quite insane. In fact, this phenomenon has been tested and proven to extend to other senses, as well.
Given these observations, how can we really claim to be autonomous conscious beings? I mean, we cannot even form an original thought which is not simply a collection of various sensory input. Are we any different from a really complicated calculator? Perhaps not. But the illusion of the otherwise is strong, and to make an argument against it would take many more pages to build upon.
Let me suggest that if there is a God, that it should be called Probability. The world we live in is bereft of divine meaning, and any thought otherwise would be intellectually unsound. We cannot definitively say what is wrong or what is right because these concepts are subjectively fabricated. All that we can say is what is probable and what is not. It is probable that if we do not pursue genetic experimentation and manipulation to its limits, then someone else will. We’ve already fallen behind the curve in certain kinds of medical research as a direct result of conservative moral legislation which are uncommon, if not unique, in the global sphere. It is improbable that our fear of the unknown is warranted. Change is inevitable and perhaps our only certainty, everything else is temporal. We must embrace the change, or be blown away like dust in the wind.
Basically, I am advocating a nihilistic approach to legislation. Morality is completely subjective and should be kept in the private sphere. The public sphere’s role is to ensure the freedom and welfare of its members, amoralistically and pragmatically. Legislation of morality is precisely what was being avoided by the founding fathers when they ensured the division of church and state. Theirs is a legacy worth maintaining.
As for the future of genetics, it is already cracking the bedrock of our ideas of mankind and its role in nature. We are slowly transforming into caretakers of our own biological destinies, and, as I’ve said repeatedly, we must not be blinded by morality. We must carefully explore our possibilities, and modify our social institutions with prudence. Universal Healthcare is a good first step. Beyond that there waits, as Eden Phillpotts once said, a universe that’s full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
by Igor Gembitsky
With humanity’s excelling acquisition of biotechnological savvy, we are quickly approaching an era where the traditional limitations of biological and genetic destiny need not apply. People who have never been able to see before, are for the first time able to make out shapes and colors through digital optic nerves installed in the place of their damages organic ones; amputees are able to play the piano with new-age prosthetics; and new organs are being printed out of three-dimensional printers who’s ink has been replaced by cells, and who’s paper has been replaced by a biodegradable gel which holds the cells in place long enough for them to fuse. This is, however, only the tip of an iceberg whose unforeseen future implications has dented the hull of our moral Titanic.
The real heart of the matter is our growing intimacy with the code of life. As we unravel the mysteries of the highly selected and refined haphazard collections of nature’s genetic code, a whole new world of possibility beckons. There are scientists all over the world feverishly working to identify and catalog the function of every gene in the recently completed sequencing of the human genome. Already, we are able to apply what we have learned to modify crops to new levels of efficiency, and with genetic screening, we could identify and treat several diseases before they become damaging. Parents can now test to show whether or not an embryo in a womb has a debilitating, like Down’s syndrome, or life threatening, such as Tay Sachs, disease and have the option of terminating the pregnancy in such a case to ease the psychological suffering of the parents who would otherwise have to watch their child suffer and/or die. Eventually, we will perhaps be able to modify our own human germ-line to eliminate the haphazard of random trait selection in prenatal development, and instead be confident in the results of the child bearing investment that we make, at least genetically.
Unfortunately, returning to my Titanic analogy, this cruise-ship of possibility has found itself in an ice-berg field of uncertainty. Is it ethical to screen people for genetic diseases if they cannot be cured or treated due to economic or technological limitations? What if genetic screening were to be used by private insurance providers to discriminate against those likely to be of greater financial liability? Wouldn’t the ability to selectively determine the traits of a child only benefit those rich enough to afford such procedures, and would the result be an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor? Could genetic discrimination lead to a new era of eugenics?
Each one of these questions warrants an entire paper for discussion, but I will attempt to address every one of these issues briefly. I will also beg a deeper question of the origins and future of mankind, the absurdity of our existence, and the reason why we can’t let moralistic ethics get in the way of progress.
The first question I’ll address is the one that I feel is most imminent; that being the question of genetic screening for insurance eligibility. Surely it is not fair to deny a person medical coverage for something which is completely out of their control, namely their genetic inheritance. The problems of disparity which would arise are too complicated a moral issue to deal with. People’s genetic codes cannot dictate their fates. It is because we cannot, as a society, sit by and watch people die from a disease because they cannot afford to pay for treatment. Eventually we are obligated to provide them with emergency care, most often un-reimbursed. As a result, it actually becomes more expensive a societal burden to be providing emergency care to so many people whose uninsured conditions have escalated to life threatening. It becomes reasonable for us to move away from private insurance care, into a more prophylactic care system. Universal Prophylactic Healthcare, to prescreen and treat people who have predestined genetic malfunction, would in fact, be cheaper and more effective than our current system of private healthcare.
Currently, the United States is spending more money on healthcare than any other nation. We spend 15.3% of our total annual GDP on healthcare . One might think that since we’re making such a large investment, we would be buying ourselves one of the best health care services in the world, but in fact we are rated as being 37th in quality among the nations of the world, according to the World Health Organization, just one place below Costa Rica, actually.
According to the National Coalition on Health Care, there were 46 million uninsured Americans in 2004, or nearly 16% of the population. This is a rise of 6 million since 2000. Health Insurance premiums for many employers are becoming too expensive to handle. Insurance premiums are rising much faster than the rate of inflation, and this is causing the gap of uninsured to steadily rise.
As a result of the immense number of uninsured, $34 billion worth of Hospital service goes uncompensated every year. An additional $37 billion is paid by tax payers and charities to provide assistance to the uninsured. Then there is the $26 billion that is paid out of pocket by the uninsured themselves. Emergency care tends to be the most expensive, and those who are uninsured are 30-50% more likely to receive their care from an emergency room than the uninsured, mostly for conditions which are preventable or could be treated more cheaply and effectively through earlier diagnosis. Early diagnosis, however, is a luxury set aside for the insured.
In effect, there are 36 nations who pay less per capita on universal healthcare and get higher quality care than Americans do for their private administrative system. By embracing universal healthcare coupled with genetic screening for early diagnosis, we could give more incentive for people to seek prophylactic care, and thus cut major costs from our healthcare system. At the same time, the fear of genetic discrimination would be alleviated because access to healthcare would be universal.
Next, I wish to address the issue of ethics in genetically screening a person whose condition cannot be treated. Some have suggested that no such genetic screening should be allowed, unless there is an option of treatment available for the person being screened. The argument follows that the psychological implication of being helplessly diseased is more damaging than beneficial. I could not disagree more with this line of thinking. I am a hardened advocate of freedom. There must be no law set forth that would limit people’s consensual right to know more about themselves and their genetic make-up. Just because there is no treatment, does not mean that there can be no treatment in the future. People who are armed with the knowledge that there is something specifically wrong with them, could start to advocate for more research in that disease, and could start signing themselves up for related research studies. It seems to me a fundamental right, the right to know, and I maintain that such a right must never be abridged.
Then there is the exciting question of the future of genetically engineered children. Is it wrong for us to play God with the code of life? I believe that not only is it right for us to do so, it is our destiny to do so. Of course, we must proceed with caution. Our techniques must be flawlessly tuned, and our wits must be greatly sharpened before we can move into actually toying with the human genome. All the necessary tests much be run in abundance on animals first. But eventually, it seems no question to me that diseased genes should be removed, and resistance genes should be added. We should aid in the evolution of our species as much as possible by cleaning up the mess of mutation that is plaguing our gene pool.
But would not only the rich be able to benefit from such breakthroughs in genetic engineering? Surely they would at first, as the rich are always the first to benefit from new procedures and technologies, such as cosmetic surgery, artificial insemination, birth control, organ transplant, eye glasses, prosthesis, and a plethora or others. But eventually, all of these technologies become cheaper and more effective, and by the virtues of capitalism, trickle down to a broader base of consumers. By offering the procedure to more people at a cheaper price, the profit margin rises, and thus it is logical that it will eventually become far more accessible to most.
The very heart of my paper, the central argument that trumps all others and encompasses all questions posed in this essay, is that because morality is by definition subjective to people’s personal believes, it must never be used to legislate. The morality that I am referring to is restrictive based on personal belief. It is entirely too intuitive, and unscientific. It is a very dangerous idea that one’s beliefs should be imposed on another, and therefore the only logical resolution is to ensure people’s freedom to seek out their own morals and virtues. The limit of one’s freedom can only be drawn at a point in which their freedom impedes on another’s. If someone believes it is unethical to be screened for genetic disease that can’t be cured, they can choose to opt out of such a procedure. But in no way should that person’s belief be imposed on someone who does want to know, regardless of the possibility for a cure. This is the idea of amoralistic legislation, and would change a lot of our conservative social policy in regards to any legislation against drugs, abortion, gay marriage, genetic screening, and any other repressive moralist legislation.
The problem with moralism is because there is no inherent right or wrong. To drive the point home, I would like to step back for a moment and take a deconstructive and nihilistic look at humanity.
The beast awakens and the era dusks.
Why do humans think? Why did consciousness evolve? Let us muse about the necessity for consciousness as an element essential for our survival. Consciousness could be thought of as a byproduct of premeditative planning. It is a complicated offshoot from the ability to avoid danger and acquire the material necessary for self-preservation through manipulation of the environment, but its purposes are no different, at least biologically speaking.
The ability to plan ahead, to premeditate, is really nothing more than a collage of biochemical pathways, which form to create a pattern of neurons that can be used as a template for response to stimulation based on previous stimulation. The pattern is a haphazard Rube Goldberg machine, which was created based on the premise that given an infinite amount of time in a variable environment (like our universe) filled with atoms and molecules, all possibilities of interaction will haphazardly be tried. One Rube Goldberg machine will, by sheer virtue of probability, create a copy of itself. The one which satisfies the conditions necessary to carry on its reconstruction in its environment will spread on until new haphazard additions to its building technique cause it to malfunction or advance. The rest will remain unchanged and unorganized. This is a form of primordial premeditation, although based entirely on extremely unlikely situations (i.e. the situations necessary for the formation of life), which would lead to the chain reaction of life. So here I begin to equate premeditation with life.
The ability to premeditate is clearly not unique to humans; simply our capacity to do so is unmatched. We have the supreme ability to plan, not by way of slow and arduous trial and error of mutation and evolution, or by the exclusive use of our chemical hard-drives (memory), but by externalizing our thoughts and ideas through language and, more importantly, literature. We have, in essence, began a process of the evolution of thoughts and ideas.
It is this new type of evolution that has separated us from any other life on earth. We’re able to hold on to history, and build on top of it. We’re able to lead ideas into fruition.
But is our premeditation really all that different from the mechanistic premeditation of the simplest forms of life? That is, is there something that we have, namely consciousness, that is fundamentally different from the act/react mechanisms of simple life forms? Surely we wouldn’t say that the DNA, and other components, of a cell think before transcribing and translating an enzyme to digest lactose, but it simply and mechanistically responds to the presence of lactose. Although we can agree that human consciousness is more complex, but is it different in terms of mechanism?
Let us consider John Searle’s China Room Argument . This is essentially an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. But why is that? Why is it impossible to be able to make a conscious being using computer circuits rather than neurons? The analogy of the China Room is an excellent break down of the theory. Suppose you sitting in a room completely isolated from the outside with nothing but a manual on the rules of the Chinese language. No actual translations, but simply blueprints to constructing Chinese sentences. There are algorithms in the book which describe the proper way to respond to certain orders of words and punctuation. People on the outside think there is a Chinese person inside the room where you, completely oblivious to Chinese, are. They attempt to communicate by writing you letters with messages such as “hello, how are you?” and slipping them under the door. You examine the letters and refer to your manual, and write down a response that fits and slip it back out the door. The people would be reading a variable response like “Howdy, I’m great! How’s the weather?” or whatever other possible answer would fit the question, and would think they’re communicating with a fellow Chinese person on the other side. They could keep asking you questions and you would keep responding based on the instructions in the Chinese grammar manual. You will not really be having a meaningful conversation with them, you would simply be executing algorithmic operations over and over again, while outside the room it will appear as though a real, thinking, Chinese person is on the other side of the door. It would be impossible to verify that you do not actually understand Chinese, because you’ll be able to answer every question that comes your way, though without actually having any idea what you’re saying. The outside will be convinced, and as long as the questions keep coming, you will continue to appear genuine.
A more contemporary way to look at it is to imagine the future of internet messenger chat bots. IM Chat Bots are interactive programs which emulate online human conversation behavior. They’re programmed respond to queries and interact in a whole variety of ways. You can get into verbal disagreements, or erotic chit-chat with these programs, and they will respond as though a real person is typing through them. They are programmed to deconstruct your input sentences and respond in an intelligible way. It logs its responses to generate consistency, and by doing so, establishes a personality. If you insult it, it will claim to you its feelings are hurt. If you threaten to delete it, it will beg for its life. Eventually, these programs will be un-differentiable from online humans, which will no doubt usher in a new era of online advertising but that’s a whole other paper.
The main point in both analogies is that no matter how conscious and aware these interactions may appear, they are, in fact, nothing but mechanical responses. They are indefinite and variable, that is, the responses are not directly determinist, although still completely mechanistic . More plainly, the answers are not predetermined, but the mechanism for preparing the answers is. And to claim that an execution of an algorithm is conscious is contrary to our conventional ideas of consciousness. Clearly, a calculator is not conscious.
Our notions of what we are - are generally quite warped. We think, intuitively, that we, the conscious self, are like a homunculus sitting at the helm of complex array of sensory probes. We are like observers of input that our bodies collect from the environment, witnessing a continuous stream of input from reality. This idea, as rational as it sounds based on experience, has been proven to be flawed through psychological experimentation.
Consider the following:
When subjects scan a picture, they are quite often unaware of changes made in the objects in the scene if the changes are made during eye movements. Subjects can be told that some objects might shift while they are looking at the pictures and to indicate immediately when this happens. The changes can be quite dramatic and can even occur with objects that a subject has just fixated upon. Still they remain unnoticed. For example, a prominent building in a city skyline became 25% larger and 100% of the subjects failed to detect any change. One hundred percent also failed to notice that two men exchanged hats of different colors and styles. Ninety-two percent did not detect that a third of a crowd of 30 puffins disappeared. Eighty-three percent did not see that in a playground scene, a child is moved forward about five meters and enlarged by 30%. Most strikingly, 58% of subjects did not notice that the swimsuit of one of four people in an advertisement for a swimsuit changed from bright pink to bright green, even though they began viewing the picture fixated on the green suit.
If we were to assume that the conscious mind is really an autonomous observer who responds to stimuli, then surely we would be able to notice such stark changes in what we’re observing. Instead, our brain manipulates our perceptions based on what it receives, consequently deleting our previous perception if it is in conflict with what we are seeing. What I am saying is: we cannot notice a blatant change that happens right in front of our noses. Our brain actually interferes with our conscious perception. To me, that is quite insane. In fact, this phenomenon has been tested and proven to extend to other senses, as well.
Given these observations, how can we really claim to be autonomous conscious beings? I mean, we cannot even form an original thought which is not simply a collection of various sensory input. Are we any different from a really complicated calculator? Perhaps not. But the illusion of the otherwise is strong, and to make an argument against it would take many more pages to build upon.
Let me suggest that if there is a God, that it should be called Probability. The world we live in is bereft of divine meaning, and any thought otherwise would be intellectually unsound. We cannot definitively say what is wrong or what is right because these concepts are subjectively fabricated. All that we can say is what is probable and what is not. It is probable that if we do not pursue genetic experimentation and manipulation to its limits, then someone else will. We’ve already fallen behind the curve in certain kinds of medical research as a direct result of conservative moral legislation which are uncommon, if not unique, in the global sphere. It is improbable that our fear of the unknown is warranted. Change is inevitable and perhaps our only certainty, everything else is temporal. We must embrace the change, or be blown away like dust in the wind.
Basically, I am advocating a nihilistic approach to legislation. Morality is completely subjective and should be kept in the private sphere. The public sphere’s role is to ensure the freedom and welfare of its members, amoralistically and pragmatically. Legislation of morality is precisely what was being avoided by the founding fathers when they ensured the division of church and state. Theirs is a legacy worth maintaining.
As for the future of genetics, it is already cracking the bedrock of our ideas of mankind and its role in nature. We are slowly transforming into caretakers of our own biological destinies, and, as I’ve said repeatedly, we must not be blinded by morality. We must carefully explore our possibilities, and modify our social institutions with prudence. Universal Healthcare is a good first step. Beyond that there waits, as Eden Phillpotts once said, a universe that’s full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.