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All Together Now: Developmental and Ethical Considerations for Biologically Uplifting Nonhuman Animals

George Dvorsky

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For that reason, nonhuman animals need to be explicitly protected from modifications that would deliberately constrain their psychologies or physical abilities. Preconceived and preconditioned existences are as wrongful for nonhumans as they would be for humans. Further, regulatory legislation will need to be established so that uplift can transpire under safe, monitored and humane conditions.

Addressing Criticisms
A difficult conceptual leap for many is getting over the species barrier. For many critics, the idea of including nonhumans alongside humans in a social context is a violation of naturalistic sensibilities. Such claims are often made on behalf of the "human exceptionalists," a group that includes such thinkers as ethicist Wesley Smith.

The idea of "species," while helpful in such fields as systematics and genetics, is not an entirely useful concept when establishing the moral worth of an animal. Once stripped of scientific nomenclature, nameless organisms can be classified based on their various morphological and psychological capacities. In this context, animals—including humans—can be contrasted in reference to an agreed upon spectrum of minimally acceptable modes of functioning.

Put yet another way, nonhuman animals such as the great apes can be construed as disabled humans. When articulated in this way, notions of obligations, accommodation and stewardship are cast in an entirely new light. The idea that nonhumans should be uplifted so that they more closely resemble Homo sapiens has been interpreted as a rather anthropocentric perspective. As already stated, the goal is not to transmutate animals in humans, but to improve their quality of life by endowing them with improved modes of functioning and increased health. If anything, the uplift argument is intellicentric and even quasi-perfectionist. Moreover, uplift is primarily advocated by transhumanists who also make the case for Homo sapiens to move beyond human limitations – a rather non-anthropocentric position.

Finally, there is the issue of identity and the potential destruction of a nonhuman animal’s former self. This is essentially the identity objection. Indeed, the uplifted animal will barely resemble its former self, and will for all intents-and-purposes be a new person[1]. That said, so long as the continuity of memory is maintained, the uplifted animal will still remember its past, and consequently, retain a fluid sense of self. The effect may be similar to the way in which an adult reflects on her childhood.

Conclusion
A future world in which humans co-exist with uplifted whales, elephants and apes certainly sounds bizarre. The idea of a United Nations in which there is a table for the dolphin delegate seems more fantasy than reality. Such a future, however, even when considering the presence of uplifted animals, may not turn out just quite the way we think it will.

Intelligence on the planet Earth is set to undergo a sea change. Post-Singularity minds will either be manifest as cybernetic organisms, or more likely, as uploaded beings. Given the robust nature of computational substrate, intelligence is set to expand and diversify in ways that we cannot yet grasp, suffice to say that postbiological beings will scarcely resemble our current incarnation.

In this sense, "postbiological" is a more appropriate term than "posthuman". The suggestion that posthumans will live amongst post-apes and post-elephants misses the point that a convergence of intelligences awaits us in our future. Our biological heritage may only likely play a very minor part in our larger postbiological constitution, much like the reptilian part of our brain does today in terms of our larger neurological functioning. And like the other sapient animals who share the planet with us, and with whom we can claim a common genetic lineage, we will one day look back in awe as to what was once our shared biological heritage.

Footnotes
1. There is considerable debate about identity over time and whether or not a "self" exists in the first place. (back to top)

Dvorsky George Dvorsky is the Deputy-Editor of Betterhumans, co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, and the producer of Sentient Developments blog and podcast. Mr. Dvorsky served as conference chair for TransVision 2004, the WTA’s annual conference.

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