The Central Question

[This post is the seventh in our new series of Thinking in Action posts, the series being devoted initially at least to discussion of talks at the Cognitive Disability conference in NYC in September. The first post in the series is here and the posts run Tuesdays and Fridays ... or at least that's the plan.]

In the short clip I’ve chosen, Jeff McMahan asks what I think is the central question from which all of his, and Peter Singer’s, arguments concerning the disabled flow. He asks: “What is the basis of our higher moral status that’s shared by the radically cognitively limited, but not shared by higher non-human animals?” I want to talk a bit about potential answers to this question and invite others to either respond to the question or to say why the question is unimportant or unnecessary. A transcript of the clip is available beneath the fold below.

During the question and answer portion of this presentation, someone invites McMahan to ask a slightly different question than that mentioned above. He suggests McMahan instead ask: What makes it more wrong to kill a human than an animal? I think we should keep both the broader and the more focused question in mind.

The Best of Ideas

The CBC radio program, “Ideas”, has a two part series on autism that is available for download from “The Best of Ideas” podcast. The series is called “The Dark end of the Spectrum”, and despite the gloomy title, I thought it was a good discussion of the subject. The first episode offers an account of the historical debate over what causes autism; from the “refrigerator mother” and the “nazi mother” to the “autism gene”. The second episode tells the story of Darius McCollum, someone who spent much of his life in jail for various offences — including impersonating a train conductor — all related to the New York City subway. The episodes may not be available for download for very long, so if you are at all interested in the subject, I recommend downloading them now for later listening.

Another “Ideas” series that people may find interesting is the series “How To Think About Science”. There are some 20 episodes (on a variety of topics) available for download right now.

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil has received some attention recently. His latest book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology was published in 2006. Besides the June 3rd New York Times article, Kurzweil was featured in the April 29th episode of “Ideas”, on CBC Radio, which unfortunately is no longer available for download.

Ray Kurzweil is someone who is particularly well known among blind people primarily because he invented the first machine to translate text into speech. That original model, which debuted in the mid-seventies, was the size of a washing machine, yet while attending the 2006 National Federation of the Blind convention, I saw him demonstrate his latest cell-phone-sized model. Kurzweil says a couple of things about the advancement of technology that I think members of the “What Sorts” team might want to consider.

1. The advancement of technology follows an exponential, as opposed to a linear, trajectory.

For reasons related to our evolution, he argues, we make our predictions about the future — including predictions about technology — under the assumption that progression occurs linearly. This leads many to make overly cautious predictions about what will be possible in the next fifteen or twenty years.

2. Radical changes in the way we live occur as the result of many small incremental steps, each one of which is in itself a conservative change.

So while the idea that humans will be uploading their consciousnesses into computers (what Kurzweil calls the “Singularity”) might cause us to respond with disbelief, disgust, or horror, he would argue that our responses are such because we have not actually taken each incremental step. When the time comes, something like the “Singularity” will seem perfectly reasonable.

I think these points are relevant to the “What Sorts” project. If he is right about the exponential trajectory, then it will be very difficult for us to imagine what the world will be like in twenty years. If he is right about the incremental process, then it highlights the need to pay more attention to each step along the way rather than focusing only on the end result.