For people who are convinced we are meat-machines: why is killing bad?

Great Debates
41

Souls are mentioned, although not directly. In the example, you and your friend are the “souls” behind the two avatars that represent you in the virtual world. You and your friend exist in a different plane of existence and are made from a different “substance” than all the characters in the virtual world.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that there is a soul. I don’t believe that there is and I don’t believe that there isn’t. It is a possibility.

No.

I don’t think we can know that. If we could, then there would not be any debate about whether or not souls exist.

Yes. If it turns out that in our world some people are avatars for “players” from another plane of existence, while some people are just material automata, then yes, these two types of people should be in a different category of moral consideration.

I’m not saying exactly how one should treat one vs the other, just that it is not imperative to treat them the same.

Well, it depends what you mean by “soul”. There are many people (and even some on this board) that believe that everything has a soul, even rocks and a glass of water.

Let’s not get into what is a soul and what can or cannot have it.

All I was referring to with the above example was that, while all the characters in the video game are made up of 1’s and 0’s, some have other entities “behind the curtain” controlling their behavior, while others don’t and their behavior arises solely from within the 1’s and 0’s.

I think these two classes of characters are different, and how we treat them differs.

No. What I’m saying is that if you are in this game, and some friends of yours are also playing this game, and during some part of the game you have to make a choice, as a result of which, either one of the “just 1’s and 0’s” virtual characters suffers, or one of your friends from this world suffers (due to his avatar suffering), then it seems that most people would choose to harm the “just 1’s and 0’s” virtual character rather than their friend.

This is just a small example. In general, most people would treat these two classes of characters in the virtual world differently.

42

I’m an atheist. My life is the most important thing I have. At the highest level it is all I have. Once that’s gone I’m gone. I have the imagination and empathy to be able to understand that all every human on the planet has is their life.

If I take their life I’m taking everything they have away from them. I want to hold onto my life for as long as possible and my default is that everyone else wants the same.

43

Do you own a car? Or a computer? Or maybe a Playstation 3? Something you care about or has some utility value for you.

Now lets say I come over and blow it up and you are forbidden to ever purchase a replacement.
I just destroyed some inanimate machine. Those machines don’t even have any kind of self awareness. Is that wrong?

In case you don’t know the answer, it’s wrong because I have no right to deprive you of your property. I have no right to inflict suffering on others who were dependent on your having the ability to use that property (like driving to work).

Same thing with people except even more so.

44

I guess I would take this back to the always entertaining “I think therefore I am”.

All I can really be sure about is that I exist. I feel joy that is pleasant and pain that is not pleasant. I like living very much and plan to continue doing so as long as possible. I am sentient and aware, which makes me more than a typical machine. If someone kills me, my dreams, hopes and amibitions are gone forever.

As for everyone else, I can’t really say with 100% certainty that they exist in this same way. They might just be meat machines, as you put it. And if they were, and there was not a sentient being feeling pain in the same way I did, then killing would not be immoral. It would be of little consequence, and there would be no need to feel empathy with the wandering organic mass that I interact with on a daily basis.

However, I do believe that other people feel in the same way that I do. They behave in ways that are very similar to myself and therefore it is hard for me to believe that they are all that different inside. This allows me to have empathy with them and to some degree feel their pain even when it is not directed at me. This is why killing feels so fundementally wrong to me.

Note that this is completely independent of any notions of everlasting souls and the like.

45

I’m not so sure about that explanation. You could kill someone without causing them to suffer, and if they had no friends or family, it’s possible that no one else would suffer either. But it’s still wrong.

46

Paging Kilgore Trout…

Paging Kilgore Trout…

47

Just to put in to the 1’s and 0’s argument: we can only react with instinctive, visceral compassion to what we evolved to react with compassion to. For example, evolution has tuned us to react with fear and queasiness to dangers such as great heights, snakes and large snarling creatures. Driving at great speed while separated from an noisy onrushing truck by a mere white line on the road should feel incredibly dangerous, but evolution just hasn’t had time to work on those kinds of inputs in terms of selecting for or against certain neurological brain features.

Similarly, those 1’s and 0’s could one day comprise a sentient being which wanted to continue to exist and be friends with you. Our prefrontal cortex might appreciate the logical similarity and perhaps output that we ought to feel empathy towards them but, again, evolution just hasn’t had time to actually go ahead and give us an innate feeling of empathy for them.

And the “killing shipwrecked loners” argument is still just another extension of the social contract mentioned by John: I could still become a shipwrecked loner, and so setting up a system which deters killing them might still benefit me.

48

It’s not just about suffering. It’s about taking what doesn’t belong to you.

49

Why? I don’t follow your reasoning here at all. If we are indeed purely mechanical creations, and we come to understand the mechanisms fully, how does that affect any of the ways we relate to the other mechanical beings around us? It doesn’t “logically” follow that understanding of this situastion would suddenly turn us into “all fior me, nothing for anyone else” sociopaths (Not solipsists – by your lights mechanistic believers fully believe in a functioning reality and other consciousnesses besides themselves – they just don’t care about their fate.)

There’s nothing “rational” about understanding necessarily producing lack of concern at all. You’ll have to detail why you think that is the case. If this were a case of a “Matrix”-type situation, then, yes, everyone else has a slight and ephemeral hold on existence. But so do I, so it’s in my interests to hold up my end of the social contract that lets us all co-exist. You seem to keep comparing it to a case of a person running a “Sims”-type copmputer world. In that case, I am not on the same level as the other characters – even if I identify with one of them, I am much more complex and much less ephemeral. It’s hard to imagine them having a separate existence as real individuals in my absence.
If a society of robots were to exist (as has been posited in many SF stories, long before the film Robots), surely they would have a set of rules and restrictions to protect each other from random acts of nihilism. They couldn’t have a stable society, otherwise.

50

OK, I think both of these are subjective but, yeah - there are probably cases where you’re right.

Anyway my purple prose was just to demonstrate that understanding life as supremely sacred is thoroughly consonant with atheism. And for some of us, follows from it.

51

If those objects were just laying around on some planet and had no owner, then whether you destroy them or not is irrelevant.

If those objects have an owner, then, yes, destroying them is bad.

If humans are just machines, then they have no “owner” whom you are deprivng of their possesion.

52

Astonishingly, a quick Google search reveals that NOT ONE punk band has taken the name “The Meat Machines” as their own.

53

But, you haven’t explained why we ought to feel empathy towards them.

Is this an axiom? “Thou shalt feel empathy towards other sentient beings, no matter what material they are made of” ?

As I mentioned in the OP, yes, we have evolved to feel empathy, but that doesn’t mean that now that we have found humans to be mere meat machines (according to some people), we need to go along with that.

For example, there was a thread a while back that mentioned that we might have evolved a “God gene”, i.e. a predisposition towards being religious and believing in some supreme being.

That was advantageous for societies in the past, but that doesn’t mean that a rational person can’t just reject those religious tendencies and declare themselves to be an atheist, going against millions of years of evolved religious tendencies.

You can’t justify something just because we evolved to behave a certain way. You have to justify it using reason.

So, we can’t just justify empathy to sentient meat machines just because we evolved to have this empathy. You have to provide a reason for it.

54

But there has been at least one group called “The Meat Puppets”.

55

Agreed. For the stability of society we need “don’t kill” rules. I mentioned this in the OP.

But this is a utilitarian view. For it to work, it does not require robots to believe that every robot “life” is valuable and unique and a treasure whose loss saddens everyone. They just have to strictly follow the “don’t kill” rule.

It seems that, in the case of humans, for nature and society to succeed in making humans obey the “don’t kill” command, it had to make people consider every life as valuable and feel empathy towards others.

This had the utiliarian result desired (i.e. people, by and large, don’t kill other humans), but just because nature and/or society chose this method, doesn’t mean that it is the only way of doing so.

For example, in some other society on some other planet, murder might be prevented by cameras watching you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Same result (societal stability), without requiring empathy towards others.

So, if we go beyond the utilitarian purpose of a stable society (which can be theoretically achieved otherwise), I don’t see a logical reason for empathy towards very complex machines.

I do feel empathy, of course, but that’s because 1) I’m not 100% convinced that we are merely meat machines and 2) I have been programmed by evolution and society to feel empathy.

In reality, I couldn’t even kill a mouse; I’m just trying to reason through why we feel what we feel.

56

Humans are self aware so we are in a sense our own “owner”. That what makes us different from other “machines”

Relevant definitions of “machine”:
A device consisting of fixed and moving parts that modifies mechanical energy and transmits it in a more useful form.
A system or device for doing work, together with its power source and auxiliary equipment.
A system or device, such as a computer, that performs or assists in the performance of a human task.
An intricate natural system or organism, such as the human body.
I don’t see anything about the definition of “machine” that implies that it would inherently be ok to just destroy one. All “machine” implies is a complex system for modifying energy (food) into work (watching TV).

If you want a logical reason why we don’t arbitrarily kill each other, it is because we as a society have concluded that it is mutually beneficial to not allow the random killing of members of our society. It has nothing to do with religeon or God or anything. It has just become accepted that cooperation outweighs lethal competition.

57

Similarly, I don’t see anything about the definition of “machine” that implies that I should care whether it stops working.

This was mentioned in the OP.

I think though, that while as a society we have decided this for utilitarian reasons, it has morphed into people having feelings of sadness and empathy when other humans die. So, people no longer refrain from killing due to the original utilitarian reason, but due to an evolved/acquired sense that life is valuable and a treasure we should protect.

In some sense, it is like in some religions where they were told to refrain from eating a certain type of meat, and the original reason was utilitarian. After generations of not eating that type of meat, it seems to me that many of those people refrain from eating that type of meat not due to the original utilitarian reason, but because they have evolved/acquired a feeling that doing so would be *a bad thing to do[/].

58

Most Christians I know believe that dogs are essentially “meat-machines”. I’m glad to say I’ve never known a devout Christian who would think nothing of killing a dog.

59

Good point.

However, I would bet that these devout Christians would care less about an accident that killed 100 dogs, than about an accident that killed 100 humans. So, the fact that dogs are mechanistic automata does change how these Christians feel about them versus humans which have an immortal soul (in their view).

60

Atheists see no less a distinction in dogs and humans than Christians do, and for the same reasons- humans are capable of much more complex thought and emotions (well, most of them) and are the epicenters of much more complicated realms of dependency, emotion, etc… Why on Earth would an atheist, who believes presumably that this is all there is, think less of life than a Christian, who believes that this is not even the tip of the iceberg and, if ended, leads but to more eternal existence?