If this film is ever made, we’ll all know who to blame. 
To be honest, I was thinking of the non-Spielberg version, where the consciousness detectors required by the quality control procedures reveal that 90% of “normal” humans are also consciousless.
why not make it a bit more profound and say all humans? that would be an ending i agreed with.
of course, that begs the question of how we come up with conscious detectors, and what exactly is conscious that they can measure. and of course, the question that needs to be answered before we can really make any assessments as to the moral value of consciousness, namely:
what is consciousness?
Yes and since we don’t know what consciousness is we also do not know nor can we prove whether other humans have consciousness. One consciousness cannot know another without turning it into a content and knowing it as such which is not to know it for the consciousness that it is. That’s why some say there is only one consciousness, as two consciousness’s cannot interact.
We make assumptions of the existence of consciousness in others based on behavior, i.e. X has similar behavioral patterns to me therefore X has or is consciousness as I am. But it is a guess.
An assumption in this thread is that consciousness is an attribute or characteristic of an entity and not the entity itself.
If consciousness is the entity and we create a worker with consciousness we have created an entity. But again, how would we know it had consciousness?
Consciousness also exists outside the realm of cause and effect; it is not a link in the process. This entire manifestation could all happen without being observed…apparently.
On a slight tangent from the OP.
We commonly consider animals to have less rights than Humans. If we also conject that consciousness resides within the brain, then would it be moral to produce brainless humans, and by surgery transplant into them animal brains. Would these ‘chimera’ have the same rights as the animal from which the brain is derived?
Also a completely brainless human, kept allive through an electric hind brain (regulating heart beat, resperation etc.) be any less moral as a sex toy than would be a vibrator?
Cheers Keithy
from my point of view (with a cognitive science background), it would be very interesting to see how an animal brain would develop with the stimuli of human senses. would it be a slightly dumber human? would it be a new thing altogether? i don’t think there is any way to predict that, so its rights would be hard to enumerate, but it would certainly be interesting to see what happens.
I’m talking about the person born into a coma, not as the result of an accident. I’m talking about permanent brain damage from birth. These unfortunates are still human even though we perceive no attributes of ‘sentience’ or ‘consciousness’, and so, we treat them as human beings. I believe that humans were made in God’s image and that human life is sacred. I believe that it would be wrong to breed mutilated human beings to be slaves. If you think that it would be ok to do any of this then you have a different definition of what is human and/or a different definition of right and wrong.
No offense meant, I just have a hard time understanding how the idea of a ‘human drone’ being morally ok comes from.
Sorry about the formatting mess.:o
Following on from Ramanujan’s thoughts about an animal brain subject to human sensory input. I would strongly doubt the brain would improve in cognitive functionality mearly due to access to improved senses, as I would expect the animal brain to be pretty close to optimal for processing its natural sense inputs, and new apparatus would be unlikely to help. Also in installing an animal brain into a human body sensory imput devices such as eyes and inner ears would probably need to be included with the brain. Anyway the animal brain implant is most likely far away in technoligy if not impossible. What may though be feasible in the near future would be to make use of dormant parts of the human genome to create chimera with Human boddies but Lemur brains. Would such a being be suitable for organ / spare part supply, would it be moral to do such a thing. And how does such morality compare to the morality of breeding Pigs with Human hearts for surgery, which I believe is allready taking place (though I have no cite, having read about such development some time back).
Cheers, Keithy
what is so nonmechanical about the human brain or body? and for that matter, why does the drone need consciousness to perform tasks when the thermostat doesn’t?
whenever we can look at it and say, by whatever means, “that is human.” i don’t know why people need exact times for this.
do they have sentience? we don’t know. does anyone else have sentience? we don’t know. we attribute these qualities to them because they appear human. again, these are people borne of people, they have mothers and fathers. other people care about them, whether or not they are mentally deficient, or comatose. there’s still no basis for comparison.
for a point of reference, i don’t believe that god created man in his image (it seems a bit too proud for my tastes). i don’t think it makes any difference, though. i think you can maintain your belief in the sanctity of human life, provided you have a nice clear definition of what “human life” is. as far as i’m concerned, consciousness is a big part of it. there is no sacred quality about a finger, for instance. so why is something that is made out of the same stuff as a finger, stands 6 feet tall, and has the ability to do work sacred?
the idea is, if we cannot call it human, and i argue we can’t call these “meat robots” human, we need not necessarily attribute the same sanctity to its life that we attribute to human life.