Dolphins as Non-Human Persons

I have been lucky enough to swim with dolphins twice in my life. Once it was as a “swim with dolphins” experience in Mexico where I was pushed around by the dolphins in an awesome little display of power and warned not to “pet them on the tummy, or they might get horny, and, by extension, violent.” It is a strange thing to be cautious not to arouse a cetacean. The second time was snorkeling, when a pod of dolphins came out of the deep and decided to investigate my dad and me for a few minutes before getting on their way. In both cases, the dolphins were visibly intelligent. It was like the uncanny valley in reverse – instead of a lifelike body with dead eyes, I was confronted with unsettlingly intelligent eyes within an inhuman body.

Because the environment of humans and dolphins so rarely intersects, it is much harder for us to observe and casually appreciate dolphin intelligence the way we do with chimps and parrots. Furthermore, dolphin faces are not as familiarly emotive. Thus, the news in The Times about a scientific consensus is developing around the rights of dolphins as non-human persons is fantastic. Here comes a huge chunk of the article summarizing all the reasons why:

Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

What makes the assertion of dolphin personhood so important is that the first recognition of personhood rights in a non-human, even if limited, will have tremendous, spectacular ripple effects. If we accept dolphins are non-human persons, say, with limited rights akin to that of a human child then here are some logical conclusions one might be able make:

1. Dolphins could have limited sovereignty rights, making the oceans they patrol effectively their territory. The ocean might become a UN protectorate.

2. Dolphins would no longer be in zoos and aquariums. It would be tantamount to imprisonment.

3. Alternatively, state funding for the study of dolphins would skyrocket. To ensure the law is accurate and neither a farce nor insufficient, a very accurate, very clear understanding of dolphin intelligence would be needed.

4. Dolphin deaths would become literal murders and deaths resulting from fishing would become genocide.

Without a near global consensus on the issue, it will be nearly impossible to recognize dolphin personhood. Can you imagine the equivalent of the COP15 dealing with international animal rights?

In Defense of the New

Ratatouille is a fantasy, but a fantasy so close to reality that the fantastic bits almost go unnoticed. The moments where the film asks us to suspend our disbelief are so few and so minor that we forget the film is about a talking rat who can cook. Remy’s unbelievable intelligence is what creates the conflict for the whole story.

Yes, the movie is an allegory for those shunned due to their background or class and the pressures of enjoing new success while staying true to one’s roots. I wouldn’t deny these layers of meaning anymore than I would deny Linguini’s physical humor or the frustrating reasons behind Colette’s toughness. The well developed story and characters of Ratatouille are what make it so easy to forget that the plot never explains how it is that Remy and his clan of rats can understand humans. There is no Secret of NIHM moment where we realize they’ve been tested on and exposed to chemicals. All we know is Remy watches and understands TV, as do his nest mates, and that once Linguini gets over the shock of Remy communicating with him, he accepts all other developments accordingly.

So Ratatouille is not just about “overcoming one’s background and the prejudice of others.” The use of animals to disguise the race/class/ethnicity tropes normally trotted out for this kind of story telling force Ratatouille into strange territory. Almost accidentally the film sets itself up to defend the rights of uplifted animals. One of the most intense moments of the film comes when Remy’s father, Django, explains How Things Are and encourages Remy to accept the status quo. To drive home his point, Django shows Remy the display window of an exterminator. Remy’s response is brilliant:

Django: Take a good, long look, Rémy. This what happens when a rat gets a little too comfortable around humans. The world we live in belongs to the enemy. We must live carefully. We look out for our own kind, Rémy. When all is said and done, we’re all we’ve got. [starts to walk away]

Rémy: No.

Django: [stops] What?

Rémy: No. Dad, I don’t believe it. You’re telling me that the future is, can only be, more of this?

Django: This is the way things are. You can’t change nature.

Rémy: Change is nature, Dad. The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide. [he walks away]

Django: Where are you going?

Rémy: With luck, forward.

These lines are generic enough that they appeal to all calls for rights and social acceptance and the bravery of being different. But the key line, “change is nature” is something special. That simple assertion is still one of the most difficult concepts about evolution that one can grasp. Species, biospheres, cultures, companies, internet memes, and fashion are always changing and it is by changing we know they are still relevant, still alive. The reverse is also true: living things will and should change into new, different, and perhaps unsettling things. Django is seen as less right than Remy not because he miscalculates how humans treat rats or because he doesn’t understand that Remy has a friend, but because he does not understand that communicating with humans changes the whole framework of the debate.

Normal, unintelligent, wild rats are always going to be killed by humans because the two species are at an impasse. Remy and his clan, however, demonstrate transrodent-like ability, being super-smart for their (or any non-human) species and capable of interacting on the same intellectual level as humans. Unlike racism and classism, it is not prejudiced to presume a non-human cannot cook or use language to the same degree as humans, as there is no evidence even close to proving otherwise. Therefore, what Linguini (and eventually Colette and Ego) do is not overcome their prejudice but accept the extraordinary claim of Remy’s intelligence by his extraordinary proof: repeatedly cooking world-class meals that impresses the toughest critics in Paris.

The argument Ratatouille seems to be making in terms of animal uplift is that any one test of intelligence is ultimately irrelevant. Remy is not subjected to an IQ test or an MRI or anything else. His cooking, a dynamic, creative, complex activity that is simultaneously an art and a science, makes all his arguments for him. Given that cooking is a uniquely, perhaps essential, human behavior, that Brad Bird would make this the proof of Remy’s personhood is quite fitting.

The toughest critic, Anton Ego, is so rocked by the revelation of Remy’s ability that he is forced to look inward, to criticize himself in order to allow this new idea of a cooking, and therefore sentient, rat:

Risking a “defense of the new” is, indeed, the most powerful and meaningful thing a critic can do. To do so requires overcoming one’s “repugnance” of the new, for whatever reason it manifests, and braving into uncomfortable and dangerous territory. All three humans that help Remy take huge risks, and, as we see at the end of the film, are justly rewarded with a successful restaurant of their own. To risk something for an idea is to take ownership in the value of that idea, to internalize and personalize that risk.

Ratatouille makes an interesting point about the risks involved. Not only is it morally right for those who believe in Remy’s abilities to support him openly, but it is also rewarded financially. Though Ego loses his job and Gaston’s is closed, the new restaurant, La Ratatouille, is co-owned (I presume) by Linguine, Colette, and Ego, and, with Remy and Colette’s cooking, bound to be extremely profitable. While government regulations (vermin infestation) and social norms (repugnance of rats) reinforce the urge to discredit Remy, capitalism opens a door for his and his supporters’ success.

Ratatouille‘s story of overcoming the limits of one’s background and the prejudices against it is an argument for the possibility of animal uplift and presents a potential new criterion, cooking, for determining personhood. C’est magnifique.

The Overmind of Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, left out one problem with the film that drove me crazy: the sentient ecology of Pandora. Spoilers follow.

Both Dvorsky and Anders briefly mention this curious aspect of the Pandora ecology:

Dvorsky – Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gaianist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na’vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet.

Anders – The Na’Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they’re good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

Early on in the very long Avatar, we are given clues that everything on Pandora is literally connected. All the animals possess neural connection jacks (appendages that end in tiny, tentacle-like exposed nerve endings) that allow Na’vi to mentally command their mounts, effectively domesticating a creature in a matter of seconds. The plant life is shown to have similar properties, both by the actions of the Na’vi (who connect their exposed dendrites to dangling vines) and by the observations of human scientists. The human scientists, lead by Dr. Grace “Sigourney Weaver” Augustine, suspect that all the plant life on Pandora is connected the way neurons in the brain are connected, with certain trees acting as ganglion or memory banks. Over the course of the film, we are confronted with the possibility that the flora is involved in a kind of biological cloud-computing.

If the system were merely passive, something the Na’vi were taking advantage of, Cameron’s neglect his own ecological neurology concept would be forgivable. But it isn’t. Pandora is possessed by a spirit, Eywa, that exists within this planetary network. Grace, before her death, acknowledges the reality of Eywa. Furthermore, Eywa demonstrates some form of active decision making, in that she must be asked to defend herself at the behest of the Na’vi and then answers that request in the form of total ecological rebellion against the human incursion. So not only is Pandora a planet-wide neural network, it is also, apparently sentient.

This thing is called a "Hammerhead Titanothere"

And yet the biggest payoffs we get from a sentient planet in the film are hammer-headed rhinos bashing through exo-suits (an admittedly awesome payoff) and a mind-transfer from paraplegic human body to lithe, Na’vi body for Jake Sully. I am aware of how cool those two things are, but when they are done by a sentient planet with an external, independent (?) biosphere, one begins to realize things are able to get way more awesome than hammer-headed forest rhinos fighting robots (I can’t believe I wrote that).

Imagine the following: halfway through Avatar, Dr. Grace Augustine and her forgettable team of boffin-stereotypes discover that just as the plants on Pandora exhibit features similar to a nervous system, the animal life exhibit features similar to an immune system. Perhaps they discover that, in one of the Pandoran creatures, the immune system works not by identifying and destroying the invading disease, like a human’s; instead a Pandoran immune system captures and reprograms individual disease agents and turns them into double-agents. Just a few double agents weaken the disease sufficiently to allow the immune system to obliterate it. No antibodies, but a few conversion agents get the job done. Instead of a disease giving a creature an auto-immune disorder, the creature’s immune system gives the disease an auto-pathogenic disorder. Extrapolate that to the Na’vi and their benevolent acceptance of just a few humans into the fold. What if Jake Sully’s entire magical conversion experience was really an immune response from Pandora itself?

And that’s only one crazy idea I came up with just now. How a sentient ecological system would respond to an invading species or what kind of thoughts it would think are questions that I wanted Avatar to ask, but it didn’t. My only consolation is that James Cameron is definitely going to make a sequel and when he made a sequel to Terminator, it was better than the original in almost every way. Keep your fingers crossed for Avatar 2: The Eye of Eywa.

Could Gonzo Vote?

My family has the tradition (as do a lot of other families, I think) of watching The Muppet Christmas Carol at some point the week of Christmas. I got to overthinking things per the usual and now am worried about whether or not The Great Gonzo could cast a vote.

I propose the following thought experiment:

The Blue Fairy, having had practice with Pinocchio, decides to bring more puppets to life. After a survey of the best candidates, she decides on bring the entire cast of The Muppet Show. Kermit, Gonzo, Ms. Piggy, Beeker and the whole gang are now “real” beings, biological, sentient and autonomous. They have all the qualities of any other living creature, including a sense of pain and need for resources, as well as the “minds” that their creators perceived them to have. Kermit would still be nervous, genuine, and smart, Ms. Piggy vain, obsessed with Kermit, and fabulous, etc. Would they be entitled to rights? Human rights?

——

One can assume that the most human of the Muppets, The Swedish Chef, would be the first to be granted rights by the Special Committee for Dealing With Magically Created Life Forms (SCDWMCF). Like Pinocchio, the Swedish Chef would be perceived as human for all intents and purposes and as a Henson creation would have been “made in the USA,” and therefore a citizen. Following close behind would be Stadler and Waldorf. Our current system of rights in the US would be unable to deny them rights, because their standing as “Muppets” would likely be categorized as either a race or ethnicity. As ostensible humans, their outer differences (being small, made of felt) would be inconsequential, as their rights stem from being members of the “human species.” Furthermore, Stadler and Waldorf would be defended by the AARP and the Swedish Chef would probably get some sort of Nordic Peoples of America backing. Swedish Chef, Stadler, and Waldorf, would, like Pinocchio, get standing as ‘real people’ and the rights associated.

So with a precedent for Muppet’s receiving rights established, the first real hurdle would be the “humans?” in the Muppet cast. Dr. Teeth and the members of the Electric Mayhem (save Animal) Scooter, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, and a slew of minor characters are all of questionable, hominid status. Sure, we all know people who kind of look like them, but Beaker’s head is a perfect cylinder and Dr. Teeth has green skin. In short, the “humans?” of the Muppets push the limits of what we accept as being human. When we watch the Muppets, we see Kermit as a frog and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker as people. That we see a yellow ball of foam wearing glasses as a human face is something of a testament to how our brains are wired to see faces in everything. The “humans?” of the Muppets would also be quickly given rights, with the assertion being made that “it doesn’t matter what color or shape you are, no matter how strange, human rights belong to all humans.” The Special Committee would logically conclude that, though exceedingly weird ones, the Muppet “humans?” are, in fact, humans proper, and thus confer upon them full rights.

So now we come to the animals of the Muppets, including the aptly named Animal, as well as Kermit, Ms. Piggy, Rowlf, Rizzo, and Sam the Eagle. Early arguments, particularly using Animal and Rizzo as examples, would be that the animal Muppets are merely highly intelligent animals, ineligible for full rights. Animal has a collar and chain, clearly he isn’t deserving of the right to bear arms or free assembly and Rizzo is a nefarious element, pilfering food and talking with a low class accent. Yet, then one could present this argument:

Faced with this stirring and patriotic rendition of an American classic, one would assume that the easily shamed members of congress would leap into action to avoid appearing un-American and quickly confer rights to the animal Muppets,  including Animal himself.

But we are now left with perhaps the biggest problem: The Great Gonzo. Gonzo is, by nearly every measure, unacceptable. He is not merely not human, he is not even of a reality based taxonomic classification. Alien, monster, or whatever, Gonzo’s existence as a “weirdo” is not merely limited to his biological origin. Gonzo is also a deviant. His girlfriend, Camilla, is a chicken. In Muppet Treasure Island, he is shown to enjoy bondage (the rack, red hot pokers, etc.) and wear flamboyant outfits. He is often seen hanging out with Rizzo. He emulates Freddy Mercury. The list of morally and socially questionable acts in which Gonzo engages is embarrassingly long. Besides wearing argyle and knowing Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by heart, Gonzo has few palatable behaviors.

That’s why Gonzo is the perfect test case. We can’t justify grandfathering him into the system based on his civic performance or ostensible humanity or anything else. He is a political risk. I don’t think he has any naturalization papers or a birth certificate. If we can justify giving Gonzo rights, I think we’ve effectively disproved the canard that rights are “human.”

The first argument I would make is, oddly enough, based on Gonzo’s weird penchant for bodily harm. First, this proves Gonzo feels pain. Second, it proves that he operates above an instinctual level, because he can enjoy pain and find existential pleasure (“I feel alive!”) in the pain. Finally, Gonzo’s ability to discuss the meta-fictive humor of his status as an omniscient narrator would evidence his ability to use rational faculties to their maximum, ruling out both stimulus-response training and critiques of hindered intelligence. Thus we are faced with a very rational agent. Furthermore, Gonzo has clear, high level affection for Camilla (loving her among a flock of chickens, jealousy towards the Christmas turkey flirting with her) as well as his fellow Muppets. Complicating this  emotional ability are his skills in bantering with Stadler and Waldorf and consoling Rizzo after an injury.

In short, Gonzo demonstrates both high level reasoning and complex emotional responses. He grasps social situations, considers his fellow beings, and demonstrates an ability to make informed, consensual decisions. Despite having a foreign ancestry, he was made and born in the USA. Non-humans born in the USA are not eligible for citizen ship not because they are non-human but because they are not rational or capable of consent – the same reason you have be 18 to vote. State of mind, not state of biology, are what matters. If we are honest about where rights come from, there is no reason The Great Gonzo, if enlivened by the Blue Fairy, shouldn’t get to vote and run for office. Gonzo for president?

Fringe and the Neutrality of Technology

In keeping with the theme of talking about my favorite TV shows under the pretense of some sort of analysis, I’d like to talk a little bit about Fringe. For starters, Fringe does three very important things.

1. It gives us a genuinely mad, morally gray scientist who works for the good guys. Who doesn’t love Walter Bishop?
2. Three very strong female characters: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, FBI Agent Astrid Farnsworth, and CEO of Massive Dynamic, Nina Sharp.
3. A completely human and yet totally Other menace.

If I’m feeling cheeky I may write a post on each of those points (especially #2) sometime this week, but for now I just want to point out those are traits of the show rarely seen on TV. And though I’d love to talk about how much I love the gross-out factor of the show, (giant parasitic worms? sign me up!) what I’m more interested in the moment is Fringe and its portrayal of technology as neutral.

Like its cousin Lost, Fringe is a mythology show, with a long, extended plot arc that requires and rewards viewer loyalty and neurotic attention to detail. Unlike Lost, Fringe has mastered the “monster” episode that made the original X-Files so popular. A “monster” episode is one in which the larger mythology of the show is secondary to the investigation of something weird, like a feral child or a chimera. They have a jump-right-in feel and are less subtle. Monster episodes in Fringe are some of the most enjoyable and, curiously, some of the most ripe for analysis because of the formula used by the shows writers.

Invariably, whatever horrific thing the team from Fringe Division is investigating, Walter Bishop and William Bell, the two super-scientists from Fringe’s fictive universe*, had a hand in inventing it. At some point Walter remembers what he was trying to do when he concocted said malicious thing, reverse engineers his own invention and solves the case. The fantastic part about this goofy formula is that it shows the technology to be invented by a man we trust and like yet are unsure of, Walter Bishop, is then misused by evil people, and then better understood and countered by that same inventor. In short, the technology is always a pawn. There is never a moment where the inventor is taken over by his inventions (a la Doc Ock) or is his invention shown to be inherently evil.

For example, one of my favorite episodes involves Walter’s elaborate scheme to hide the components to a teleportation device and the criminals usage of a matter-wave disruptor thingamajig that allows them to walk through solid matter. What makes it brilliant is that neither technology comes off as evil, or even bad. The episode makes a point to highlight the very good intentions Walter had with his initial invention. Furthermore, we see that technology did not merely “fall” into the wrong hands, but was stolen by manipulative double agents. Abrams, despite his tendency to camp things up a bit too much, always knows how to seek the human element in a situation.

We accept cursory explanations of how a person can transform into a beast or how a computer screen can liquefy someone’s brain because the story isn’t riding on the reality of those events, but on how people work together to cause evil and do good. Every case on the show has been solved by a full team effort. Every character has their weaknesses, but as a team (which at its largest was six people including Charlie and Broyles) their strengths are able to shine and save the day. It’s schmaltzy when I spell it out like that, but what makes Fringe entertaining is that the dynamic between the weaknesses and strengths is different every week.

In addition to the presentation of technology as a neutral thing in non-neutral hands, Fringe does a decent job of showing medicine and drugs as neutral as well. Though initially used for humorous purposes, Walter’s seemingly wanton usage of hallucinogens and narcotics is shown to stem not from hedonistic drives (though those are sated) but from intellectual curiosity and self-control. At least twice, we see Walter’s use of LSD to allow Olivia to confront her own mental situation. Yet in another episode, we see Walter suffering due to a minor overdose of Valium. The usage of drugs by an exquisite mind for both enjoyment and betterment is a rare portrayal in popular entertainment indeed.

It is very easy for a show like Fringe to take the Michael Crichton approach where science goes crazy, escaping its inventor’s control. Instead Fringe shows a consciousness is necessary to guide a technology to good or to evil. Walter and Bell invent a technology, evil people misuse it in their absence, Walter reasserts ownership of the tech through his intellect and regains control. It’s nice to see a show about new technologies and cutting edge science that focuses more on the people and their reasons for acting than just the tech itself.

I also enjoy watching Olivia shoot people and Walter eating Twizzlers while he is doing an autopsy. Also Broyles and Nina Sharp are both terrifying and weird. Did I mention there was a snake-bat-lion-scorpion? The show is good. You should probably watch it.

*It is worth noting that J.J. Abrahms uses science fiction tropes (time travel, parallel universes) to actually explain his fictive universe. In Star Trek, time travel explains his reinvisioning of things. In Fringe, parallel universes explain why Walter Bishop, William Bell, and Massive Dynamic exist yet the rest of history so closely matches our own.

Reproduction Rights

On Saturday, the New York Times published an article about surrogate pregnancy including three cases in which problems arose due to the unregulated state of surrogacy. In one case, the surrogate mother discovered that the adoptive mother had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and sued to keep the children. In another situation, a single man arranged a pregnancy and his eccentricities have brought his ability to raise children into question. Finally, a woman is attempting to keep the child she surrogate mothered for her gay brother and his partner. In each case, we are shown the unprecedented legal and ethical quandaries interwoven into the very definition of words like mother, parent, family, and reproductive responsibility and rights.

The NYT article makes a clear case that raising a child is complex and emotional. Reducing pregnancy to a transaction only serves to amplify these complexities and emotions by trying to remove them from the equation. But wherein are the nuances of creating life lost?

George J. Annas, a bioethicist who is chairman of the health law program at Boston University, said, “This is the main problem with commercialization, seeing children as a consumer product.”

It is interesting that the article chose to use this quotation, as in two of the three example cases the pregnancy was not for profit. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that this quotation from Annas points out what happens to the child, but is largely unconcerned with how the process affects the mother. I suggest Carolyn McLeod’s “For Dignity or Money” which is the most evenhanded account of the multiple feminist perspectives on contract pregnancy, an issue far to complex to deal with in a single blog post.

The question that underpins contract pregnancy is always just beneath the surface of the NYT article and nearly every popular piece I read on the topic: has nature prevented these people from having children for a reason? Questions of ability, knowledge, and stability are logical to ask of any parent. Though I largely disagree with its method and position among social services, Child Protective Services makes sense in a major egalitarian society, because some people are not fit to be parents. What disturbs me is the double-standard for the reproductively impaired. I am not trying to create a new minority group or coin a new PC euphemism with the use of “reproductively impaired” but merely point out that these people in a state of nature cannot reproduce at all. They are, by choice or chance, effectively sterile. Therefore they seek the next best means by which to have children.

The disturbing trend here is that those who are able to have children “naturally” are innocent until proven guilty, while those who must use alternative means are subjected to the judgments of doctors, bureaucrats, and their peers. One must qualify to have IVF, adopt, and, as shown, use a surrogate mother. Unless one can prove one is able to have the financial, moral, legal and mental stability necessary to raise a child, one cannot have a child by any artificial means; however, there is no such condition for simply getting pregnant or impregnating someone. In short, if nature has already hindered your ability to reproduce, then the state and society have the right to control how and when you acquire children.

This double-standard is the passive equivalent of a far more insidious active, possibility. The specter of eugenics is often raised around issues of reproductive rights. The eugenicists of the earlier part of the 20th century are oft maligned for their support of sterilizing those deemed as problematic for society. If one was below the poverty line or shown to be “morally” or “mentally” unfit (more often euphemisms for bigotry than matters of ethics), the eugenicists argued for sterilization. While sterilizing for any one of those reasons is now considered patently offensive and wrong, it is seen as completely rational for those who meet those conditions and are born or become sterile to be forced to remain that way.

Let me provide an example. Let us assume that the only criterion one must meet to adopt a child are that one must make $50,000 a year, have no criminal record, be mentally and physically healthy, between the ages of 25 and 45, and be straight. Let us extend these criterion to receiving in-vitro fertilization, egg or sperm donation, and surrogate pregnancy. While grossly simplified, it is an analogous model to our current legal system’s requirements, designed to protect the welfare of the children. This set-up makes sense both on face and when analyzed in detail – the combination of standards provides a normative baseline for what a decent home for a child would be. While each standard might be debated (economic and sexual status in particular) the general idea of standards for adoption and assisted reproduction make sense because they are designed to protect the new child.

Now let us add a twist: in addition to being unable to adopt or receive reproductive assistance, if one does not meet one or more of the above criteria then one is legally and compulsively required to undergo temporary chemical sterilization. For the sake of the children, one might argue, it is the responsibility of a just society to only allow reproduction among those who are up to the task. Simply possessing the ability to reproduce unassisted is no justification for having the right to do so. In fact, getting pregnant is itself often used to exemplify a person’s irresponsibility. By this logic it would seem that we as a society have an obligation to prevent those who do not meet society’s standards from acquiring children, be it by natural birth, adoption, or assisted means.

Rightly we find such a suggestion abhorrent. Unlike Leon Kass’ repugnance theory, which relies on our instinctual fear of something new or misunderstood as a form of moral judgment, this abhorrence comes from our living in a liberal and free society. To suggest that the government is responsible for determining who may and who may not have children based on their class, sexual orientation, legal and medical history, and age is perhaps one of the most prima facia dystopic and offensive ideas one could articulate. Yet it is the real status quo for those who seek to adopt or use assisted reproduction. In every one of the cases described in the NYT piece, no one would have so much as thought to scrutinize their right to have children had they been able to do so naturally. Sterility due to nature or by situation is viewed as an exception, thus granting the state legal jurisdiction over one’s reproductive rights. Biopower exerts itself most grotesquely among those already outside the norm.

If forced to surmise as to why, I would guess that our society still maintains the deeply embedded, though irrational belief, that those who are sterile from birth or by accident or do not wish to reproduce in a normative fashion, such as asexual or homosexual people, are as such because some greater moral force – be it Nature, Fate, or God – has preordained them as deviant and unfit to parent. The NYT piece expresses this view perfectly, wherein there is no example of a successful surrogate pregnancy, only deviants – a mentally unstable mother, a strange, lonely man, and a homosexual couple. That a happy, normal, heterosexual couple with no other problems but biological inability would want a child via surrogacy goes unexplored. The underlying logic is that their normalcy is only ostensible and problems are likely lurking beneath the surface. If you can’t do it like everyone else, the argument goes, then perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it at all.

I do not have an immediate or even rough solution for the problem of our reproductive double-standard. What I do know is our society’s relationship with and perspective on reproduction is still grossly undermined by our continued attachment to decayed religious morays and their secular bioconservative descendants. There are people having children who do not want them and people who want children who cannot have them in substantial, depressing numbers. Compounding it is our legal system’s deranged obsession with genetic relationships creating de facto legal relationships. Adoption and foster care is stigmatized, contraceptives are restricted, the abortion debate has devolved into factious insanity, “natural” fertilization and birth is given mythic status and mystic veneration, and artificial methods are still portrayed as dehumanized scientific experiments; and the entirety of reproduction and sexuality is surrounded by a reactionary veil of ignorance, misinformation, and puritanical dogma crippling the very measures that would protect and help those that are most needful.

The state of law and ethics surrounding reproduction and sexuality in the West is in desperate need of a sea change, but the brave new world it would create is, for now, still to terrifying to even contemplate. It is a problem, however, that we must confront. We cannot, appropriately enough, leave it for future generations to handle.

A Kept Man

Ask yourself this question: What is the masculine form of the word “mistress?”

Can you think of an answer? I couldn’t.

Technically, there isn’t one. A male, extra-marital, long-term lover doesn’t have a specific term. There is, however, a kindred spirit to “mistress” that is more gender adaptable: the kept woman. The “kept” part of the kept woman is that she is largely provided for and supported by her lover, who is by definition of superior wealth. Until very recently the reverse situation was nearly impossible (Catherine the Great and Queen Elizabeth being notable exceptions). The closest male equivalent to a “mistress” would be a “pool boy.” The implicit social and age difference, as well as the extra-marital connotation, is about as close as I can get.

A pool boy, however, does not get much of a benefit besides sexual satisfaction. A kept woman, in addition, by definition receives more material favors, such as an apartment, clothes, an allowance, and/or trips. Not too shabby.*

So what we are confronted with are busy women with disposable income, frustrated with dating needy men, with errands and chores piling up, and no intention of settling down. Sounds like a perfect recipe for a kept man.

A kept man lives somewhere at the intersection of maid, mistress, and husband. The important thing, of course, is that he is supported by his woman (or women). The transition from simple lover to kept woman/man occurs at the moment the relationship moves from one of merely emotional and physical pleasure to one in which material gain and financial stability are added to the mix. For both people involved, the advantages are clear. In fact, the development of a culture in which a “kept man” is acceptable would help to remove the stigma around kept women and mistresses present in puritanical America. For the record, I would like to note that a “kept person” need not be extra-marital nor monogamous. Nor is it for everyone. I’m just saying it sounds like a good idea for some people.

As a final point, I’d like to say that this idea is not entirely my own. On at least three separate occasions I have had female friends – who are either currently or soon will be far more successful than me (they don’t have to list “blogger” on their resume) – have brought up the appeal of such a relationship. They have nice apartments with too much space and no one to clean them, nice kitchens with no one to cook in them, huge bank accounts with nothing to spend it on, and other more, ahem, personal needs that need to be met without the hassle of dating. A husband is too big a commitment, a boyfriend might have a job of his own, but a kept man is there to do your bidding – for a nominal cost.

Any takers?

*Before anyone gets in a huff, let me state for the record that I am aware that the whole construction of concubine/mistress/kept woman is a result of the severe power imbalance between men and women, be it a result of aristocratic or capitalist wealth. I am aware that it is not always  some sort of idealized situation where the woman gets everything she wants and is still treated well. I’m not babbling about how unfair it is that women get these opportunities and men don’t. That is the opposite of what I’m trying to get at. Also this is just a goofy thought experiment, so chill out on the feminist critique for a second.

**I’m aware I’m assuming the heterosexual (not heteronormative) perspective here. Cut me some slack. GLBT relationships are outside my realm of analysis, cause I have no idea on what the norms are.

Artie’s Wheels

I really, really like the show Glee. I like it because it stops pretending that people who live in small cities in western and mid-western states are somehow more wholesome than their metropolitan counterparts. I like it because it exposes the high school ruling class for the terrified, soon-to-be-townie losers they usually are. I like it because it admits high schoolers have sex and drink and smoke weed and still manage to function. I like it because it obliterates the myth that marrying your high school sweet heart is a good idea. I like it because it is the sunshiniest, saccharine dark comedy I’ve ever seen.

I also like it because instead of taking a stab at diversity, it actually has it. The caveat is that the diversity is totally unrealistic: somehow there are at least three Jews going to the same school in Lima, Ohio, which is actually more impossible than a lot of other things that happen on the show, but whatever. That the wheel-chair bound kid, Artie, isn’t some super hot chick missing a leg (looking at you Deuce Bigalow), but instead a nerdy, sweater-vest-and-glasses-wearing, paraplegic with a molasses smooth voice, is great. That the writers of Glee devoted an entire episode to showing what Artie’s daily struggles are like is, well, something I don’t know if I’ve seen on prime time television.

When I was initially writing this post, I kept using the word “disabled” to describe Artie, but the whole point of “Wheels” was to show Artie isn’t disabled. Except for walk, Artie does everything the other glee club kids do: sing, dance, play instruments, battle wits, go on dates, and maintain some level of self respect. My favorite moment in the episode is when Artie blurts out, “I wanna be very clear: I still have the use of my penis.” The act is so human, so basic, and so central to his life as a paraplegic it reminds us that he is simultaneously a person in a wheel chair and a teenage boy. Artie’s ability to walk away from Tina when she admits she’s faking her stutter shows he is, alternatively, confident enough in himself to prefer being alone to being with a fraud. He’s great.

In The Future of Human Nature Habermas writes that, “Since individuation is achieved through the socializing medium of thick linguistic communication, the integrity of individuals is particularly dependent on the respect underlying their dealings with one another.” What he is blathering about is that our sense of self is in large part formed around our interactions with our friends, peers, and society at large. He then goes on to discuss how this individuation relates to one’s sense of bodily (phenomenological) self, “Bodily existence enables the person to distinguish between these only on the condition that she identifies with her body. For the person to feel at one with her body, it seems that this body has to be experienced as something natural – as a continuation of the organic, self-regenerative life from which this person is born.” Emphasis mine. If a person’s body feels unnatural to her, then she has a fractured identity. What I disagree with is Habermas’ assertion that what constitutes a person’s body must actually be “natural” and/or “organic” and must link with what that person was at birth. To say Habermas is discounting or ignoring amputees and the paralyzed, among a multitude of other bodily changes that can occur after birth, is an understatement.

Artie’s dancing and countenance in a wheel chair, not to mention his confidence and honesty about his difference, disprove Habermas’ claim. I would argue that the body must not feel like something “natural” but like something contiguous and familiar. The body must feel as though it responds to one’s mind in conjunction with what is expected. Artie’s adaptation to life post-car crash at the age of eight, a situation that borders on normal, demonstrates the ability for the phenomenological body to incorporate (literally) non-natural and non-organic objects into the self. If Habermas had deigned to read Merleau-Ponty or Lacan he would have known these things. But, as we know from another lesson Glee bashes us over the head with: no one is perfect.

Oh, and Artie is singing Billy freaking Idol. The song choice couldn’t be more perfect. Artie’s identity and sense of self is heightened by his difference, hence the song “Dancing with myself.” Thus, Artie Abrams from Glee disproves Habermas’ thesis on phenomenological self requiring a “natural” and “organic” body. Enjoy the refutation:

The Substrate of Consciousness

Athena Andreadis’ article in h+ about the transhumanist fear of biology in general and their underestimation of just how complex and powerful biological systems is deliciously blunt:

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

After an interesting start, Andreadis wanders off into the territory of questioning other aspects of immortality and makes more than a few errors in logic. To more fully consider her argument, we need to understand how the mind/consciousness can be understood in relation to the brain/body.

Among futurists, there seem to be three options for how a person’s consciousness exists in relation to the physical mind.

1. Software: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories can be downloaded onto a different substrate, such as a computer hard-drive or other digital memory source.
2. Hardware: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in the brain’s physical substrate of neurons. The mind is emergent from this organic matrix and inseparable.
3. Embodied: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in a brain that is interwoven and inextricable from the body in which it resides. When you lose a hand, it’s not just your body that changes, you as a person change.

Andreadis discounts option one as an impossibility or, if anything, a process that results in a mental clone that would become different the moment it attained consciousness. I agree with her, if “mind uploading/downloading” is possible at all, in any way, is not a method for immortality. The rest of her article moves between interpretations two and three, using one or the other as it fits her argument. Mostly that’s fine, for her purposes hardware and embodiment are generally the same.

The problem with Andreadis’ article is that this is actually an argument against immortality, not, as it seems initially, an analysis of the complexities of keeping the mind alive indefinitely. Most frustrating is Andreadis’ reliance on the flaw that doesn’t assume “perfect method,” when discussing the ethics of an argument. When she critiques constructions of the brain “in silico” that is, in an artificial body or with artificial neurons, there might be a loss of “pingbacks” and/or “empathy.” This argument is equivalent to saying, “manned flight won’t work because what if we build a plane with wings that fall off or aileron cables made of silly putty?” It presumes a level of technological ineptitude that is ridiculous for ethical considerations. When arguing the ethics you do not say, “Thing X is unethical because a broken or incomplete version of thing X would cause problems Y and Z.” That isn’t an argument, it’s a technique and a distraction.

Even more frustrating, and particularly disappointing from Andreadis, who is eyeballs-deep in transhumanist lit, is her final paragraph, which repeats tropes of the anti-immortalists that have been readily rebutted.

Instead of refuting or critiquing the rest of Andreadis’ argument, I’d just like to forward my own. For a moment, let’s forget all the other enhancements and modifications transhumanists and technoprogressives support and posit, and instead just consider keeping the mind healthy and alive indefinitely. Based on the current trends in science, I largely think that the human body can be maintained indefinitely through purely organic/biological means. The problem is aging, and Aubrey de Grey has me convinced we can take steps to fix or at least slow those problems. Furthermore, I believe progress will be so slow in that field that societal norms and our relationship with life expectancy will adjust to prevent the societal upheaval or existential ennui Andreadis fears.

As for the hardware/embodiment issue, I would still posit that mind transplantation is possible if three criterion are met. If any one of these is impossible, I would argue ethical brain transplantation is impossible.

1. A brain can be severed from one body, taken out, and placed into another (either organic or artificial) without any degradation in brain matter and with all connections necessary for immediate function (blood circulation, involuntary muscle control, immuno-suppression) working.
2. Embodiment happens slowly in a controlled environment. Senses would have to be eased back “on,” control of the body would have to occur in stages, like recovering from paralysis. I imagine body transplantation would happen this way automatically, given the complexity of the re-wiring going on, but if not, it would probably need to be induced.
3. There are extant methods to ensure the legal personhood of a transplanted mind does not alter from body to body. Rights stem from the consciousness and personhood of the mind, not the physical substrate or its body.

In addition to these, there are the obvious requirements of consent on behalf of the transplantee and that the new body is not the result of some other crime (really Athena? de facto murder? No vat-grown or robotic bodies came to you as a possibility?). Number two is likely to be the most overlooked, but Andreadis’ emphasis of the mind’s link to the body is correct. A contiguous consciousness is already adapted to a changing body (aging, injury, exercise, operations, etc), but something as traumatic as a brain transplant would be, well, something with which a mind might need a bit more time.

But ideally, the transplant wouldn’t be necessary, because we’d be able to maintain our bodies as they are, preventing aging internally through a variety of biological modifications to the wetware of the human being, from the DNA up.

The Venture Bros. & Clones

The Venture Bros. is one of those shows I don’t really laugh out loud at until the third or forth time I watch an episode. It isn’t because the jokes aren’t hilarious the first time, it’s just that there is so much awesome compressed into every moment I don’t have time to laugh. “The Grand Inquisitor” “Twenty Years to Midnight” is one of the few exclusions: the Grand Galactic Inquisitor’s  ridiculous interjections still make me tear up from laughing so hard. My larger point is that there is so much going on in any given episode, some stuff can get lost in the mix.

One long narrative thread that gets drawn from the first episode of season 2 all the way to the end of season 3 is that the boys, Hank and Dean, can be cloned when they die. Their beds record their memories, so the clones have almost no memory break between death and waking up the next morning. A classic ethical problem of cloning technology has always been “would the clone be a new person or the same one?” There are two versions of the answer to the metaphysical/ontological aspect of this question: the religious and the secular answers.

In the religious version, the answer is that the soul cannot continue on, despite the “memories” being implanted in the new cloned substrate. Basically this results in a soulless zombie thing that is not the same person. So the answer is no.

In the secular version, the answer is that the original person really did die, so his or her consciousness is no longer continuous, meaning he or she is gone. The clone, despite having the same memories and not perceiving a gap in time, thus having a contiguous conscious experience, is still a different person. Again, we come to the answer of no.

Normally, this would be a bit of a problem, as The Venture Bros. is a show watched by nerds who undoubtedly would have figured out this conundrum and become upset that their favorite characters were now, well, not the same as the ones from the first season (despite that the Hank and Dean from the first season were also clones, but nerds are good at cherry picking when we’re being cranky). But, you see, thanks to the metaphysical footwork of Dr. Orpheus, the Venture’s necromancer neighbor, getting into an argument with Venture, we’re presented with a strange workaround to the problem of a clones’ consciousness.

Orpheus, guilt-ridden that he was a terrible babysitter and let the boys die, seeks to find their souls in the underworld. After a failed search, he realizes the boys’ souls are “trapped” in a machine. Dr. Venture starts arguing with Orpheus that the mumbo-jumbo about “souls” and “resurrection” is no different from using clone slugs and recorded memories. The strange implication of all of this is, when we accept the rules of the Venture world for a moment, are actually forced to agree with Venture in that Orpheus detects the souls of the boys in the computer storing their memories.

Thus, the resolution that Jason Publick and Doc Hammer come up with is: your soul is your memories, can be stored for future usage and ultimately put into a new body. The religious and secular problems are overcome.

Ok ok, I know this isn’t exactly a rigorous philosophical or theological examination of the implications of clones with implanted memories. I think Moon probably does a better job of handling that than The Venture Bros. But it is the only effort I’ve seen to combine the secular and religious argument and, in the process, reverse the conclusion of both. Oh, and it means we get the “aborted clone desperate to live up to the original” episode to boot. Everybody wins.