Social ethics issues of the United States are an interesting phenomenon. Justice Bork once used the phrase “where the rubber meets the road” in a sense something like that of the anachronism ‘oars in the water’- except that it was used concerning legal issues. Answers to ethics issues and questions aren’t necessarily more fungible than legal ones. It is the case that legal questions exist within a neural network of precedents in which they need compatibly cohere while ethics issues and questions tend toward being colorful, anecdotal and unbound even within particular ethical systems. Therefore I will move directly on to where the meat hits the market.
Questions about the ethics of abortions and lab grown meat arise, and then one extrapolates from those to more difficult questions of cloning headless human bodies for use as spare parts and birthing ‘machines’. Should profit generally be a primary concern for ethics questions and a major premise for syllogisms adapted to iterations of social ethics algorithms?
What are weighty philosophical questions usually aren’t decided by philosophers. Academic philosophers may be neo-sophists providing opinions for dollars rather than deep thinkers offering their best opinions. So complex issues arise these days as they have the past several decades that aren’t isolated questions or challenges as much as salient questions embedded within networks of contingence.
Neologisms are new words created; sometimes for questionable reasons. Yet new words and phrases may be engineered for ethics evaluations unless one wants to limit parameters to that of a legalistic approach. Is a free paradigm then so unbounded that valid answers to ethics questions are impossible or at least limited to those of pragmatic value and application?
Logic allows one to create their own value structure, as if it were an algebra with constants and variables. Structuring ethics ‘syllogisms’ or test iterations can also be constructed with constant and variable premises representing given value systems within which valid answers need cohere. Aristotelian ethics algorithms had 256 possible forms with 23 being valid forms. Artificial neural networks of ethics tests and parameters may be adapted in three dimensions or even four dimension forms in order to test questions and answers for coherence within ethics system parameters.
What is wrong about growing beef without brains or heads in barn-laboratories? One may need to overcome initial squeamishness at the nominally inhuman concept of growing living flesh in brainless beasts to be eaten. Is it more compassionate to eat the flesh of an animal with a mind- even if old and substantially deteriorated such that it doesn’t feel the pain of living in captivity and doesn’t think about its future? Would vegetarians eat the flesh of brainless beasts that are nothing more than meat grown for profit?
I will digress here briefly to consider neural networks in relation to artificial intelligence. Frankly I don’t know how contemporary artificial computational intelligence programs are constructed. I would guess that three-dimension or four-dimensional neural networked nodes with language criteria capacity to understand human language and meanings; words and phrases, are structured with great depth and great energy cost. They veritfy meaning and build replies consistent with precedents from human social language use. Hence the ‘deep learning’ approach of mass user artificial intelligence system like ChatGPT and Gemini to examine human language in all forms.
A problem for A.I. and its users is that A.I. imitates human language use and is an inorganic algorithm. Human language and artificial intelligence have a great divide across which they communicate. Human language develops within human experience in a physical ecosphere in which they live. A.I. language exists in a reflection of the language used in that realm without any experience of it.
It’s possible that computational language learning networks regarded as artificial intelligence use word association tests to correctly identify the meaning or value of the signs that are called ‘words’. Feedback from spheres of meanings and protocols generate construction of meaningful phrases and paragraphs with inductive replies following instructions understood with the reductio ad absurdam of deductive/associational logic iterations modeling the sort of language the A.I. learned scraping libraries of language data for examples. It is exquisite mimicry of human intelligence completely detached from direct experience. Human uses of language A.I. constructs will build libraries of completely abstracted second hand experience as if it were primary experience related with accurate language, decalibrating social reality further than it would otherwise be from human physical reality and pragmatic social lexicons.
It is possible that the most striking ‘singularity’ will not be the one when A.I. is just ‘smarter’ than humans- it already has achieved that level in some respects (for example Stockfish the chess engine has reached a 4000 rating while the highest human rating for classical chess every reached is 2885).The greater singularity will be where A.I. achieves its own logical system that is not one that is a derivative of formal human logic constructs. At that moment, even lacking consciousness, the A.I. may be able to go about interact with the quantum cosmos as if it were a self-directed robot operating a quantum threshing machine harvesting wild patterns and trails throughout the physics of the Universe before everything blinks into nothingness.
Florida banned lab-grown meat. Is that a refutation of free enterprise or compassionate conservatism reinforcing principles against exploiting animals? Is it just the unwillingness of cattle growers to face competition from humanitarians seeking to end the killing of animals with minds for human consumption? It is a small step and yet a giant leap for mankind to grow meats for eats to growing headless human bodies in labs for spare body parts or as headless birth vessels sparing human women with heads the suffering of gestation and childbirth.
I have no answer to the question of ethics of those scenarios. Perhaps there are practical academics that would provide answers to such questions for a consultant fee. Perhaps government would seek a few answers and then accept the answers it most desires as the best ones. Even while the sea level rises and ocean temperatures increase.
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