I feel like you’re trying to say we should care about “memetic life” as well as… other life. But the parallel you draw seems flawed: an individual of any race and sex is still recognizably conscious, and an individual. Do we care about non-sentient life, memetic or otherwise? Should we care?
You’re right, it’s infeasible to care about individual memes (or for that matter, the vast majority of individual animals) the way we care about other humans. I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m trying to break a logjam of humancentric ethical thinking.
Forgive me for passing on my confusion here, but I’m not certain that consciousness/sentience, is anything more than ‘recognizably human’. You and I have a common brain architecture and one of our faculties is picking that out from trees and rocks. Perhaps there are plenty of evolved, competent alien minds that would pose a challenge to our ape-like-me recognition systems simply because they’re so alien.
But if and when humans upload, then they will become effectively memes. We need to solve the question of how to care about non-sentient life, because a datafile could be you or me or a descendent.
I feel like you’re trying to say we should care about “memetic life” as well as… other life. But the parallel you draw seems flawed: an individual of any race and sex is still recognizably conscious, and an individual. Do we care about non-sentient life, memetic or otherwise? Should we care?
I don’t know about ‘should’ - but many humans do act as though they care about their favoured memes.
Catholicism, Islam, patriotism—there are many memes that are literally ‘to die for’.
You’re right, it’s infeasible to care about individual memes (or for that matter, the vast majority of individual animals) the way we care about other humans. I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m trying to break a logjam of humancentric ethical thinking.
Forgive me for passing on my confusion here, but I’m not certain that consciousness/sentience, is anything more than ‘recognizably human’. You and I have a common brain architecture and one of our faculties is picking that out from trees and rocks. Perhaps there are plenty of evolved, competent alien minds that would pose a challenge to our ape-like-me recognition systems simply because they’re so alien.
But if and when humans upload, then they will become effectively memes. We need to solve the question of how to care about non-sentient life, because a datafile could be you or me or a descendent.