I don’t know you, but for me only a few hours a day is devoted to thinking or other non-physiological pursuits, the rest goes to sleeping, eating, drinking, Drinking, sex, physical exercise, etc. My goals are dominated by the need to acquire resources to support physiological needs of me and my family. You can extend any courtesy you want to anyone you want but you (human body) and a computer program (software) don’t have much in common as far as being from the same group is concerned. Software is not humanity; at best it is a partial simulation of one aspect of one person.
It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here. I spend a reasonable amount of time (probably a couple of hours of conscious effort each day; I’m not sure how significant I want to call sleep) meeting immediate physical needs, but those don’t factor much into my self-image or my long-term goals; I might spend an hour each day making and eating meals, but ensuring this isn’t a matter of long-term planning nor a cherished marker of personhood for me. Looked at another way, there are people that can’t eat or excrete normally because of one medical condition or another, but I don’t see them as proportionally less human.
I do spend a lot of time gaining access to abstract resources that ultimately secure my physiological satisfaction, on the other hand, and that is tied closely into my self-image, but it’s so far removed from its ultimate goal that I don’t feel that cutting out, say, apartment rental and replacing it with a proportional bill for Amazon AWS cycles would have much effect on my thoughts or actions further up the chain, assuming my mental and emotional machinery remains otherwise constant. I simply don’t think about the low-level logistics that much; it’s not my job. And I’m a financially independent adult; I’d expect the college student in the grandparent to be thinking about them in the most abstract possible way, if at all.
I don’t know you, but for me only a few hours a day is devoted to thinking or other non-physiological pursuits, the rest goes to sleeping, eating, drinking, Drinking, sex, physical exercise, etc. My goals are dominated by the need to acquire resources to support physiological needs of me and my family. You can extend any courtesy you want to anyone you want but you (human body) and a computer program (software) don’t have much in common as far as being from the same group is concerned. Software is not humanity; at best it is a partial simulation of one aspect of one person.
It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here. I spend a reasonable amount of time (probably a couple of hours of conscious effort each day; I’m not sure how significant I want to call sleep) meeting immediate physical needs, but those don’t factor much into my self-image or my long-term goals; I might spend an hour each day making and eating meals, but ensuring this isn’t a matter of long-term planning nor a cherished marker of personhood for me. Looked at another way, there are people that can’t eat or excrete normally because of one medical condition or another, but I don’t see them as proportionally less human.
I do spend a lot of time gaining access to abstract resources that ultimately secure my physiological satisfaction, on the other hand, and that is tied closely into my self-image, but it’s so far removed from its ultimate goal that I don’t feel that cutting out, say, apartment rental and replacing it with a proportional bill for Amazon AWS cycles would have much effect on my thoughts or actions further up the chain, assuming my mental and emotional machinery remains otherwise constant. I simply don’t think about the low-level logistics that much; it’s not my job. And I’m a financially independent adult; I’d expect the college student in the grandparent to be thinking about them in the most abstract possible way, if at all.