steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Hastings) (01/08/91)
In article <Dec.31.18.41.39.1990.26052@athos.rutgers.edu> webber@csd.uwo.ca (Robert E. Webber) writes: >reminds me of a tale of a >ship being replaced plank by plank; the question being when it was a >new ship. If I take someone's brain and replace it cell by cell with >the brain of squirrel, at what point would you say I have destroyed >the person's brain? This reminds me of an outstanding short story called "The Axe", which was published years ago in a science fiction magazine. I think it was _Galaxy_, but I may be wrong. I know it was written by a woman author, since the cover said "Special issue with all women authors!" or some such. (If anyone can tell me the name of the author, or find me a copy of the issue, I would be grateful; I have wanted this story for my collection for years.) The protagonist was a biological researcher who ran a lab with his brother. They had developed a tailored bacterium that would go all through your body, forcing each cell to renew itself, fixing many disorders in the process, and then dying once its work was done. (I imagine if the story were written today, "nanomachine" would replace the word "bacterium.") The new bacterium posed a grave threat to the dominant bio labs, owned by a corrupt guy (named, I believe, "Genghis Graham"). The dominant labs made all their money by growing clones for spare parts. Who needs spare parts when you can regenerate without surgery? The corrupt guy had murdered the brother of the protagonist, destroyed all the cultures of the bacterium, and ruined the notes on how it had been created. In court, his lawyer argued that he had not committed murder; all he had done was vandalism, and he was prepared to pay for it. And here is where it relates to the previous posting. Take an axe, said the lawyer. Replace the handle. Is it the same axe? Most would say "yes." Replace the head instead. Same axe? Yes. Now, replace both handle and head at the same time. Not the same axe anymore! He contended that what his client had killed was not the brother, since it had undergone the regeneration treatment. All of its cells had been replaced at once, and it was not the same person under the law. Further, under the laws in force in the story, it must be a clone and therefore property (clones can't be people if you cut them up for spare parts). Some day, nanomachines will make it possible to do something like this. They will even make it possible to have multiple copies of a person at the same time. The law will clearly have to deal with the problem of identity differently than it does now. I can picture people having their fingerprints altered to little pictures of rock stars, and changing their appearance several times a month. How will criminals be positively identified then? If you duplicate yourself, and your duplicate commits a crime, which of you do the police prosecute? If you download yourself into a computer, and the copy of you gets erased, was that murder? How about if you download yourself, and then years later the copy, which has by now developed a unique personality and changed its name, gets erased? Nanomachines will surely make possible true thinking machines, if only by building "neural network" type hardware millions of times more complex than the machines being built today. Will these thinking machines get protection under the law? I read a short story, by John Varley I believe, about a young woman after she was murdered. In her society, they were able to record brain patterns, clone you from a tissue sample on file, and restore you from backup when you died. (If you knew who killed you you could sue for "alienation of personality" since the restoral process took months, and things wouldn't be quite as they were when you died.) If death is curable, what is the appropriate penalty for murder? -- Steve "I don't speak for Microsoft" Hastings ===^=== ::::: uunet!microsoft!steveha steveha@microsoft.uucp ` \\==|