Human Rights to Sapience Rights 2 – The Social Animal

Dolphins and whales are declared non-human persons in India. The scientific community establishes the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans to protect them, their environment, and their culture.

MRI scans dogs for the first time, neurologists predict they have a sentience level as that of a human child, and they may have emotions very similar to those we feel.

A poetic article shows incredible sentience in elephants, they mourn their dead, remember long lost friends and enemies. Research also shows they use a variety of primitive communication techniques, including gestures and vocals and even joke making, and might possibly be able to learn and reproduce new sounds after linking them to particular emotions.

If all these ideas are proven to be true and correct, what does this mean? Let's take a look at ourselves. Human beings feel as though we are entitled to certain rights. And we are, of course. We should not be subject to cruel conditions such as torture or slavery, because we find that life is something worth experiencing and it goes against fundamental goodness to deprive a soul from his or her life. We look at murder as a crime so grave its punishment in many cultures is to remove the culprit from society all together. But what makes the existence of a human any different from the existence of an ant? Perhaps it's the complexity of the existence. Ants are responsive, they detect a chemical, lain by other ants, and immediately begin to scout, attack, defend, escape, avoid, eat, etc. They can't respond with free thought, only in reflex. However, is that so different from us?

Everything's Booming, Almost

Mankind is going through a chain of booms. We've experienced the population boom, economies boom on and off, and most influentially the great technology boom. Additionally, there's been a data boom, a communication boom, and it can even be ventured to say we're beginning an ethics boom. What's missing?

Let's talk about a few things mentioned above. Population and economy are discussed extensively enough in other sources. What is this technology boom though? It's not as clearly defined, nor are it's ramifications. We know computers were invented only a handful of decades ago, and they've evolved at an exponential rate since then. What does this mean for us? Well, according to some sociologists, cultures merge from the technology of their peoples. This seems accurate enough, it's observable today, especially in the first world, but our technology has also lead to a globalized economy as companies spread across multiple nations, countries and their people communicate over the internet, Google creates a map of the entire planet. This leads to impacts on third world countries, and their cultures have been influenced slightly. Throughout the connected world, people are demanding more things, things like more jobs, more food, more connectivity, more rights, things that we didn't need to emphasize on as much before our population boomed. How do limited resources and large numbers of people influence culture? Let's just ask al-Shabab.

Money is the World's Largest Religion

Human beings study several sciences: physics, mathematics, biology, ethics, and of course economics. When we look at an object in physics, one of the more 'real' sciences you could say, depending on the perspective in question, we can determine and assign it several properties: things like mass, height, length, inertia, density. However, in recent years, we've added a property to that list: cost. Cost is commonly the first aspect we look at, especially nowadays in our state of economy. But what is it? To answer that we must ask what is currency.

A friend of mine named Shawn has more money than most people I know, so when he told me what money was, it surprised me coming from someone who had so much of it. He told me, money is a promise. It's a promise that because you gave me some item or service, someone else in a similar society will give you an item or service of equal value. But then what is value? It might be measurable, but how so? We can measure weight, and dimensions, and the like, without question. But value is something different. It's a psychological phenomenon, a process in the brain in which the human undergoes some equation to calculate how much currency the asset in question is worth. It's not a real thing, it's an imaginary game. However, the ritual of applying value to assets has become so widespread, along with the trade of, accumulation, or at least obsession over currency, it reaches every corner of the planet. It's a mental process which we use to justify actions such as sacrifice and war and the joining of labor systems which consume our health and life, all for the dollar. Money is truly a religion is every aspect.

Human Rights to Sapience Rights - Robots, A.I., and Agriculture.

I've come across a few news items recently.

A high school girl, Eesha Khare, invents a superconductor designed to charge cell phones in 20 seconds. It is flexible, yet entirely solid, i.e. non-liquid, and can last 10,000 charge cycles. And it's smaller than an average flash-drive. 

A team from Harvard creates an insect sized, flying robot. It uses special strips of ceramic that respond to an electric pulse much like our muscles do, with contractions, which it uses to flap it's wings. It's smaller than a paperclip. 

Vijay Kumar and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have designed flying swarm bots. They operate solely off A.I., they can jump through hoops, operating in real time. They can use a Kinect to create a 3D image of a building and navigate it. They can fly in perfect formations, acting off their A.I.'s to sense each other's position and coordinate their movements.

Bee populations are dying. This means crops aren't being pollinated, ecosystems and many markets in agriculture are in danger. Global Warming and pesticide use are being blamed, among other factors.

That last one seems to stand out against the technological hubbub, but there is a connection. Could robotics be used to solve problems in an industry as sensitive as agriculture? The dream of robot farmers isn't that far off from our current state. With enough genetic engineering and chemical fertilizers, we have produced plants that need less and less care from farmers, it's not too hard to believe that soon the only effort we need to apply to agribusiness is the mechanic motions of plant, water, harvest, repeat. But would that be wise? We can, but should we remove the human factor completely from farming?

Same-Sex Marriage - An Informal Debate - Part 2

Part one of this discussion can be found at:
http://dylanwheeler.blogspot.com/2013/05/gay-marriage-informal-debate-part-1.html

I had to extract closure to the debate, as it was declining to games of semantics and linguistics riddled with circular reasoning as opposed to a forward moving discussion. Sadly it's very common among debates to target the opponent himself rather than the points the other person is making. I'll let you my readers be the judge on who is guilty there however. I will say my opponent had a good idea in the beginning, and his alternate viewpoint was interesting at first, but I'll let the debate below express the err. Enjoy.

Deep Economy - Eating Locally - Taking Notes

Part One of this this review can be found at: http://dylanwheeler.blogspot.com/2013/04/deep-economy-economic-growth-taking.html

Chapter 2 of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy discusses the utmost important sector of any economy known to human beings: food. He highlights the many problems in our globalized food system and offers solutions and examples of how his solutions work.

I'll start by explaining what has become of the food system. Not so long ago, nearly half of America's population worked in agriculture, and that was the minimum needed to sustain our society. People's lives and cultures were centered around farm life, the reason our schools take a two month summer vacation is because parents needed their children to help work the land during the large summer harvest. Since then however, our economy has changed; and now only 1% of our population works our farms.

Same-Sex Marriage - An Informal Debate - Part 1

Good evening readers.
I was browsing the astonishing quantity of content which the internet consists of, and I came across a petition I supported and signed and shared it to my Facebook page. It can be found at change.org. I recommend viewing it just to get a better grasp of this post, but roughly it involves an anti-gay pastor who is scheduled to deliver a prayer at the Pentagon, and the authors of the petition wish to send a message that taxpayers don't want their money to go towards honoring a man who holds such values. I posted this petition to my Facebook wall, and it lead to a debate with a friend of mine, and he offered a very interesting perspective that most people don't offer in cases such as this. It lead to a bit of an informal debate, a very exciting and interesting one, that I just couldn't help but share here; one involving rights, ethics, and some sociology.

Deep Economy - Economic Growth - Taking Notes

The book subject of this review can be found for purchase at Amazon.
Also, information on the book can be found on Facebook.

Me being the eccentric little bibliophile I am, when I received this years tax return I was absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of going on a little shopping spree at the nearest Barnes and Noble. I picked up a book titled Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. I've finished the first chapter, and here's my thoughts...

Chapter One, After Growth, talks about a lot of, for lack of a better word, politics. Politics in a more modern sense in which everybody gets involved, not just the politicians. The author takes a lot of time and ink to convince you that since the rise of the industrial revolution and the workings of Adam Smith, the whole planet has been convinced that the absolute best thing human beings can do for the economy is to continuously improve economic growth. This idea has been around for so long, in fact, that it's become imbedded into our very culture. McKibben even discusses it as something akin to religion, and of course he quotes many authors and economists and experts and sociologists, and cites many a research paper and report, but I'll let him convince you of his ideas by encouraging you to read the book. Regardless, that's the point he's making, that growth reigns supreme in our modern economic culture, and for good reason: it's worked.