Nerd Pride Radio

Kyle asks the best Listener Betrayal questions. I took my best shot at them. Now it's your turn!

If someone you loved was killed in front of you, but someone created a copy of them that was perfect right down to the atomic level, would they be the same person and would you love them just as much?

Are we allowed to ask questions back? Like, when was the copy created? At the instant of death... Or like a backup copy from the start of the year?

I'm not stepping into that replicator even if it gets me quickly to Mars, sorry.

I think my initial inclination is: "No." But let's say this played out, and the person is there with all the memories, personality and everything of their former self. That's them.

Look at it from the loved one's perspective. You died, but then miraculously came back. And it's you. It's you you. Like- of course it's you because you remember that time you pooped a little in math class and had to walk funny to the restroom, and when your kid broke their leg and you panicked on the way to the doctor, or all the secret things that only you and your partner know. It's you.

So even though I'd be freaked out at first and be like- "Nope," I think I'd come around to realizing that's stupid.

You would know. You would still have the trauma of seeing them die. That would take some therapy and support to work through.

Unless "watching them die" mostly consisted of the digital conveyor breaking them down to component pieces and then reconstructing them back on the ship to save them from Gorrignak.

Next one:

If a child somehow survived and grew up in the wilderness without any human contact, how “human” would they be without the influence of society and culture?

Not very, as we see in cases of children raised by animals, but sometimes if it's a brief period with the right sort of animal, they recover and can rejoin the human world fairly well. Hoofstock and water animals seem like worse choices.

Aristotle dealt with this. He said a human raised outside of society would be either a beast or a god. If he/she had no language or social skills, he/she would be no different from an animal. If he/she could speak and interact with humans, he/she would have to be a god: no one but a god could learn those things outside of human society.

His main point in this is that humans are fundamentally social, and growing up outside of society (where we learn language, with which we can debate abstract things) is unnatural.

Nietzsche says that Aristotle left out the third option: both beast and god--a philosopher (as Nietzsche understands the term).

Of course it's a human. That's biological.

I think it's dangerous to say such a child wouldn't be a human. The conclusion would be based on the fact that it doesn't live up to our standards for "being civilized." If we're going to draw those lines, then we can also draw lines that other cultures also aren't civilized. That's dangerous.

But more than that, to say the child isn't human would, for many people, mean that the child is not as worthwhile as a "real human." I also think that is dangerous.

The question wasn't whether the child would be a biological human. How was that supposed to change? The question was, how "human" is the child after living without human contact? As it happens we have empirical answers to this question. Not very many, but we do have them. And the answer seems to be, if you're going to live in the wilderness as a child, live with dogs for the best hope of reintegration into the human world.

I don't understand why observing facts, like that children who live in the wild for some period have serious difficulties adjusting to human culture again, has any bearing on whether we treat those children well, or whether we treat other groups of culturally dissimilar people well. Their difficulties reassimilating will occur regardless of which specific human culture they were part of, so the fact that this happens implies nothing about which group of people is more or less civilized than another. Nor does it indicate we would be any less compassionate towards children who had suffered such a fate. As much as the idea of living among a pack of wolves, bears, or ostriches appeals to me, it's really not a good plan for children.

Couple things I find really interesting about this: it can happen to animals who come to live with humans. The feral children - at least, the ones we know about who survive - rarely end up living alone. They join up with dogs or bears or monkeys or large birds or other creatures. I assume they learn the mode of communication those animals use, and to the extent that language structures our brain development, I wonder how different their brains are as a result of that aspect of the experience alone? As I say this, my dog is communicating with other dogs in the neighborhood and something is really going down out there. Fascinating. Here he comes to get me to join his investigation, or whatever they're doing.

But you also cannot ignore the cultural context of your semantics. The idea that certain people are less "human" than others has never been used in the justification of anything good.

People want to use "human" in this sense to solely be descriptive of behavior and capabilities, but most people cannot utilize that definition without the added implication of "deserving the rights and respect of humans".

Separate the two concepts and use less ambiguous terminology.

Facts don't care about your feelings, y'all.

It pleases me that I have amused you. I don't think there is any way I could say that with a straight face.

Suppose that we took Neanderthal DNA and implanted it in a human mother's egg.

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