"in a perfect world, the judge would be able to press a button and instantly alter the brain/mind and behavior of the offender, and would immediately set them free because they no longer pose a reasonable threat to anyone" That´s not what a perfect world looks to me VagabondSpectre. It is Stalin´s, Mohammed´s, Mao´s perfect world, but not mine because I think human beings have souls that need to be respected. Even dark souls need some respect, for the sake of the standard we (people who believe in human rights) want for Human kind.

A kid is totally responsible for his small actions. Responsible comes from response; the person doing the harm is the agent whose response you want to improve. The kid responds to stimuli, and changing those stimuli you allow the kid to change his behaviour without even touching his physical brain or giving a good wash. If the kid gets fun from not controlling himself while playing, then let´s remove the fun by linking being so antisocial with no videogames for a month.

Children or animals are not computers; computers are tools. Tools do not matter, because they are not part of something greater or meaningful: they aren´t meaning-makers, entities that experience the world subjectively and contribute to the cosmic soul.

Mohammed´s — DiegoT

There are wayyy too many Mohammeds... Which one? :joke:

"in a perfect world, the judge would be able to press a button and instantly alter the brain/mind and behavior of the offender, and would immediately set them free because they no longer pose a reasonable threat to anyone" That´s not what a perfect world looks to me VagabondSpectre. It is Stalin´s, Mohammed´s, Mao´s perfect world, but not mine because I think human beings have souls that need to be respected. Even dark souls need some respect, for the sake of the standard we (people who believe in human rights) want for Human kind. — DiegoT

This isn't rationally persuasive. You're telling humans to be compassionate because A: souls, and B: just 'cause. I'm telling humans to be compassionate because without hard-free will harmful retribution as itself a form of justice becomes emotionally and logically incoherent (taking sadistic revenge on a cog doesn't fix the original harm, or the cog).

Here's a question I hope can tease out the difference between our views:

If God resurrected Hitler and asked you what should be done with him, what would your answer be?

Mine would be to allow him to continue to exist in a form or place in which he cannot harm anyone. Why not let him be happy?

A kid is totally responsible for his small actions. Responsible comes from response; the person doing the harm is the agent whose response you want to improve. The kid responds to stimuli, and changing those stimuli you allow the kid to change his behaviour without even touching his physical brain or giving a good wash. If the kid gets fun from not controlling himself while playing, then let´s remove the fun by linking being so antisocial with no videogames for a month. — DiegoT

This is the general thrust of punishment as rehabilitation, and it is especially effective on children. But would it not be more ideal for children to learn about the importance of safety on an intellectual level instead of the level of Pavlovian conditioning via negative reinforcement? Granted, it takes time for children to learn such things (which is why we take the safe and easy route and threaten them, and when necessary physically intervene), but applying this method to adults requires far too much force and can be highly ineffectual.

Children or animals are not computers; computers are tools. Tools do not matter, because they are not part of something greater or meaningful: they aren´t meaning-makers, entities that experience the world subjectively and contribute to the cosmic soul. — DiegoT

If there's a cosmic soul, I would bet that computers contribute to it. I believe that we emerged from material which is not itself conscious, and I have no qualms accepting that a digital intelligence could qualify as "conscious" in all the ways (and potentially more) that humans consider themselves to be.

It´s not self- consciousness I was referring to, but about being part of something greater. Let me try to explain it better: a bee, a dinosaur and Sarah Silverman are all part of one project, we can call it "Life Project", that for the sake of simplicity we are going to suppose it started with the formation of our Sun. A bee is very little self-aware, that´s how she copes with being a bee; however, she´s unknowingly very much integrated and a contributing element of a single process of Unity in Diversity, which is Life as we know it. No machine I know is part of that. They are not concerned with Life, and they even destroy life to make room for more machines and synthetic space. All our machines, they may well be alien parasites from another universe for all they care. They´d behave exactly the same. Giving these machines an ego will not change this at all, as HAL 9000 showed in 2001. They are still aliens from their own universe, totally detached from the common project. We human beings, even as we become more machine-like by the day, are still very much like the bee or or the river or Sarah Silverman. The human way to achieve this in our soul level, is by being meaning-makers; creating worlds of symbols we inhabit as souls but which are responding to, or derived from, the Life project. It is true that we are alienating or separating ourselves from this process, and when we managed to totally switch off, there will be no more humanity left in us. We´ll be like our toaster and unlike the bee.

If a machine could integrate in the cosmos and the life project instead of being just an autonomous process, conscious or not, I guess it can be part of the soul of the universe. But it is far from clear that this is even possible, as machines are by definition, entities that work against the flow of Life.

No machine I know is part of that. They are not concerned with Life, and they even destroy life to make room for more machines and synthetic space. — DiegoT

You have much to learn!

Biological life is indeed a mechanical form of life; we're machines: