What *IS* life and why is it important?
IS life important?
Are there things that are important that are not life?
1. The intelligent alien scenario is a good one, I think. Although I'm skeptical we'll ever actually meet any intelligent aliens close-up, I think it's a good gedanken-experiment. Would we grant human rights to these entities? If they offered to stomp us like bugs otherwise, would that change our perception of the problem space?
2. What if we created a robot with sentience in some way equivalent to that of a human being - a thing that didn't just reason, but felt and dreamt and had a will to live and be happy? (Again, I don't think this is likely to happen in my lifetime, but it's just a thought experiment.)
3. What if we created a perfect replica of a human being from scratch, molecule by molecule? (Not in my lifetime.) Could we treat such a thing as property? Could we own it? Experiment on it as we chose?
(Now we *could* of course. But you understand what I'm getting at is *should* we.)
