Learning by playing god

One feature that is common to many animals, in particular to most mammals, is the custom of play among the offspring. In the relative safety of the group, the young learn to fight, bite or hunt knowing that the stakes are low, that they are probably not going to get hurt and that they will have a meal even if they do not manage to catch prey. The games are the way to assess the development of their capabilities and they typically increase in complexity as the cubs grow. The case of humans is not much different, only a lot longer because the inborn capabilities are very limited, so there is a lot to learn: from the coarse control of the limbs, to the locomotion on to finer manipulation and even speech. But then the intellectual development also requires its own portion of mental games.

My kids, which are not kids anymore, are now playing to pass judgement, so they often engage in obscure hypothetical situations of dubious origin trying to discern what would be right or wrong. Over the weekend Jason posed the question: "If you had a 1:10 clone of Adolf Hitler (so it is completely helpless against you), would you punish him for the crimes of the original one?". Considering the fact that our current cloning technology is purely genetic (i.e. the clone is like a twin of the original one, eventually younger, but has to undergo its own growth and development), the clone is a separate person totally independent from the original one and therefore should not be held accountable for his crimes. This would be the case of the clone soldiers of Kamino in Star Wars: the Attack of the Clones.

Photo: pixy.org

Then he wondered what would happen if the clone were an instantaneous copy of the original, in the way that Sheldon explain teleportation on episode 12 of The Big Bang Theory. In the teleportation system, the original is destroyed to leave only one copy at the destination, but theoretically the original could be kept, obtaining a second individual with exactly the same past history up to the moment of cloning, when the stories start to diverge. I stated that in that case I would not be against punishing the copy, but that it would be unfair to make the him pay and not the original, so I would be in favor of punishing both equally or, better yet, punish the original before cloning to spare yourself the dilemma.

The next hypothetical question follows Stanislav Lem's discussion in "Are you there, Mr. Jones?". Jason argued that, if the copy at the destination end of the teleportation has been assembled by a machine, it could technically be considered the product of the machine and therefore the property of the owner of the teleporter, in the same way that you own the prints coming out of your printer. Lem gives his story one additional twist, because the parts of Mr. Jones are progressively replaced by bionic ones until no original part is left, a clear reference to the ship of Theseus or the sorites paradox that I mentioned a few days ago. But even with the complete and instantaneous replacement that Jason posited I argued that the copy would be a person in its own right and therefore should not be owned. Of course, if one starts to produce copies, the concept of identity (and therefore of ownership) gets a bit diluted, but we did not follow that route.

Instead, we started discussing the ownership of animals, in particular wild animals, either captured, like many zoo exemplars, or cloned as the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise. Jason mentioned the difficult trade-off between respecting the nature of wild animals and being able to manage them in any reasonable way: if you Tyrannosaurus Rex starts feeding on, say, Velociraptors, it might simply not be possible to "produce" enough of them to make up for the losses. On the other hand, trying to tame the T-Rex to prevent it from devouring its fellows would be like playing God, redesigning the species that came out of millions of years of evolution.

This kind of mental exercises is very interesting, because it shows the difficulties of a balanced approach. Indeed, back in the early 1990's it led to a whole new genre of computer games based on models or simulations of the reality. I remember spending hours on end on the likes of Populous (where you actually played a god) and SimCity (where you are allegedly the major of the city but some of your powers are almost god-like).

Regardless of the content of your play, exercising your skills knowing that there is not much skin at stake is not only rewarding, but even necessary for healthy growth. I am happy that our children engage in it so eagerly. Have a nice evening.