That's a philosophy, not a fact. Individuals and organizations define things by all sorts of criteria. eg temporally, consensus and differentiation are just a few. It's not as simple as "we all agree this zebra is a human".
So is a pig that started with human genes, still human? Of course not. What about a human that started from pig genes? Hm.
That's what I mean, by being defined by existing humans. Because that's all we really have to go by.
You add wings to a person, lots of folks would be happy to call it a new kind of being. Some would argue its non-human. The proposal is to add disease resistance or other blood factors or cellular machinery, which are invisible and not obvious. But isn't it similar to adding wings?
"All humans that are possible" has to include the pig-human, and the winged-human, and so on. Clear to me, they are non-human.
Why are people so hung up on definition of human rather than more critical things we don't understand, such as consciousness and intelligence?
Perhaps they're afraid to be put in the non-human box, and non-human is to be removed or exploited? (Also, inhumane. For once properly built word.)
History has shown repeatedly narrow definitions of humanity in action. It ends in a bloodbath of some kind.
It's like you've backed into the concept of a soul and decided a string of nucelotides was it.
will the resulting eugenics wars [0] be simulated [1] as well?
That would have to be a very careful choice. Otherwise, sound the Godwin.
See, to maximize uniqueness you would institute crazy eugenic policies to combat sexual selection, random culling (literally euthanized at random) in addition to randomizing wealth and power. (Sortition.) Conceivably this would result in a somewhat unstable society, but perhaps workable.
Fun sci-fi setting.
Might make for a good scifi story.
You need a catchy slogan, like “enumerate all humans!”
I feel like this concept hinges upon the assumption that genetics determine a person, which is not true. In my opinion, it's more important to raise people in all kinds of environments than to have every genetic individual in existence. Two genetically different individuals raised in an identical situation would likely behave similarly.
We? Who's we?
And what do you mean by "extremely negative mutations"? Who are the curators of humanity who gets to decide that?
What if the engineered people you consider to be "extremely neagtive" don't want to be "fixed"?
Nope.
Not even a little.
Why would you think we would? Is one of the possibilities Hitler with laser eyes? I would argue that we have a responsibility to PREVENT that particular person from being brought into existence.
If we imagine the set of all genetic combinations that result in something that could be conceivably thought of as “human,” only an infinitesimal fraction of humans will ever be born through traditional sexual recombination. To be born is to win a lottery with astronomically long odds.
As biotechnology advances, we will be able to conceive and grow humans using completely artificial means (eg artificial wombs). Do we, the relatively tiny population of humans who have had the luck to be born, have a duty to the much more vast population of “genetically possible humans” to bring them into existence?
I think we do if we ever reach a post-scarcity society.
Three obvious problems: genetic mutations that would make a life unbearable, the phenomenon of twins, and the astronomical number of resulting humans.
I’m sure we’ll be able to identify extremely negative mutations and either fix them or abandon those genomes. The issue of twins means we’re not generating every possible human mind, but creating a reasonable sampling of that space (we observe twins have very similar life outcomes). To the last problem, I have no solution, I’m just assuming the Universe is spatially infinite with an even distribution of matter and energy.
BTW, it might be simpler to just simulate these humans, but I’m still extremely uncertain as to what extent a human in a computer = a human in meat-space.