Not that we should of course only check the bottom line, but it seems to me that even if the strongest ev psych claims about gender, the strongest race realist claims about race, and the strongest social constructionist claims about culture were all correct, human minds would still occupy a very small portion of mindspace. The moral, then, would seem to be correct: neither our biological nor cultural nor individual histories have shaped our intuitions for dealing with the sort of minds we might be able to create.
Could it have no "sense of self?" Could it be more like a swarm with implausibly uncanny optimization capabilities than a Mind from one of the Culture novels? Perhaps it would be like a "hegemonic swarm" from one of those books.
Is human civilization as a whole such an entity? I can look at humanity as a whole with a mindset, such that all of human civilization and culture can look like a "soulless, monstrous, hegemonic swarm."
What would entities that do have a sense of self, but no compatible concept of sex and mammalian pol...
Today's post, The Psychological Unity of Humankind was originally published on 24 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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