A welcome robocall from Congresswoman Susan Davis

Last night I received a robocall from the office of San Diego's Congresswoman Susan Davis, inviting me to join a public townhall teleconference in progress. It told to just remain on the line to be automatically joined to the conference, or to press 2 to opt-out of any future calls. How great is that?

I stayed on the line and joined, to be treated to a few disappointing call-in questions (and Ms. Davis' responses) before my cordless phone lost reception from only 25 feet away (a 5.8 GHz Uniden with new batteries). Sadly, it's status quo for the phone, call reception seems rather unreliable in my urban abode.

The robocall recording had never given me a callback number (or option), and I don't pay for caller ID on my landline, so I had no way to call back into the teleconference. I could have tried *69, but I wondered what charges I would end up paying for that, if it would have even worked. I tried a quick Google search, but didn't find any information about the town hall teleconference on her official web site. I was getting ready to go out anyway, so I gave up. Ah well, it was cool while it lasted.

Kudos to Susan Davis for going to great lengths to interact with her constituents! Now, if only they could find a better way to filter out the paranoid wackos and senile old ladies.

A cylon-inspired tangent to abortion

If we ever design robots sophisticated enough to be called "alive", all the strict pro-lifers may have to accept they can never unplug any of their AI-compatible equipment without compromising their principles.

Stated another way, I think the abortion debate is upper-bounded by the development of human-like robots.

Speaking of robotic cohabitants, I wonder how we'll ever justify humanity's inefficient use of resources to them if we ever bump up against resource limits and are forced to start allocating resources based on productivity efficiency. Somehow I think the age-old parenting fallback of "because I said so" won't hold up to (hopefully ruthless) robotic logic.

The abortion debate makes us dumber

While musing about the pro-choice vs. pro-life arguments of the abortion debate, I realized that the debate is a symptom of irrationality. This is easier to see by deconstructing the crux of the debate: that we (humans) have a right to life¹.

What does this statement actually mean? Precise definitions of "humanity" and "life" would require exact physical or chemical descriptions, potentially down to a molecular level. We get by without them because we usually don't require them, but in the context of abortion, they are particularly necessary. Assuming that science eventually provides exact definitions, any laws governing abortion would undoubtedly rely on them. In doing do, such law would create a ludicrous set of boundary conditions--a fetus one mutation shy of being "human" or a nanosecond short of being "alive" would fall outside of the law. These ridiculous boundary conditions plainly show that the concept of sanctioning or criminalizing abortion is entirely arbitrary, because the definitions of "human" and "life" are arbitrary. As in not founded on reason. "Human" and "life" simply describe different states of matter that we are subjectively connected to.

This leads to two questions:

1. Is it right to impose arbitrary laws?
2. How should arbitrary laws be defined?

First, it's important to recognize the difference between arbitrary regulations and arbitrary laws. We encounter arbitrary regulations every day, while driving under posted speed limits, for example. However, one must recognize that laws like speed limits are arbitrary in a very different sense than abortion law. The motivation behind laws imposing speed limits is that nobody has the right to endanger others on public streets. It boils down to a "pro-life" ideology, that nobody has the right to endanger someone else's life². Sure, the actual speed limits themselves are arbitrary, but the crux of the law is quite rational³: it is important to protect life. This assumption is well accepted in society and generally does not require an exact definition for life. However, abortion law is different, because it depends on precisely defining life.

Thus, the crux of the abortion debate centers on the question of how to define a law based on an arbitrary definition. Since the definition of life is arbitrary, any approach depending on it cannot be considered rational or scientific. "Arbitrary definition" is an oxymoron in the context of science, where definitions are simply precise measurements, not arbitrarily selected values⁴. Rationally creating a law based on an arbitrary definition is like attempting to find two integers which add up to "three-ish".

The matter ends up being settled by the laws the universe imposes on us all. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Might is right. Our arbitrary laws evolve to represent the social groups powerful enough to change them. I, for one, desperately want to live in a society based on reason and science. I hope that the Internet catalyzes this kind of social evolution, that perhaps it will become a possibility within my lifetime. I suppose that as long as we're generally heading toward that goal, that's all I can ask for.

In the meantime, I'm going to stop debating the subject. Humans do NOT have a right to life, it is simply a useful social tenet that doesn't usually require exact definitions for "human" and "life". The universe is decidedly unconcerned with whether any of us are alive, and with the myriad ways in which that may change.

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Footnotes

1: Note: I'm not claiming that the crux is a general "right to life" for all life. The practice of killing and euthanizing animals (and aborting animal fetuses) is currently well accepted, indicating that a general "right to life" is not crucial to the debate. Also note that I'm not implying that I support killing animals, though I do enjoy a good hamburger, occasionally.

2: Perhaps the only "arbitrary" type of laws I can agree with are those that boil down to protecting people from the actions and choices of others. Our kind of society hinges on the concept that nobody has the right to endanger someone else's life (or create a significantly negative impact on someone else's life). Obviously, though, this ideology becomes difficult to apply in the case of abortion law, due to the ill-defined nature of life. At what point does a human gain the right to life? At conception? At the age the fetus can survive outside the womb? When it can feel pain or know that it is dying? At birth? At an age where it can fend for itself? It's quite a slippery slope, once one starts debating anything beyond conception...

3: Rational, given our subjective context of being alive.

4: Except when dealing with the definitions of units of measurement, of course!