Enshrining human , transhuman and posthuman self agency through Property Rights law and statute

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Enshrining human , transhuman and posthuman
self agency through Property Rights law and
statute

• Presented by Morris Folke Johnson
• To Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons
• 10 December 2011
• Terasem Island, Second Life

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Speaking Note 1

• My proposition is that a proactive stance
  should be taken so that what those who wish to
  move human evolution along can do so without
  diverting time, and resources to ask line-item
  permission from any other human or social,
  cultural, theistic or governmental jurisdiction
  or construct. There are a wide range of
  implications enabled by successful application of
  Property Rights to support human self-directed
  evolution in all of its manifest forms. I am
  going to some use language which may bring forth
  some strong discussion.Please in advance let me
  make apology to those whose sensitivity I may
  offend.

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Definition

• Self-agency
• a developmentally based
• transformation in
• conceptualizing self as a
• purposeful agent capable of
• shaping motives, actions,
• and future possibilities.
• Research in Nursing Health, 2003, 26, 2029

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Speaking Note 2

• I had a hard time deciding on a term to cover
  self-ownership in a way that applies to humans,
  transhumans, posthumans or any type of
  cybernetic or digital construct and especially to
  medicine in all its forms preventative,
  regenerative, crisis-management and palliative.
• What I did was find a search term which seemed to
  bring up scholarly papers covering the
  derivatives of self-ownership of ones body.

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History-Religion

• God gave us self agency, self agency
• that allows us to make our own
• decisions - good and bad. Through a
• lot of the bills that the church has
• obviously been supporting and
• spearheading - like the liquor laws,
• they are trying to control that legal self-
• agency we have been given. All this
• shows is fear and the need to be in
• control. If God was truly a part of the
• church, then they wouldn't have this fear
• and need to be in control.
• http//www.abc4.com/content/news/top20stories/st
  ory/The-secret-untold-story-behind-Utahs-new-liquo
  r/zTDj3R5_qkClr_IPeUKQnA.cspx?rss20

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Speaking Note 3

• Religions in large measure attempt to justify the
  taking away of the capacity to make many
  decisions about our bodies through
  interpretations of scripture writings.
• Property Rights are removed from the individual
  and in the extreme tolerate honor killing of
  children and family members by some religious
  cultures.
• Capital punishment imposes upon individuals the
  condition that if they destroy the rights of
  others to enjoy their own bodies they will in
  turn be stripped of this ownership by the state
  or some third party society agrees to delegate
  this function to.
• The killing of un believers in the middle ages
  or Witches at Salem are all instances where
  self-ownership was stripped by others without
  justification by or permission of the person
  whose body was being damaged.

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History-Culture

• -The disenfranchisement of the individual is
  reinforced by caste and gender constructions
  that have historically created a loss of
  self-agency for women and lower castes
• Purifying the earthly body of God religion and
  ecology in Hindu India By Lance E. Nelson . Pg.
  124

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Speaking Note 4

• Be it women as second-class citizens, slavery
  of one class or nationality by another, or
  apartheid , or treatment of gay/lesbian/bi-trans-s
  exuals or the treatment of Jewish persons by the
  German 3rd Reich, we have a history overflowing
  with persons debasing the rights of others to
  enjoy their most prized possession their own
  bodies without just cause. Perhaps laws against
  rape also detail how one person may not interfere
  with the enjoyment or use by another person of
  their own body.

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History- Medicine

• How the patient-doctor relationship affects
  self-agency
• Patients are often more successful at
  self-advocacy if the particular problem they are
  describing also connects to some aspect protected
  under the "Patient Bill of Rights." However,
  self-advocacy can also resolve other situations,
  such as differences of opinion between the
  patient and doctor, or personality conflicts, or
  even minor problems in delivery of health care.
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-advocacy

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Speaking Note 5

• The history of medicine delegating doctors,
  regulators and other third parties to interfere
  with the chemicals, therapies, devices a person
  may direct to have control over to control their
  own body functions has changed but is still does
  essentially the same thingthird parties exhibit
  control over the use you wish to make of your own
  body. In balance the citizen of today does have
  more capacity to take back this control than ever
  beforehowever the cost in time , effort and
  money reduces the degree to which we actually
  control our body when dealing with healthcare
  issues.

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Current Views

• A growing body of research has documented
  the contributing role of self-efficacy beliefs in
  self development,
  adaptation, and change at different phases of
  the life course
• Role of Affective Self-Regulatory Efficacy in
  Diverse Spheres of Psychosocial Functioning
  Child Development, May/June 2003, Volume 74,
  Number 3, Pages 769782

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Speaking Note 6

• Academic literature has collected a lot of
  valuable material to enrich our discussion.

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Self-Agency VS Ownership

• Women are, therefore, entitled to
  independent land rights solely on the basis of
  having rights as humans. Likewise, the
  interdependence principle refers to the fact that
  rights are interconnected with each other, so
  that the fulfillment of one right is tightly
  connected to the fulfillment of other rights.
  From this perspective, the fulfillment of the
  rights to political participation, and to an
  adequate living, (just to mention some examples),
  would be tightly connected to the right to land.
  
• Gender Development Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2008
  pgs. 55-71

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Speaking Note 7

• There does appear to be a logic track to
  justify tightly-held personal ownership rights as
  part of an already accepted system of rights.

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Human Rights in a Posthuman World

• We can view appearance discrimination cases in
  the workplace as presenting the question of how
  and when the law will permit the co-modification
  of worker's bodies VS
• by treating the human body as non co-modifiable,
  and treating everything else as property, we
  sufficiently protect human rights and dignity
  from the threats posed by property rights
• Conference Papers -- Law Society 2008 Annual
  Meeting, p1, 0p.
• http//my.news.yahoo.com/woman-gets-100-silicone-i
  njections-to-have-the-world-s-biggest-lips.html

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Speaking Note 8

• Legally minded persons do recognize that
  property rights may be used by individuals to
  back their perceived rights to modify their
  bodies. Yes something as demure as the right
  for someone to wear to work and in public places
  tattoos, display cosmetically reshaped bodies as
  a method of self-expression is a discussion area
  where general agreement in much of the world
  stands behind the freedom to choose how to modify
  your own body..irregardless of prior, present or
  future intent for personal uses of such
  modifications If in due course this also
  enables one to create personal gain , wealth,
  power and such , this co-modification would be
  supported by the application of Property
  Rights.

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Human Rights in a Post Human World Critical
Essays/Discussion

• Focusing on the human right to development, the
  author examines why the UN Declaration on the
  Human Right to Development has not attracted more
  attention and goes on to highlight the work of
  Arjun Sengupta and its implications for the human
  right to development. It goes on to examine how
  in the current world scenario the 'emancipatory
  potential' of human rights may be carried forward
  
• http//www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Law/
  PublicInternationalLaw/InternationalHumanRights/?v
  iewusaci9780198061762

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Speaking Note 9

• While we all think first of our own
  jurisdictions , the global jurisdiction is the
  final goal of any crystallization of a Human
  Right.

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Why choose Property Rights as opposed to Human
Rights?

• transhumanists do not accept that there is
  any "essential natural essence to being human"
  that must be respected, an essence that I believe
  we must hold on trust, un-tampered with, for
  future generations. It is difficult to define
  what constitutes this essence, without referring
  to a soul or at least a "human spirit" - the
  latter of which does not require any religious
  belief, but does require that we see ourselves as
  more than just machines. The fact that at least a
  large majority of transhumanists are atheists and
  they do see humans as machines might explain, in
  part, why they believe no such respect is
  required.
• http//www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/transhuma
  nism_the_dangers_of_creating_humanity_2.0/

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Speaking Note 10

• Those who oppose the idea of self directed
  modification to drive directed evolution of
  everything from your Omics to various levels of
  organelle substitution or addition to cybernetic
  modifications to transloading or uploading into
  a digital substrate with or without subsequent
  downloading to a cybernetic or organic construct
  may use quite a variety of arguments and forums
  to sway social, cultural and political constructs
  to crystallize opposing views into LAWS.
  Property Rights may be the simplest method for
  individuals to decouple their activity from the
  force or effect of those who would for a wide
  range of motives choose to derail the
  aforementioned activities.

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Short-Term Derivative Deliverables

• Baby Step ExampleUnregulated Access to personal
  medical information Should Patients Get
  Direct Access to Their Laboratory Test Results?
  An Answer With Many Questions
• http//jama.ama-assn.org/content/early/2011/11/22/
  jama.2011.1797.full
• At HumanityHarvard in June 2010 I presented a
  piece with details of a globally distributed
  open-source broad scoped medical interactive
  database. Self-agency or Self-ownership of your
  own body would greatly reduce the capacity of
  third parties to discourage such an enterprise
• http//www.slideshare.net/lifespan.pharma.inc/huma
  nity2010-june13d1-s2ver2transcriptednoted
• Third parties invoke the fear of loss of
  privacy and infringe on your ownership Rights
  over your free choice to use your medical data in
  a manner of your own choosing.Morris Johnson 10
  Dec 2011

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Speaking Note 11

• What we have had for most of recorded history
  is a system which controls individuals in a
  manner which has all the defining aspects of
  ownership. True self-ownership can have some
  immediate short term consequences.YES,
  disruptive in some aspects but ABSOLUTELY
  EMPOWERING in other aspects.

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Looking for Testable Law

• USA.Human Tissue Bill . section 32
  establishes that property rights are created
  where there has been an application of human
  skill to controlled material
• ROHAN HARDCASTLE, Law and the Human Body
  Property Rights, Ownership and Control, Oxford,
  Hart Publishing, 2007, Hardback, 210 pp., 40.00

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Speaking Note 12

• This statement may indeed cover the
  issue..humans with sufficient skill and
  sophistication to apply knowledge to controlled
  material AKA ones own body may have an already
  established justification to have property
  rights to this body.

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Speaking Note 13

• To begin discussion I present 5 token test
  situations covering a variety of scenarios.

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Potential Test case situation 1

• Person who is diagnosed terminal with lt90 days
  life decides to order his live body be deanimated
  and put into cryogenic stasis
• 10 days later, in hopes that a body in that state
  would have a greater chance of successful
  reanimation of an undamaged consciousness in some
  biological, cybernetic or synthetic digital
  life-form

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Potential Test case situation 2

• Woman wishes to have her placenta cooled and
  frozen after delivering a child and does so. .
  Woman bequests placenta to her child in her will
  and dies shortly after in a car accident.
• Child has need for stem cells derived from the
  tissue 10 years later to grow a new limb.

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Potential Test case situation 3

• -person reads journal papers and self
  diagnoses a lead to a treatment not within the
  scope of standard approved therapies .a very
  limited number of replicated successes exist.the
  person procures all the required services without
  asking for ethics or regulatory body approval,
  simply asserting right to manage his body as if
  it were any other piece of personal property.

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Potential Test case situation 4

• A person wishes to consume a pharmaceutical
  substance not approved by regulators of his
  country or admissible for importation to his
  country asserts right to acquire , transport and
  consume said substance to alter in a manner
  purported to enhance the normal capabilities of
  his neurological function asserting right to
  alter his personal property in a manner of his
  own choosing and within the scope of his own
  personal comfort level for risk aversion.

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Potential Test case Situation 5

• Person wills his assets to be managed by a
  computer program which he terms an artificial
  general intelligence which he has satisfied has
  captured enough of his mindfiles so as to act on
  his behalf as if it were heThe AGI immediately
  upon his death orders his body frozen and
  asserts the right to act as his custodian until a
  reanimation procedure can be carried out.under
  what conditions can property rights be
  transferred to others

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Issues

• Qualifications for person to
• assume complete unrestricted
• self-agency/ownershipage,
• intellectual capacity,
• knowledge/education
• .tests of ownership..
• When does diminished capacity/infirmity result in
  relinquishment or transfer of said ownership to a
  custodian or other third party?
• When does criminal activity result in loss of
  self-agency to a third party?

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Speaking Note 14

• This is by no means an exhaustive list of
  issues related to our discussion of Property
  Rights over your body, but is meant to facilitate
  the detailing of such a list.

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Issues

• What is the appropriate function for regulators
  such as FDA, DEA when third parties cease to have
  the capacity to interfere with the rights an
  individual gains when they gain legal recognition
  of self agency and self ownership over their own
  bodies?
• What other changes to current law are natural
  derivatives of personal property rights that
  recognize self-ownership of ones body?

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Speaking Note 15

• Making Disruptive Change constructive is
  the task.

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The Scope of The Paradigm shift

• When Singularity University speaks of changes
  that may impact the lives of a billion persons in
  less than 10 years I immediately think of the
  enshrinement in law and statute of personal
  property rights that include the ownership of
  own your own body.

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Speaking Note 16

• I really believe that simple recognition of the
  ownership of ones body by the resident
  consciousness may by itself have one of those
  109lt10 types of impacts on the world as we know
  it.
• This recognition then marginalizes the arguments
  to and against the other means to this end.
• The bottom line is that when you control the
  discussion you are in much better than if you are
  responding to the arguments of others, who by
  setting the area for discussion thereby lessening
  your chances of winning such an argument.

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To Contact Me

• On Second Life MorrisFolkeJohnson
• Email- lifespan.pharma.inc_at_gmail.com
• To download a copy from the Web
• http//www.slideshare.com/lifespan.pharma.inc
• Phone/FAX- 306-447-4944
• Cell/mobile [phone]
• Snail Mail
• SW34-01-16-W2nd meridian, Rd 707 South, Box
  10, Beaubier, Saskatchewan, Canada, S0C-0H0

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I invite your opinions of what might be all the
derivatives and deliverables of self-ownership.