Holographic Rights?

[LtGarak]

I agree, as unfortunately my whole idea of holographic rights is tied up with the Doctor. If Picardo wasn't as good as he was in the role, it wouldn't interest me quite so much.
This discussion reminds me of the recent Futurama episode with Bender wanting the free will thingamabob that Mom's Robots had developed. There seems to be some sort of free will algorithm built in to some holograms. Otherwise, the EMH would not have developed specific interests like opera and holo-photography and be able to bore the crew with his slideshows (?). But, someone had to develop this free will program.
The more the hologram is used, the more they seem to grow and adapt as seen with both Vic and the EMH. So, can this free will algorithm then be seen as just another interesting upgrade, or should it mean that they should be treated as other beings who developed free will by natural selection over millennium? I voted "Don't Know".

 

[Timo]

If a mining automaton can autonomously decide whether to use the duranium pick or the laser chisel to split the rock in front of it, the automaton has free will. It's no more complex than that.

Now, literally, imagination is the limit. Certain automatons may have a wider base of experience (lived or uploaded) to draw from when imagining, meaning that free will comes in a continuous scale. It would be utterly futile to draw a line anywhere; even a thoroughly programmed machine can "choose" whether to operate or break down, and arguing that this "choice" is a less conscious and less free one than deciding what to wear today is pretty futile when one can plausibly argue that every decision ever made by anybody has been the result of inevitable random facts accumulating.

If the rights of an individual are to depend on the degree of free will he, she, it or whatnot has, fine. One just has to come up with a way to quantify free will so that it can be divided in such degrees, and a way to deal fairly with borderline cases. Just be prepared to accept that such a determining basis for rights will see mankind split into dozens of categories, too.

Timo Saloniemi