Delinquents as guinea pigs of ancestral simulation

This is a reimagining of Tu Tzu-chun by Li Fu-yan 李復言 (from T'ai-p'ing Kuang-chi太平廣記), from about year 978. Again, written originally for another context, hence including clumsy explanatory sections.

I have no understanding of neuroscience and a shallow one about arguments for the plausibility and ramifications of ancestral simulations. If speculative fiction about these topics, given that the science is soft, would annoy you, you're free to protect yourself from this.

“After the incident of Tu Tzu-ch’un, our department has had to respond to allegations that there lies unaddressed ethical problems in simulating convicted criminals into distressing ancestral simulations. The following is a short prose illuminating the experiment that was performed on him during his time in our Penitentiary. Archaic medical practices and social practices are explained, when deemed appropriate, marked by square brackets.

The designated and experienced torturers reported that he had suffered all the punishments, and Dr Y King said, “remember, this man is a secret villain. It is not fitting that he should be reborn a man: we will have her simulated as an extremely shy, cognitively impaired daughter in the family of Wang Ch’üan, the deputy magistrate of the Shan-fu County in Sung-chou. It could be the perfect anthropological experiment to help us understand oppression at large in Chou-dynasty China.”

From birth the little girl was sickly, and hardly a day passed without acupuncture or moxa burning or some nasty medicine. And she was always falling out of bed or into the fire, but whatever the pain she never made a sound. Soon she was grown into an extraordinarily beautiful girl by​ ​her time’s standards - small feet, luscious hair, large hips and shoulders. We had engineered that way, so as to explore the ways in which beauty excuses cognitive impairment. However, because she never spoke, she was thought by her family to be “dumb” [editor’s note: an archaic term, pertaining to persons impaired or decelerated cognitive abilities in pre-mental engineering ages.] Her relatives would take the liberties with her and offer her all sorts of insults , but she would not respond. This might imply sexual abuse as well as verbal, as this was more often the norm than an exception for cognitively impaired women, but she would not respond.

In the same town there was a learned man named Lu Kuei who, hearing of her beauty, sought her through an intermediary for his wife. The family declined on the grounds that she was dumb, but Lu said, “If my wife is worthy, what need has she for speech? She will serve as a reproach to sharp-tongued women.” They agreed to the match, and Lu married her as his wife. For several years in the simulation their love

was very deep according to reports from the responses from Lu. We also monitored Tu’s development under the period of marriage, and saw a certain incongruence in Tu’s life satisfaction and the contemporary account of her and Lu having been a loving couple. However, seemingly internalised ignorance of one’s own feelings was, again, one of the great traits by which Tu showed conformity to her newly assumed gender role.

After certain years in the simulation, which amounted up to three working days in our laboratory, Lu grew contemptuous over the deal which he had entered in taking a mute wife.

Our last recorded conversation before we had to stop the experiment unfolded as follows: “If you are not ever going to speak, what use to a man of honor is the child of a wife who despises him?” And he took their infant child by its two feet and dashed its head against a stone, spattering blood for several paces around. In Tzu-ch’un’s heart love welled up, and for an instant, the simulation programme, for reasons we could not then understand, allowed her to slip a sound of distress: “No–”

The sound was still in the air when we had to withdraw her from the simulation and he resumed consciousness in the medical segregation division. After a thorough re-examination of the case, we concluded that his now permanently emotionally unresponsive state was due to reaching and transgressing a threshold after which a human being cannot bear emotional pain anymore. In such an incident, one’s amygdala will be impaired in much the same manner as the delicate bones of the ear can be damaged by a loud enough sound. The function of the amygdala as a fuse of emotions is more easily understood in terms of modern quantitative psychology and neural computation; however, preventing the circuit to break was not yet part of our safety measures, as its importance was not yet fully appreciated in the mental computation community. The cause of the transgression was later concluded to likely having been caused by our mental software engineers’ lack of education in the long-term effects of living under oppressive societies as a member of multiple subaltern groups, in Tu’s case, as a disabled woman. In subsequent studies involving subjecting humans to oppression in ancestral simulations, our department has ensured that there are adequate safety measures put in place to protect test subjects from these

potentially fatal events. Most importantly, simulated reproduction and parenthood is now considered an emotional risk, and thus banned in ancestral studies.”

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The excerpt from Tu Tzu-ch’un’s story is rewritten as a futuristic medical report in prose from a time when humans explore their own history by “ancestry simulations”. The protagonist transforms from an outsider man into an abused woman through the force of an institution, this time through scientific (fiction), rather than religious magic. The possibility of such simulations is discussed by, among others, philosophers Nick Bostrom, as more than a mere exercise in Cartesian scepticism about the nature of reality. Tu Tzu-Ch’un’s society uses these ancestry simulations to explore historical methods of torture, religion, marriage practices, and the like, by using delinquents as guinea pigs. This rendition of the original story has the gory effect of making us question the ethical permissibility of forcing a person to live through simulated physical and social torture, while making us aware that the same practices existed and continue to do so, in historical and contemporary societies. Herein lies the thought experiment behind my decision: If ancestral simulations are even remotely possible, then, it is possible that we live in such simulations, or, that our ancestors as we know them did. If we then deem simulating people into oppression unbeknownst to themselves, to be morally culpable, then there is some reason to reassess all oppression and abuse in history as possibly having had an engineer, and thus having been immoral and wrong, irrelevant of the society or time in which it took place. Intuitively, nevertheless, these practices taking place in historical or our own time sometimes excite less moral blame, due to a common tendency to relativise the evildoing of previous civilisations. Moral relativism is, then, open to accusations of conflict from the theoretical possibility of ancestral simulations.

The distantness and neutrality of the omniscient narrator, i.e. the doctor writing the report, is not as complete in this version as in the original, for this time there is a sense of responsibility and culpability involved. Tu Tzu-ch’un’s consent to transform remains a question mark in this rendition, but its relevance to the meaning of the story lies precisely in its absence: the beggar of mercy cannot choose.

The use of prisoners in simulated oppression is a practice that could, moreover, hardly be defended immediately, given the historical background and legal permissibility of using prisoners as slaves and medical test subjects. One of the common motivations for retributive incarceration is the punishment from loss of freedom, and there seems to be little intuitive reassurance against the fear that prisoners of the future, like this story’s Tsu Tzu-ch’un, might be used in such experiments, if ancestry simulations ever become available.

References

Bostrom, Nick. 2003. "Are We Living In A Computer Simulation?". ​The Philosophical

Quarterly​ 53 (211): 243-255. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00309.

"Guatemala Syphilis Experiment | American Medical Research Project". 2018. Encyclopedia Britannica​. https://www.britannica.com/event/Guatemala-syphilis-experiment.

Love, David, and Vijay Das. 2017. "Slavery In The US Prison System". ​Aljazeera.Com​. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/09/slavery-prison-system-1709010 82522072.html.

Ma, Y. W, and Joseph S. M Lau. 1986. ​Traditional Chinese Stories : Themes And Variations​. Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company.