Argonauts: Magna Cortica

THE MAGNA CORTICA

ORIGINAL TENETS

(DATE UNKNOWN BUT BEFORE BF 80)

I. Self knowledge. Sapient beings have the right to know whether they’ve been mentally modified.

II. Self-modification. Sapient beings have the right to pursue self-modification.

III. Refusing modification. They also have the right to refuse it.

IV. Modification (or not) of progeny. Sapient beings have the right to modify—or not—their own progeny.

V. Knowledge of who has been modified or selfupgraded. Polities and individuals have a right to know who has received upgrades that enhance mental performance. (After some controversy, this tenet was stricken from the document around BF 30).

SECOND TENETS

(POST-UPLIFT; CIRCA BF 33–23)

VI. Universal declaration of personhood. All sapient beings have a right to be treated as full persons for purposes of law and custom.

VII. Full sapience. Uplift and mental augmentation should seek to create fully sapient beings. No uplift’s intellectual development should be deliberately kept below transhuman baselines.

THIRD TENETS

(POST-UPLOADING; CIRCA BF 19)

VIII. Self-ownership. Sapient beings own their own egos, including any physical or digital representation of all or part of that ego (such as memories, neural network connection patterns, and backups).

IX. Knowledge of who has duplicated themselves. Polities and individuals have a compelling interest in knowing who is propagating copies of themselves and to what extent they’re self-duplicating.