Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects almost, ALMOST read like a treatise. But it wasn't one. Instead, it ultimately became a touchstone text for me, because it allows me to approach the problem animals pose us philosophically as human beings from a radically new angle.
Let me be a little more clear: I see animals, philosophically, as a certain kind of conceptual space, a buffer space if you will, where you can work out all of man's ontological doubts in a detached manner. In doing so, I am assuming, on the one hand, that animals as we know them are one, fixed unitary being (which they are not; there are as many animals as there are animal behaviours) and, on the other, that they are free from the kind of condescension usually directed at them when it comes to matters of some socio-political importance.
Such a view of animals is essentially using animals to define man. The animal becomes a kind of negative space, which is our default reaction. Unfortunately, modern thought, while striving to get there in fits and starts, still isn't non-anthropocentric. However, if we are to come up with yet another kind of space, namely the semi-sentient digital 'pets' that Chiang postulates and which are already somewhat of a reality, which hover somewhere between animal and man, we are given an opportunity to deny such a use of animals philosophically, while retaining the anthropocentric viewpoint.
Does that make sense?
Still very much at the level of metaphor, nevertheless Ted Chiang's novella teases at such a world. It poses no easy answers, but it constantly hints at an idea which transcends utopian navel-gazing and becomes something sublime.
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