"There was this sense of not really being answerable to anybody because we'd already gone too far," says Gordon of his experience.
Its hardly pacifying alternative is an unelected, self-interested, self-legitimised corporate board, answerable, when it really comes down to it, only to itself and the attorney general of California.
Universally answerable questions can now be answered like, do ya'll really love chicken and watermelon that much?
In the last resort the question of whether something is "really" conscious doesn't seem to him interesting or even answerable.
Rather, it's a typical morality play about a sound-bitten government trying to fix a problem by leaving it in the hands of an incompetent, answerable-to-no-one bureaucracy, which proceeds to really mess it up.
Are the objections answerable and was Socrates simply too inexperienced to answer them adequately?
In fact, the main advantage of public funding for science is "to ensure we have publicly funded people, answerable to democratic government, whose job it is to tell the rest of us what's really going on".
