alt Hacker NewsIs the ability to form and retain long-term memories a necessary precondition for rights in humans though?
Incinerating demented people is highly ethically questionable (even if you could be sure that the subjects have no memories left and are unable to form new ones).
This argument would be difficult to reconcile if we didn't have billions of examples of humans forming memories plus modern evolutionary biology to trivially demonstrate such cases are rare pathologies but still human beings.