- We can't even prove/disprove humans are consciousness
- Yes but we assume they are because very bad things happen when we don't
- Okay but we can extend that to other beings. See: factory farming (~80B caged animals per year).
- The best we can hope for is reasoning by analogy. "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?"
This paper is basically taking that to its logical conclusion. We assume humans are conscious, then we study their shape (neural structures), then we say "this is the shape that makes consciousness." Nevermind octopi evolved eyes independently, let alone intelligence. We'd have to study their structures too, right?
My question here is... why do people do bad things to the Sims? If people accepted solipsism ("only I am conscious"), would they start treating other people as badly as they do in The Sims? Is that what we're already doing with AIs?
> My question here is... why do people do bad things to the Sims? If people accepted solipsism ("only I am conscious"), would they start treating other people as badly as they do in The Sims? Is that what we're already doing with AIs?
A simple answer is consequences. How you treat sims won't affect how you are treated, by other people or the legal system.
We can prove humans are conscious. You're the proof, and so am I. It's not a property that has to be constructed from proofs, but one of the certainties that makes all the rest of your universe possible.
But people think that just because they can intellectually try to negate it out of existence and fail to reconstruct it from proofs or descriptions, then it can't be proven and thus may or may not even exist.
Conscious or not, there's a much more pressing problem of capability. It's not like human society operates on the principle that conscious beings are valuable, despite that being a commonly advertised virtue. We still kill animals en masse because they can't retaliate. But AGIs with comparable if not greater intelligence will soon walk among us, so we should be ready to welcome them.
If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.
A simpler animal could have a purely physiological, non-subjective experience of pain or fear: predator chasing === heart rate goes up and run run run, without "experiencing" fear.
For a social species, it may be the case that subjectivity carries a cooperative advantage: that if I can experience pain, fear, love, etc, it makes the signaling of my peers all the more salient, inspiring me to act and cooperate more effectively, than if those same signals were merely mechanistic, or "+/- X utility points" in my neural net. (Or perhaps rather than tribal peers, it emerges first from nurturing in K-selected species: that an infant than can experience hunger commands more nurturing, and a mother that can empathize via her own subjectivity offers more nurturing, in a reinforcing feedback loop.)
Some overlap with Trivers' "Folly of Fools": if we fool ourselves, we can more effectively fool others. Perhaps sufficiently advanced self-deception is indistinguishable from "consciousness"? :)
>If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.
The idea of what selection pressure produces consciousness is very interesting.
Their behavior being equivalent, what's the difference between a human and a p-zombie? By definition, they get the same inputs, they produce the same outputs (in terms of behavior, survival, offspring). Evolution wouldn't care, right?
Or maybe consciousness is required for some types of (more efficient) computation? Maybe the p-zombie has to burn more calories to get the same result?
Maybe consciousness is one of those weird energy-saving exploits you only find after billions of years in a genetic algorithm.
The factory farming argument is a little tired. I'd rather be killed by an airgun over what nature intended: slowly eaten alive by a pack of wolves from the anus first.
That’s ridiculous though. A normal life for an animal involves lots of hardship, but also pleasure. Factory farms are 24/7 torture for the entire life of the animal. It’s like being born in hell.
I’ve seen these videos. They depict what it would be like to be a human in the body of the animal, not what the animal would go through. There’s presumably a lot of suffering that wouldn’t be useful as a signal to the tripod fish. For example, the weight of the pressure on its body would be a distraction and thus a hindrance to reproduction. The same goes for the depiction of its attitude towards a partner (presumably these aren’t social animals). The goal of the video is to exaggerate the horror of the animal’s life for entertainment and ad revenue. It’s also, of course, something we don’t have an immediate capacity to change through political and social means. We could probably make farm animals’ lives infinitely better and improve the food quality they produce with very little reduction to our quality of life.
I'm not a vegan but this argument makes no sense. Show me a scenario where the pack of wolves kills every single herd participant. Otherwise, I'd rather take my chances surviving in freedom than locked and airguned in the head. This is comparing a human surviving outdoors to being on death row.
- We can't even prove/disprove humans are consciousness
- Yes but we assume they are because very bad things happen when we don't
- Okay but we can extend that to other beings. See: factory farming (~80B caged animals per year).
- The best we can hope for is reasoning by analogy. "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?"
This paper is basically taking that to its logical conclusion. We assume humans are conscious, then we study their shape (neural structures), then we say "this is the shape that makes consciousness." Nevermind octopi evolved eyes independently, let alone intelligence. We'd have to study their structures too, right?
My question here is... why do people do bad things to the Sims? If people accepted solipsism ("only I am conscious"), would they start treating other people as badly as they do in The Sims? Is that what we're already doing with AIs?