tbh, my hidden motivation for writing this is that I find it grating when people say we shouldn’t care how we treat AI because it isn’t conscious. this logic rests on the assumption that consciousness == moral value.
if tomorrow you found out that your mom has stopped experiencing the internal felt sense of “I”, would you stop loving her? would you grieve as if she were dead or comatose?
It depends entirely on what you mean by consciousness. The term is used for several distinct things. If my mom had lost her sense of individuality but was still having a vivid experience of life, I’d keep valuing her. If she was no longer having a subjective experience (which would pretty much require being unconscious since her brain is producing an experience as part of how it works to do stuff), I would no longer value her but consider her already gone.
interesting. what if she has her memories and some abstract theory of what she is, and that theory is about as accurate as anyone else’s theory, but her experiences are not very vivid at all. she’s just going through the motions running on autopilot all the time—like when people get in a kind of trance while driving.
tbh, my hidden motivation for writing this is that I find it grating when people say we shouldn’t care how we treat AI because it isn’t conscious. this logic rests on the assumption that consciousness == moral value.
if tomorrow you found out that your mom has stopped experiencing the internal felt sense of “I”, would you stop loving her? would you grieve as if she were dead or comatose?
It depends entirely on what you mean by consciousness. The term is used for several distinct things. If my mom had lost her sense of individuality but was still having a vivid experience of life, I’d keep valuing her. If she was no longer having a subjective experience (which would pretty much require being unconscious since her brain is producing an experience as part of how it works to do stuff), I would no longer value her but consider her already gone.
interesting. what if she has her memories and some abstract theory of what she is, and that theory is about as accurate as anyone else’s theory, but her experiences are not very vivid at all. she’s just going through the motions running on autopilot all the time—like when people get in a kind of trance while driving.