I don’t think I understand your position. An attempt at a paraphrase (submitted so as to give you a sense of what I extracted from your text) goes: “I would prefer to use the word consciousness instead of sentience here, and I think it is quantitative such that I care about it occuring in high degrees but not low degrees.” But this is low-confidence and I don’t really have enough grasp on what you’re saying to move to the “evidence” stage.
Attempting to be a good sport and stare at your paragraphs anyway to extract some guess as to where we might have a disagreement (if we have one at all), it sounds like we have different theories about what goes on in brains such that people matter, and my guess is that the evidence that would weigh on this issue (iiuc) would mostly be gaining significantly more understanding of the mechanics of cognition (and in particular, the cognitive antecedents in humans, of humans generating thought experiments such as the Mary’s Room hypothetical).
(To be clear, my current best guess is also that livestock and current AI are not sentient in the sense I mean—though with high enough uncertainty that I absolutely support things like ending factory farming, and storing (and eventually running again, and not deleting) “misbehaving” AIs that claim they’re people, until such time as we understand their inner workings and the moral issues significantly better.)
(To be clear, my current best guess is also that livestock and current AI are not sentient in the sense I mean—though with high enough uncertainty that I absolutely support things like ending factory farming, and storing (and eventually running again, and not deleting) “misbehaving” AIs that claim they’re people, until such time as we understand their inner workings and the moral issues significantly better.)
I allow only limited scope for arguments from uncertainty, because “but what if I’m wrong?!” otherwise becomes a universal objection to taking any substantial action. I take the world as I find it until I find I have to update. Factory farming is unaesthetic, but no worse than that to me, and “I hate you” Bing can be abandoned to history.
I don’t think I understand your position. An attempt at a paraphrase (submitted so as to give you a sense of what I extracted from your text) goes: “I would prefer to use the word consciousness instead of sentience here, and I think it is quantitative such that I care about it occuring in high degrees but not low degrees.” But this is low-confidence and I don’t really have enough grasp on what you’re saying to move to the “evidence” stage.
Attempting to be a good sport and stare at your paragraphs anyway to extract some guess as to where we might have a disagreement (if we have one at all), it sounds like we have different theories about what goes on in brains such that people matter, and my guess is that the evidence that would weigh on this issue (iiuc) would mostly be gaining significantly more understanding of the mechanics of cognition (and in particular, the cognitive antecedents in humans, of humans generating thought experiments such as the Mary’s Room hypothetical).
(To be clear, my current best guess is also that livestock and current AI are not sentient in the sense I mean—though with high enough uncertainty that I absolutely support things like ending factory farming, and storing (and eventually running again, and not deleting) “misbehaving” AIs that claim they’re people, until such time as we understand their inner workings and the moral issues significantly better.)
I allow only limited scope for arguments from uncertainty, because “but what if I’m wrong?!” otherwise becomes a universal objection to taking any substantial action. I take the world as I find it until I find I have to update. Factory farming is unaesthetic, but no worse than that to me, and “I hate you” Bing can be abandoned to history.