People talk about “welfare”, “happiness” or “satisfaction”, but those are intrinsically human concepts
No, they are not. Animals can feel e.g. happiness as well.
If you use the word “sentient” or synonyms, provide at least some explanation of what do you mean by it.
Something is sentient if being that thing is like something. For instance, it is a certain way to be a dog, so a dog is sentient. As a contrast, most people who aren’t panpsychists do not believe that it is like anything to be a rock, so most of us wouldn’t say of a rock that it is sentient.
Sentient beings have conscious states, each of which are (to a classical utilitarian) desirable to some degree (which might be negative, of course). That is what utilitarians mean by “utility”: The desirability of a certain state of consciousness.
I expect that you’ll be unhappy with my answer, because “desirability of a certain state of consciousness” does not come with an algorithm for computing that, and that is because we simply do not have an understanding of how consciousness can be explained in terms of computation.
Of course having such an explanation would be desirable, but its absence doesn’t render utilitarianism meaningless, because humans still have an understanding of what approximately we mean by terms such as “pleasure”, “suffereing”, “happiness”, even if it is merely in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way.
No, they are not. Animals can feel e.g. happiness as well.
Yeah but the problem here is that we perceive happiness in animals only in as much as it looks like our own happiness. Did you notice that the closer an animal to a human the more likely we are to agree it can feel emotions? An ape can definitely display something like a human happiness, so we’re pretty sure it can experience it. A dog can display something mostly like human happiness so most likely they can feel it too. A lizard—meh, maybe but probably not. An insect, most people would say no. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s an argument that animals can experience happiness which is not based on their similarity to us, in that case I’m very curious to see this argument.
Otherwise, I actually think it somewhat answers my question. One my qualm would be that sentience does seem to come on a spectrum—but that can in theory be addressed by some scaling factor. The bigger issue for me is that it implies that a hardcore total utilitarian would be fine with a future populated by trillions of sentient but otherwise completely alien AIs successfully achieving their alien goals (e.g. maximizing paperclips) and experiencing desirable-state-of-consciousness about it. But I think some hardcore utilitarians would bite this bullet, and that wouldn’t be a biggest bullet for a utilitarian to bite either.
No, they are not. Animals can feel e.g. happiness as well.
Something is sentient if being that thing is like something. For instance, it is a certain way to be a dog, so a dog is sentient. As a contrast, most people who aren’t panpsychists do not believe that it is like anything to be a rock, so most of us wouldn’t say of a rock that it is sentient.
Sentient beings have conscious states, each of which are (to a classical utilitarian) desirable to some degree (which might be negative, of course). That is what utilitarians mean by “utility”: The desirability of a certain state of consciousness.
I expect that you’ll be unhappy with my answer, because “desirability of a certain state of consciousness” does not come with an algorithm for computing that, and that is because we simply do not have an understanding of how consciousness can be explained in terms of computation.
Of course having such an explanation would be desirable, but its absence doesn’t render utilitarianism meaningless, because humans still have an understanding of what approximately we mean by terms such as “pleasure”, “suffereing”, “happiness”, even if it is merely in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way.
Yeah but the problem here is that we perceive happiness in animals only in as much as it looks like our own happiness. Did you notice that the closer an animal to a human the more likely we are to agree it can feel emotions? An ape can definitely display something like a human happiness, so we’re pretty sure it can experience it. A dog can display something mostly like human happiness so most likely they can feel it too. A lizard—meh, maybe but probably not. An insect, most people would say no. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s an argument that animals can experience happiness which is not based on their similarity to us, in that case I’m very curious to see this argument.
For the record, I believe we do have at least crude mechanistic model of how consciousness works in general, and yes what’s with the hard problem of consciousness in particular (the latter being a bit of a wrong question).
Otherwise, I actually think it somewhat answers my question. One my qualm would be that sentience does seem to come on a spectrum—but that can in theory be addressed by some scaling factor. The bigger issue for me is that it implies that a hardcore total utilitarian would be fine with a future populated by trillions of sentient but otherwise completely alien AIs successfully achieving their alien goals (e.g. maximizing paperclips) and experiencing desirable-state-of-consciousness about it. But I think some hardcore utilitarians would bite this bullet, and that wouldn’t be a biggest bullet for a utilitarian to bite either.