I think that these examples are less interesting because the subject’s interaction with these “pseudo-people” is one-sided
I don’t see why it should matter that they’re “less interesting”; they’re real examples, a theory should have an easy time managing reality. I come away with the impression that you’re too deep into a specific theory that you prize for its elegance, such that you’re more tempted to try to throw away large parts of everyday human intuition and value (insofar as they’re in tension with the theory) than to risk having to revise the theory.
In your previous comment you wrote: “Or (as seems more likely to me) there are some intuitions so strong that we should be suspicious of clever arguments attempting to refute them?”
But my view is the one that more closely tracks ordinary human intuitions, which indeed say that we care much more about (e.g.) whether the brain/mind is actually instantiating happiness, than about whether the agent’s external behaviors are happy-looking.
A pet owner whose brain scan revealed that the cat is suffering horribly would be distraught; going ‘oh, but the cat’s external behaviors still look very calm’ would provide zero comfort in that context, whereas evidence that the brain scan is incorrect would provide comfort. We care about the welfare of cats (and, by extension, about whether cats have ‘welfare’ at all) via caring about brain-states of the cat.
The reason we focus on external behaviors is because we don’t understand cat brains well enough, nor do we have frequent and reliable enough access to brain scans, to look at the thing that actually matters.
You can say that there’s somehow a deep philosophical problem with caring about brain states, or a deep problem with caring about them absent a full reduction of the brain states in question. But the one thing you can’t say is ‘this nonsense about “is the cat’s brain really truly happy or sad?” is just a clever argument trying to push us into a super counter-intuitive view’. Your view is the far more revisionist one, that requires tossing out far deeper and more strongly held folk intuitions.
Personhood is something that can be ascribed to system that has inputs and outputs.
You can gather evidence of personhood by interacting with the system and observing the inputs and outputs.
If “inputs” here just means ‘things that affect the person’, and “outputs” just means ‘thing the person affects’, then sure. But all physical objects have inputs and outputs in that sense. If you mean something narrower by “inputs” and “outputs” (e.g., something closer to ‘sensory information’ and ‘motor actions’), then you’ll need to explain why that narrower thing is essential for personhood.
I’m guessing you would say that behavior is also merely indirect evidence of “sentience” but here the woods are murkier since I don’t know what “sentience” is even supposed to mean, if it’s not a property of behavior.
It’s a property of brains. If we both don’t have a good reduction of “sentience”, then I don’t see why it’s better to say ‘it’s an unreduced, poorly-understood property of behavior’ than to say ‘it’s an unreduced, poorly-understood property of brains’.
Let’s taboo “sentient”. Look, I care about cats. You’re telling me “you shouldn’t care about cats, you should instead care about this property for which I don’t have anything resembling a definition, but we definitely can’t be sure that cats have it”. And my response is, why should I care about this property??
If someone’s a sociopath who doesn’t care about the welfare of cats, and just enjoys using cats as sources of sensory entertainment, then yeah, it makes sense to go ‘feel free to replace my cat with an unconscious automaton that’s equally entertaining’ or ‘feel free to alter my cat so that it’s constantly horribly suffering internally, as long as its outward behavior remains unchanged’.
But most people do care about the welfare of cats. For those people, it matters whether cats have welfare, and they intuitively understand welfare to be mostly or entirely about the cat’s mind/brain.
This intuitive understanding is correct and philosophically unproblematic. A concept isn’t problematic just because it hasn’t been fully reduced to a neuro or cog-sci model. It’s just an open area for future research.
...I come away with the impression that you’re too deep into a specific theory that you prize for its elegance, such that you’re more tempted to try to throw away large parts of everyday human intuition and value (insofar as they’re in tension with the theory) than to risk having to revise the theory.
In your previous comment you wrote: “Or (as seems more likely to me) there are some intuitions so strong that we should be suspicious of clever arguments attempting to refute them?”
But my view is the one that more closely tracks ordinary human intuitions, which indeed say that we care much more about (e.g.) whether the brain/mind is actually instantiating happiness, than about whether the agent’s external behaviors are happy-looking.
...But the one thing you can’t say is ‘this nonsense about “is the cat’s brain really truly happy or sad?” is just a clever argument trying to push us into a super counter-intuitive view’. Your view is the far more revisionist one, that requires tossing out far deeper and more strongly held folk intuitions.
Huh? My interpretation of this conversation is almost diametrically opposite! For me it felt like:
Rob: I don’t understand why people think they care about cats, they seem just irrational.
Vanessa: I have a very strong intuitive prior that I care about cats.
Rob: I am unsatisfied with this answer. Please analyze this intuition and come up with a model of what’s actually happening underneath.
Vanessa: Okay, okay, if you really want, here’s my theory of what’s happening underneath.
The thing is, I have much higher confidence in the fact that I care about cats than in the specific theory. And I think that the former a pretty ordinary intuition. Moreover, everything you say about cats can be said about humans as well (“we don’t understand the human brain very well etc”). I’m guessing you would say something about, how humans are similar to each other in some specific way in which they are not known to be similar to cats, but this is just passing the buck to, why should I care about this specific way?
The rest of your comment seems to be about the theory and not about the intuition. Now, I’m happy to discuss my theory of personhood, but I will refrain to do so atm because (i) I don’t want us to continue mixing together the claim “I care about cats” and the claim “this specific theory of personhood is correct”, which have very different epistemic status and (ii) I’m not even sure you’re interested in discussing the theory.
Let’s taboo “sentient”. Look, I care about cats. You’re telling me “you shouldn’t care about cats, you should instead care about this property for which I don’t have anything resembling a definition, but we definitely can’t be sure that cats have it”. And my response is, why should I care about this property??
If someone’s a sociopath who doesn’t care about the welfare of cats, and just enjoys using cats as sources of sensory entertainment, then yeah, it makes sense to go ‘feel free to replace my cat with an unconscious automaton that’s equally entertaining’ or ‘feel free to alter my cat so that it’s constantly horribly suffering internally, as long as its outward behavior remains unchanged’.
I… don’t think I’m actually a sociopath? Google defines “sociopath” as “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience”, and I’m pretty sure I did not exhibit any extreme antisocial attitudes. I’m actually not claiming anything like “feel free to alter my cat so that it’s constantly horribly suffering internally, as long as its outward behavior remains unchanged”, although I’m not sure this is a coherent hypothetical (I can imagine something like, “clone my cat s.t. one copy continues to control the body while another copy is locked away in some simulation where it’s horribly suffering”, which I’m not okay with.)
I don’t see why it should matter that they’re “less interesting”; they’re real examples, a theory should have an easy time managing reality. I come away with the impression that you’re too deep into a specific theory that you prize for its elegance, such that you’re more tempted to try to throw away large parts of everyday human intuition and value (insofar as they’re in tension with the theory) than to risk having to revise the theory.
In your previous comment you wrote: “Or (as seems more likely to me) there are some intuitions so strong that we should be suspicious of clever arguments attempting to refute them?”
But my view is the one that more closely tracks ordinary human intuitions, which indeed say that we care much more about (e.g.) whether the brain/mind is actually instantiating happiness, than about whether the agent’s external behaviors are happy-looking.
A pet owner whose brain scan revealed that the cat is suffering horribly would be distraught; going ‘oh, but the cat’s external behaviors still look very calm’ would provide zero comfort in that context, whereas evidence that the brain scan is incorrect would provide comfort. We care about the welfare of cats (and, by extension, about whether cats have ‘welfare’ at all) via caring about brain-states of the cat.
The reason we focus on external behaviors is because we don’t understand cat brains well enough, nor do we have frequent and reliable enough access to brain scans, to look at the thing that actually matters.
You can say that there’s somehow a deep philosophical problem with caring about brain states, or a deep problem with caring about them absent a full reduction of the brain states in question. But the one thing you can’t say is ‘this nonsense about “is the cat’s brain really truly happy or sad?” is just a clever argument trying to push us into a super counter-intuitive view’. Your view is the far more revisionist one, that requires tossing out far deeper and more strongly held folk intuitions.
What are the “outputs” of a person experiencing locked-in syndrome?
If “inputs” here just means ‘things that affect the person’, and “outputs” just means ‘thing the person affects’, then sure. But all physical objects have inputs and outputs in that sense. If you mean something narrower by “inputs” and “outputs” (e.g., something closer to ‘sensory information’ and ‘motor actions’), then you’ll need to explain why that narrower thing is essential for personhood.
It’s a property of brains. If we both don’t have a good reduction of “sentience”, then I don’t see why it’s better to say ‘it’s an unreduced, poorly-understood property of behavior’ than to say ‘it’s an unreduced, poorly-understood property of brains’.
If someone’s a sociopath who doesn’t care about the welfare of cats, and just enjoys using cats as sources of sensory entertainment, then yeah, it makes sense to go ‘feel free to replace my cat with an unconscious automaton that’s equally entertaining’ or ‘feel free to alter my cat so that it’s constantly horribly suffering internally, as long as its outward behavior remains unchanged’.
But most people do care about the welfare of cats. For those people, it matters whether cats have welfare, and they intuitively understand welfare to be mostly or entirely about the cat’s mind/brain.
This intuitive understanding is correct and philosophically unproblematic. A concept isn’t problematic just because it hasn’t been fully reduced to a neuro or cog-sci model. It’s just an open area for future research.
Huh? My interpretation of this conversation is almost diametrically opposite! For me it felt like:
Rob: I don’t understand why people think they care about cats, they seem just irrational.
Vanessa: I have a very strong intuitive prior that I care about cats.
Rob: I am unsatisfied with this answer. Please analyze this intuition and come up with a model of what’s actually happening underneath.
Vanessa: Okay, okay, if you really want, here’s my theory of what’s happening underneath.
The thing is, I have much higher confidence in the fact that I care about cats than in the specific theory. And I think that the former a pretty ordinary intuition. Moreover, everything you say about cats can be said about humans as well (“we don’t understand the human brain very well etc”). I’m guessing you would say something about, how humans are similar to each other in some specific way in which they are not known to be similar to cats, but this is just passing the buck to, why should I care about this specific way?
The rest of your comment seems to be about the theory and not about the intuition. Now, I’m happy to discuss my theory of personhood, but I will refrain to do so atm because (i) I don’t want us to continue mixing together the claim “I care about cats” and the claim “this specific theory of personhood is correct”, which have very different epistemic status and (ii) I’m not even sure you’re interested in discussing the theory.
I… don’t think I’m actually a sociopath? Google defines “sociopath” as “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience”, and I’m pretty sure I did not exhibit any extreme antisocial attitudes. I’m actually not claiming anything like “feel free to alter my cat so that it’s constantly horribly suffering internally, as long as its outward behavior remains unchanged”, although I’m not sure this is a coherent hypothetical (I can imagine something like, “clone my cat s.t. one copy continues to control the body while another copy is locked away in some simulation where it’s horribly suffering”, which I’m not okay with.)