...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.)
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.)