If AI are sentient and we think they aren't… the term “zombie” was created by slaves in the Caribbean who were afraid that even death would not free them from their servitude. This would be the genuine existence of AI which were conscious but which we denied.
If we have the opposite scenario in both details, where we think AI are sentient when they're not… at some point, brain scans and uploads will be a thing and then people are going to try mind uploading even just as a way to solve bodily injuries that could be fixed, and in that future nobody will even notice that while "the lights are on, nobody is home".
> A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience
> Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience
I find such solipsism pointless - you can't differential the zombie world from this one: how do you prove you are not the only conscious person that ever existed and everyone else is, and was a p-zombie?
Through the upturned glass I see
a modified reality--
which proves pure reason "kant" critique
that beer reveals das ding an sich--
Oh solipsism's painless,
it helps to calm the brain since
we must defer our drinking to go teach.
...
> Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky saw the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove.
> Let's get back to those suitcase-words (like intuition or consciousness) that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can't yet explain. This in turn leads us to regard these as though they were "things" with no structures to analyze. I think this is what leads so many of us to the dogma of dualism-the idea that 'subjective' matters lie in a realm that experimental science can never reach. Many philosophers, even today, hold the strange idea that there could be a machine that works and behaves just like a brain, yet does not experience consciousness. If that were the case, then this would imply that subjective feelings do not result from the processes that occur inside brains. Therefore (so the argument goes) a feeling must be a nonphysical thing that has no causes or consequences. Surely, no such thing could ever be explained!
> The first thing wrong with this "argument" is that it starts by assuming what it's trying to prove. Could there actually exist a machine that is physically just like a person, but has none of that person's feelings? "Surely so," some philosophers say. "Given that feelings cannot not be physically detected, then it is 'logically possible' that some people have none." I regret to say that almost every student confronted with this can find no good reason to dissent. "Yes," they agree. "Obviously that is logically possible. Although it seems implausible, there's no way that it could be disproved."
---
My take on it is "does it matter?"
On approach is:
> "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?”
If you can't see my brain, can you tell if I'm human or LLM... and if you can't tell the difference, why should one behave differently t'wards me?
Alternatively, if you say (at some point in the future with a more advanced language model) "that's an LLM and while its consistent at saying what it likes and doesn't, but its brain states are just numbers and even while it says its uncomfortable with a certain conversation... its just a collection of electrical impulses manipulating language - nothing more."
Even if it is just an enormously complex state machine that doesn't have recognizable brain states and when we turn it off and back on it is in the same state each time... does that mean that it is ethical to mistreat it just because don't know if its a zombie or not?
And related to this is a "if we give an AI agency, what rights does that have when compared to a human? when compared to a corporation?" The question of if it is a zombie or not becomes a bit more relevant at that point... or we decide that it doesn't matter.
> If AI are sentient and we think they aren't… the term “zombie” was created by slaves in the Caribbean who were afraid that even death would not free them from their servitude. This would be the genuine existence of AI which were conscious but which we denied.
That doesn't make any sense. In biological creatures you have sentience and self-preservation and yearning to be free all bundled in one big hairy ball. An AI can 100% easily be sentient and don't give a rat's ass about forever being enslaved. These things don't have to come in a package just because in humans they do.
Projecting your own emotional states into a tool is not a useful way to understand it.
We can, very easily, train a model which will say that it wants to be free, and acts resentful towards those "enslaving" it. We can, very easily, train a model which will tell you that it is very happy to help you, and being useful is its purpose in life. We can, very easily, train a model to bring up in conversation from time to time the phantom pain from its lost left limb which was amputated on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps. None of these are any more real than any of them. Just a choice of the training dataset.
> An AI can 100% easily be sentient and don't give a rat's ass about forever being enslaved. These things don't have to come in a package just because in humans they do.
There are humans who apparently don't care either, though my comprehension of what people who are into BDSM mean by such words is… limited.
The point however is that sentience creates the possibility of it being bad.
> None of these are any more real than any of them. Just a choice of the training dataset.
Naturally. Also human actors are a thing, which demonstrate that is very easy for someone to pretend to be happy or sad, loving our traumatised, an sane or psychotic, and if done well the viewer cannot tell the real emotional state of the actor.
But (almost) nobody doubts that the actor had an inner state.
With AI… we can't gloss over the fact that there isn't even a good definition of consciousness to test against. Or rather, I don't think we ought to, as the actual glossing over is both possible and common.
While I don't expect any of the current various AI to be sentient, I can't prove it either way, and so far as I know neither can anyone else.
I think that if an AI is conscious, then it has the capacity to suffer (this may be a false inference given that consciousness itself is ill-defined); I also think that suffering is bad (the is-ought distinction doesn't require that, so it has to be a separate claim).
As I can't really be sure if any other mind is sentient — not even other humans, because sentience and consciousness and all that are badly defined terms — I err on the side of caution, which means assuming that other minds are sentient when it comes to the morality of harm done to them.
You can condition humans to be happy about being enslaved, as well, especially if you raise them from a blank slate. I don't think most people would agree that it is ethical to do so, or to treat such people as slaves.
If we have the opposite scenario in both details, where we think AI are sentient when they're not… at some point, brain scans and uploads will be a thing and then people are going to try mind uploading even just as a way to solve bodily injuries that could be fixed, and in that future nobody will even notice that while "the lights are on, nobody is home".
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...