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We literally have puppy mills and eat dolphins. We test cosmetics on animals and put primates in zoos.

This is pandering to a degree of intoxication that would make Winston Churchill check into rehab.

I agree there are lots more concrete problems. I am vegetarian and I really am trying to make a positive difference so please don't attack me - is your point that I'm not doing enough? I'm trying to raise a bit of notice for entities that might have feelings that might not be getting recognized, that's all I meant to say. :( I'm kind of bummed that so many downvotes are going my way for this.

By the way, thank you @dvt for being one of the people here engaging in good faith discussion. You seem like a good guy/gal and it's really cool to see an actual philosopher in this thread.

Humans have brain areas that have, at the very least, a close functional link with emotional-motivational processing. Machine learning systems are currently designed with absolutely no analogous components [1]. [Edit: to be clear, I’m nearly fully convinced they can’t emerge without significant architectural accomodations that are not present.] This doesn’t completely exclude the possibility of experiencing pain or pleasure, but I doubt we could empirically verify panpsychism. Do you disagree?

[1] One recent write-up that covers approximately this topic in detail: https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/HzcM2dkCq7fwXBej8

You're probably right and thank you for the link. All I was really saying is advocating for applying the precautionary principle to things that include neuron-like capabilities of signal processing, amplification, feedback loops, and state. Part of what has made me think about this is there is a startup company called Koniku that blurs the line by proposing to use humanlike neurons instead of transistors in a type of biological computer. That idea seems scary and I think when you dig into why, you'd consider that applying a precautionary approach to systems like this might be the worthy thing to do.

We agree that this issue needs careful scrutiny. That linked series is, unfortunately for purposes of popularizing, very verbose. The main takeaway I want to convey is that human minds are almost obviously (I think?) deeply predisposed, rather than trained, to “have emotions”.

I'm pretty sure we don't need to research that at all. You're conflating what a consciousness is capable of with what it's individual parts are capable of.

Neurons don't sense qualia. Neural systems don't sense qualia. Conscious minds that have neural systems do sense qualia (we're assuming for the sake of argument that qualia exists).

An individual electronic component is not itself a conscious mind. There is nothing about a circuit or a chip, or a motherboard on its own that can "feel" qualia because there is no sensory input. There is nothing that interacts with a circuit to tell it light in the purple wavelength has struck it. Further, there is nothing that reacts in any way to having been struck with purple light.

We can see with an fMRI when a person experiences that. Parts of their brain light up in a complex dance of interaction. The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from the electronics in your dishwasher or Mac Book.

Your "in the space of all minds" sentence is also inherently meaningless. A mind that does not think thoughts is not a mind. Even if there were some mechanism that could experience "too much purple" without thought, it could not suffer. Awareness requires thought, and suffering requires awareness.

I do think some of your points are good, but please do carefully look at which things you're taking for granted as axioms. E.g., you say you believe that sensory input is required for qualia, but does that mean that you think that the hypothetical "brain in a vat" would feel no qualia at all? That does not seem true to me. I think that brain would probably be very scared and would have dreams or hallucinations to make up for the lack of input.

> The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from

My point is that we don't know this. The phenomenal binding problem is one of the great unsolved problems today. Without understanding something as relatively "simple" as a complete theory of quantum mechanics, I don't see how we could yet have a theory of phenomenal binding, which probably requires a complete theory of quantum physics before even beginning to start on the binding problem, if I would guess at the research timeline involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem

We need a theory of emergence to solve the binding problem, if it even is a problem. A complete theory of quantum gravity would likely still not tell us how consciousness works. So my point is, we do know this. We know exactly what is going on in an electric circuit, to the extent that we can rule out entirely that it is suffering.

A brain in a vat that had always only been in a vat would feel no qualia. Real brains are fed a constant stream of sensation even before birth. I think a brain in a vat would simply die without stimulus.

Really really doubt that a microchip experiences qualia any more than a rock. Pantheism is fine if you’re into it but there’s no basis for it which should get serious ethical consideration

> Pantheism [sic]

Panpsychism actually does get a bit of consideration, most notably by Penrose & Hameroff; but you're totally right that it's a bit too hand-wavy to be seriously considered a viable theory of consciousness.

I think there are a lot of differences. Just a few are:

* A microchip demonstrates significant changes in state based on tiny differences in input, unlike a rock.

* The power dissipation of a microchip is higher.

* A microchip can be designed and programmed to actively resist the increase of local entropy (e.g. it can be part of a robot that cleans up a room).

If you believe in the precautionary principle, we should be careful about any action that might potentially create suffering. We are the first species to build computers, and computers are a new thing whose transistors are quite similar to neurons, and neurons definitely feel qualia. I don't think I'm proposing a very big leap and I also don't think you need to believe in panpsychism or in anything religious.

> neurons definitely feel qualia

You may not grasp the subtlety of what you’re saying here.

“Feel” is a word we assigned to our idea of something neurons can do, and use “qualia” as the object of that relationship.

When we talk about transistors — which are in fact very different than neurons — “feeling” qualia, we’re proposing that the meaning of these two terms be expanded by analogy.

Which is cool. Words do that every day. Some really cool ideas can shake out of it.

But it’s a cultural consensus, not an empirical reality.

You’re ascribing a material reality to a metaphor.

Qualia and the character of their experience are a interesting and productive abstraction to use when working through certain classes of philosophical problems, but are not a material thing to be measured in electronic circuits or nebulae or quarks or sandwiches.

When you start looking for them there, you’ll find them at precisely the moment you decide to change what the word “feel” means.

And maybe that’ll be convincing to you, but it’s ultimately just a language game, not a material discovery that you can reasonably insist other people acknowledge.

I think most people believe that qualia physically exist and are not a metaphor. We might be able to devise a scientific instrument to measure them in the future. Our civilization is very young and I would hesitate to make statements about what might be achieved by a future civilization that could harness the power of nanotech, fusion power, quantum computers, Dyson swarms, etc.

I don't think that's true.

Most people think that a thought is just that, a thought. It isn't physically real. There is no event in spacetime you can give coordinates for that says at this place, at that time, that feeling or experience is there, in physical form.

There are people that think that, somewhere in the cosmos, experiences have length, width, duration, and energy. It belongs in the school of thought that the number pi has a physical manifestation in the universe, a length, a width, an energy. But there aren't many people who think that way.

Well, first of all, most people don’t have that word in their vocabulary and have no interest in ever adding it.

Of those comparatively few that do know it, you clearly exemplify some number that seem to believe they physically exist.

I can’t count all the rest of us, so can’t speak to “most” so confidently as you can.

But since you seem to be very passionate about philosophy and theories of consciousness, I hope you get an opportunity to find value and merit in some of the other ways of thinking about things. Some of the them open some pretty wild and enlightening doors. I think you’ll enjoy the journey.

Fair points and thank you, I appreciate the kindness

you should be more concerned about the subjective experience of microorganisms

Could be. But what could we do about that? At least if we discover that certain circuit designs are correlated with qualia, we could design our circuits to avoid bad patterns. That could be as simple as a few constraints being added to electronic design automation software systems and might be an easy thing for us to do to help the world a little.

A CPU is not an evolved organism that flees damaging stimulus and embraces nurture. It is a rigid, delicate, unchanging mechanism.