How should we treat beings that might be sentient? | Hacker News Reader

How should we treat beings that might be sentient?

arstechnica.com

27 pointsrbanffy21 comments

The current vibe seems to be "How replaceable are they?" or maybe "How replaceable are they, compared to their value to everyone else?"

A normal human? Hard to replace, unknown value, given basic rights and dignities but usually not supported to live.

A murderer? Hard to replace but negative value, put to death in many jurisdictions.

A domestic animal? Medium-hard to replace, value is low but known, easy to adopt but also easy to euthanize or ignore. If they attack your cows or crops you'd shoot them.

A farm animal? Easy to replace, grown and eaten for luxury food.

The HeLa cell line? Easy to replace, treated like bacteria.

A human fetus? A matter of great political debate whether they are valuable or replaceable.

Based on this trend line regression, I don't see AIs ever gaining human rights. They're replaceable.

All our actions are ultimately driven by selfish motives. If you peer deep enough, you'll always find that selfishness.

You might or might not be right, but even if you are, the extent to which this is depressing depends a lot on your definition (and delineation) of "self".

A lack of selfishness at some level has the same problem as lack of an immune system. It encourages pathological behavior.

Too much has similar problems as an overactive immune system - it causes eventually self destructive pathologies.

Cooperation is also selfish, even if we don't normally think of it that way. We're working together with others to accomplish something we couldn't alone, but either the result is something we personally desire, or we expect compensation for our help.

Agreed. IMO, the real difference between ‘good’ (aka ‘not selfish’) and ‘bad’ (aka ‘selfish’) behavior is really more about the level of honesty, coercion, control, and degree of autonomy afforded the other participants than actual degree of self interest.

So it’s less about degree of one’s own self interest, and more about the degree of interfering with or manipulating others and their self-interests.

Peering deep enough amounts to making 'selfish' a meaningless word.

The extent to which an individual or group has "rights" is defined by its ability to remove value. This can come in the form of physical violence, economic boycott, legal attacks, social ostracism, etc.

Women, minorities, the poor, children, etc have fewer "rights" on average, sometimes explicitly so in some cultures. This is not because of the value they add, which is enormous, but because of the value they can choose to withhold, which is comparatively limited.

I like the cut of your jib, that is an interesting and unique perspective. I would add to the list of "how replaceables",

How many patents do they hold?

Do they owe child support?

I tend to agree with Peter Singer on this one.

> The fundamental interest that entitles a being to equal consideration is the capacity for "suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness".

It's a high (and sometimes blurry) bar, for sure, but ignoring it is a disservice to yourself in my opinion.

It fits in with the notion of not doing harm unless necessary, since it's usually easy to determine when someone is or could be harmed/suffering.

I'd love to see how we can adopt this in our current economic system. Would we classify factory farming as necessary even though it causes extreme harm to sentient beings? We'd have to make a huge shift in food production and eating habits.

We haven't remotely tried alternatives, and the main arguments for retaining factory farming seem to be "I'm entitled to eat meat because I like it and pay for it" and perhaps "there are too many moving parts to just stop with no consequences", which I don't find convincing. Even if the process of fixing it is also subject to the rule, so we can't just cut jobs immediately, I think the main obstacle is that there simply isn't the collective will to change.

Almost everything in nature exists on a spectrum (even though the lines are sometimes relatively sharp).

Would it really be so surprising to learn (or be convinced by philosophical arguments, as this might not be accessible to empiricism) that it's the same with sentience?

I think a dense philosophical text on ethics at the edge of sentience is a useful thing for a society to have.

Even if it's hard to turn that into a widespread shift of consciousness, it's a great first step and a solid foundation to build on. Assuming it is solid philosophically, that is - no way to tell that from just an article.

Most everything else I've read has just been vibes. If this book can deliver on being more than vibes, I'm all for it.

Assume they are sentient, like plants.

I dont think plants are a good example. We don't even have weak evidence that they might be sentient.

We know that many aninals are sentient and we should grant them protections.

what about lawyers?

I’ve personally found every standard I’ve been presented with to be disingenuous in some way.

Take Group A, sometime in their life their prefrontal cortex got advanced enough to notice non-human species experience pain and other similar responses to stimuli, after a lifetime of being apathetic or completely dismissive to the idea. Group A is way slower in this realization than everyone else but they don’t know it. Now Group A wants everyone to change their behavior for the specific reason that non-human species experience pain and have responses to stimuli, and that if everyone else knew that they would change their behavior on their own.

Except everyone else already knew that, and developed their existing behavior already understanding that and coming to terms with that.

Group A needed an octopus documentary and a psychedelic journey to point this out to them. Everyone else could already tell.

Makes it hard to have a conversation with Group A about anything because Group A is slow.

>You might be tempted to shake your head at Birch’s confidence in humanity... (cue in global warming here)

When coming to reasons why I doubt humanity's ability to care for others, global warming is too abstract to even register on my list. War. Genocide. Child molestation. Slavery. In my book, the best thing that could ever happen to a species is for it to remain undiscovered by humans.

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