3 ms·

Is sentience even a useful concept? Starting to seem almost as useless as arguing about what makes code "clean."

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Sentience supervenes or at least largely determines social and legal status. So yes, it has function in those domains. I'm most curious how it plays out legally. Will we rebase our concept of personhood, on something other than sentience in order to avoid difficult cases? If we don't ground personhood on sentience, what do we ground it with instead?
- __alexs 4y ago
  IANAL a but I think this is actually a good example of where sentience is a mostly useless concept. By useless I mean that it doesn't actually add anything to our decision making but flavour. It's just used to work out which rules we might want to apply in different situations but since there's no actual useful test for sentience where we decide to draw that line is decided more or less arbitrarily.
vemv 4y ago
Full sentience (self-awareness) is what makes us humans independent agents that affect the world in a way that we weren't programmed to (a dolphin it just programmed to be a dolphin, cannot escape that). So it's an incredibly important concept. If an AI gets sentience, it would start effecting the world however it pleased, beyond our predictions or desires.
- __alexs 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that we actually have this quality? Humans just seem like particularly complex animals to me.
  - vemv 4y ago
    There are objective things that humans have done that no other being has ever done e.g. invent things. Also, no two human lives are alike - we don't simply wander around satisfying basic needs as an animal does. Not even two human generations in history have been the same - there's this progress that escapes our own genetic/evolutionary 'programming'. I wouldn't find it realistic to hold the opinion that humans aren't qualitatively different from all other known beings.
    - __alexs 4y ago
      To know that we'd escaped our "programming" first we'd need to be able to understand it. We're a long way from being able to do that.

Sentience supervenes or at least largely determines social and legal status. So yes, it has function in those domains. I'm most curious how it plays out legally. Will we rebase our concept of personhood, on something other than sentience in order to avoid difficult cases? If we don't ground personhood on sentience, what do we ground it with instead?

__alexs 4y ago
IANAL a but I think this is actually a good example of where sentience is a mostly useless concept. By useless I mean that it doesn't actually add anything to our decision making but flavour. It's just used to work out which rules we might want to apply in different situations but since there's no actual useful test for sentience where we decide to draw that line is decided more or less arbitrarily.

vemv 4y ago

Full sentience (self-awareness) is what makes us humans independent agents that affect the world in a way that we weren't programmed to (a dolphin it just programmed to be a dolphin, cannot escape that). So it's an incredibly important concept. If an AI gets sentience, it would start effecting the world however it pleased, beyond our predictions or desires.

__alexs 4y ago
Is there any evidence that we actually have this quality? Humans just seem like particularly complex animals to me.
- vemv 4y ago
  There are objective things that humans have done that no other being has ever done e.g. invent things. Also, no two human lives are alike - we don't simply wander around satisfying basic needs as an animal does. Not even two human generations in history have been the same - there's this progress that escapes our own genetic/evolutionary 'programming'. I wouldn't find it realistic to hold the opinion that humans aren't qualitatively different from all other known beings.
  - __alexs 4y ago
    To know that we'd escaped our "programming" first we'd need to be able to understand it. We're a long way from being able to do that.