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I’m surprised there isn’t more conversation around our human desire to treat objects and non-sentient beings like people. Whether it’s naming a sailboat and giv
by mproud 4y ago
I’m surprised there isn’t more conversation around our human desire to treat objects and non-sentient beings like people. Whether it’s naming a sailboat and giving it a gender, or building a robot and treating it like a human.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand many organic things do feel varying degrees of pain and pleasure, and they should be respected. But I think assigning, pretending, or otherwise believing a largely inorganic, man-made scripted machine has consciousness or sentience is driven chiefly from an inherent quality of being human.
- garrisonj 4y agoTrue. We’ll feel like they are sentient way before they are.
- theptip 4y agoI think this is true, AND we will use this reasoning to deny their sentience long after they are.
- DangitBobby 4y agoOf course, they could already be sentient.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoTo add on that, if you have a system solely for conversing with and about other conscious beings, you can hack that into a system for conversing about anything by treating inanimate objects as particularly shy and sloth like beings. Its nice as you don't need grammatical rules to handle the distinction between animate and inanimate object functions. Eg, any method of learning information can be phrased as "X told me Y." Jack told me. The equations tell me. I told myself. You can even personify large forces beyond your comprehension or the universe as a whole. In that case we usually call it "religion".
- DangitBobby 4y agoI'm more interested in going the other way: the urge to create very narrow categories into which only humans fit, attempting to exclude other animals or things that could be like humans. Human exceptionalism, let's call it.