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I think it’s tempting to set some threshold like “it must be self reflective”, but that raises a different question: why is this important vs. some other thresh

I think it’s tempting to set some threshold like “it must be self reflective”, but that raises a different question: why is this important vs. some other threshold? e.g. does it matter if self reflection is possible if it is possible for the organism to experience pain? I think the answer lies in what we’re trying to understand and why we’re trying to understand it. If the threshold is applied for the purpose of understanding when an organism or machine has reached some level of human-ness, purely for the purpose of some kind of benchmark, self reflection is an interesting bar to reach. But usually these questions are aimed at finding some moral direction about how we should treat these entities. We have strong intuitions that abusing animals is morally wrong even if animals cannot self reflect. When thinking about a future AI, I think we have to consider the possibility that self reflection is not a necessary bar to reach before we have some uncomfortable moral questions to answer. Put another way, I suspect there will be many milestones that are meaningful and interesting, each introducing a new set of questions and implications. And I think some of the early milestones carry implications that are worth caring about long before self awareness is reached.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
> does it matter if self reflection is possible if it is possible for the organism to experience pain? Yes. Without introspective self-awareness there can be no 'identity, there can be no 'someone' - you just have a base consciousness that can react to stimuli, which is not morally significant. We have the full connectome of the roundworm and were able to implement it in software and place it in a lego robot. It's going to be pretty equivalent to the actual work. Does it feel pain? Besides which, we can kill animals humanely, so pain doesn't have to come in to it, only the right to life.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > Yes. Without introspective self-awareness there can be no 'identity, there can be no 'someone' - you just have a base consciousness that can react to stimuli, which is not morally significant. I'm not convinced of this a priori. And even if it was proven to me, the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant. It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > I'm not convinced of this a priori. We can't really say for certain much at the moment, but what I stated makes the most sense based on the evidence we have. > the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant. That non-self-aware impulse-to-live is morally equivalent to a plant seeking sunlight IMO. > It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life. The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not.
    - haswell 3y ago
      > That non-self-aware impulse-to-live is morally equivalent to a plant seeking sunlight IMO. Do you find the practice of raising meat in factory farms to be acceptable? > The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not. There are lots of differences. This is one. But what specifically about human self awareness lessens the value of animal life? If we were not self aware, we’d kill and eat meat without considering the morality. So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here?
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        > Do you find the practice of raising meat in factory farms to be acceptable? Not really, I would push for reform. We should be following what Dr Temple Grandin advocates for. > So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here? Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood. That's where I draw the line. At being with introspective self-awareness or the innate potential for such.
        haswell 3y ago
        > Not really, I would push for reform. I’m not trying to catch you in some kind of “gotcha” but trying to understand your reasoning. If the moral implications of killing animals are roughly the same as killing plants, do you also believe agriculture needs reform for similar reasons? And if not, wouldn’t that indicate some higher moral obligation towards animals? > Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood. Why is reflection on experience the bar and not experience itself? Animals demonstrate learned behaviors, e.g. recognizing humans from memory and resuming friendly behavior based on that recognition. Similarly, avoidance of situations that are known to cause pain. Our not-so-distant primate ancestors had a similar kind of experiential existence before gaining the ability to reflect on that experience. The underlying experiences that this reflection reveals are the same experiences that predate our ability to self reflect and are the parts of us that are most common to us and other animals. I guess what I’m fundamentally not understanding in your argument is the basis for the idea that a species gaining self reflection somehow becomes the point at which it becomes immoral to kill or harm that species. Furthermore, moral behavior can be found all throughout the animal world, with clear indications of love/protection, companionship, sharing/cooperation, reciprocity, memory of transgressors, etc. Obviously the subjective experience of these behaviors will differ across species, but the more important point is that it seems problematic to attribute the existence of moral behavior to self awareness. Self awareness helps us improve our understanding of moral behavior through rational thought, but the logic of such inquiry ultimately still relies on those underlying subjective experiential states. The fact that through introspection we can identify and label these concepts is unique to humans, but what I conclude about this is quite a bit different than your claim. I’d argue that gaining the ability to self reflect is the very thing that increases our moral obligations. Only through self reflection can we realize that as a species, we’re no longer bound to our evolutionary defaults, and no longer required to kill other animals to survive. What arguably started as natural selection of traits that are adaptive (but imperfect) for the survival of a social species could evolve beyond those more primitive defaults. And through self reflection we can now understand what pain feels like, and how inflicting it on others is harmful - to them and to us. I’m not arguing that eating animals is never acceptable. But the way we go about it surely seems to matter, and if it matters, the implications of it mattering are worth exploring more broadly.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

> does it matter if self reflection is possible if it is possible for the organism to experience pain? Yes. Without introspective self-awareness there can be no 'identity, there can be no 'someone' - you just have a base consciousness that can react to stimuli, which is not morally significant. We have the full connectome of the roundworm and were able to implement it in software and place it in a lego robot. It's going to be pretty equivalent to the actual work. Does it feel pain? Besides which, we can kill animals humanely, so pain doesn't have to come in to it, only the right to life.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> Yes. Without introspective self-awareness there can be no 'identity, there can be no 'someone' - you just have a base consciousness that can react to stimuli, which is not morally significant. I'm not convinced of this a priori. And even if it was proven to me, the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant. It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > I'm not convinced of this a priori. We can't really say for certain much at the moment, but what I stated makes the most sense based on the evidence we have. > the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant. That non-self-aware impulse-to-live is morally equivalent to a plant seeking sunlight IMO. > It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life. The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > That non-self-aware impulse-to-live is morally equivalent to a plant seeking sunlight IMO. Do you find the practice of raising meat in factory farms to be acceptable? > The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not. There are lots of differences. This is one. But what specifically about human self awareness lessens the value of animal life? If we were not self aware, we’d kill and eat meat without considering the morality. So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here?
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > Do you find the practice of raising meat in factory farms to be acceptable? Not really, I would push for reform. We should be following what Dr Temple Grandin advocates for. > So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here? Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood. That's where I draw the line. At being with introspective self-awareness or the innate potential for such.
      - haswell 3y ago
        > Not really, I would push for reform. I’m not trying to catch you in some kind of “gotcha” but trying to understand your reasoning. If the moral implications of killing animals are roughly the same as killing plants, do you also believe agriculture needs reform for similar reasons? And if not, wouldn’t that indicate some higher moral obligation towards animals? > Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood. Why is reflection on experience the bar and not experience itself? Animals demonstrate learned behaviors, e.g. recognizing humans from memory and resuming friendly behavior based on that recognition. Similarly, avoidance of situations that are known to cause pain. Our not-so-distant primate ancestors had a similar kind of experiential existence before gaining the ability to reflect on that experience. The underlying experiences that this reflection reveals are the same experiences that predate our ability to self reflect and are the parts of us that are most common to us and other animals. I guess what I’m fundamentally not understanding in your argument is the basis for the idea that a species gaining self reflection somehow becomes the point at which it becomes immoral to kill or harm that species. Furthermore, moral behavior can be found all throughout the animal world, with clear indications of love/protection, companionship, sharing/cooperation, reciprocity, memory of transgressors, etc. Obviously the subjective experience of these behaviors will differ across species, but the more important point is that it seems problematic to attribute the existence of moral behavior to self awareness. Self awareness helps us improve our understanding of moral behavior through rational thought, but the logic of such inquiry ultimately still relies on those underlying subjective experiential states. The fact that through introspection we can identify and label these concepts is unique to humans, but what I conclude about this is quite a bit different than your claim. I’d argue that gaining the ability to self reflect is the very thing that increases our moral obligations. Only through self reflection can we realize that as a species, we’re no longer bound to our evolutionary defaults, and no longer required to kill other animals to survive. What arguably started as natural selection of traits that are adaptive (but imperfect) for the survival of a social species could evolve beyond those more primitive defaults. And through self reflection we can now understand what pain feels like, and how inflicting it on others is harmful - to them and to us. I’m not arguing that eating animals is never acceptable. But the way we go about it surely seems to matter, and if it matters, the implications of it mattering are worth exploring more broadly.