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Philosophers have largely only been able to run thought experiments. While those can help clarify what we know, any apparently new knowledge generated thereby h

Philosophers have largely only been able to run thought experiments. While those can help clarify what we know, any apparently new knowledge generated thereby has to be confirmed by physical experiment. Physical experiments on human consciousness can only be done in very limited ways without ethical issues -- we don't have the technology to press the pause or undo buttons for human brains, and we don't have direct access to the full state of the brain. Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-introspect all the way down to the most basic level. You may object that there's no way to really know that another mind is conscious, and that no volume of physical evidence will prove it, and that will continue to be true even as we learn how it all works, in the same way that solipsism is both fully irrefutable and essentially ignored by anyone who wants to know more about how the world works.

notamy 3y ago
> Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-introspect all the way down to the most basic level. If a hypothetical AGI is truly believed to be conscious, how could it ever possibly be ethical to experiment on such a thing?
- randallsquared 3y ago
  Consent plus the ability to reset make it at least possible to respect ethics in such experiments, unlike with biological organisms.
  - notamy 3y ago
    > Consent Which we could likely easily engineer into whatever system eventually exists, once that point is reached. I doubt anyone who makes such a thing would intentionally engineer it to NOT consent to their experimentation. > Consent plus the ability to reset For a hypothetical example: If I said I would perform <some psychological experiment> on you, but it's okay because I can force consent into you and then perfectly reset your brain and body back to how they were pre-experiment, would you still be okay with it? This may be a bit of an extreme way of looking at it, but the ethical concerns matter.
    - randallsquared 3y ago
      If you use force to obtain “consent”, then I would argue that it isn’t ethical and maybe that it’s a contradiction in terms. If you know how to create a person who would be enthusiastic about consenting, doing that doesn’t seem unethical. For example, after someone chooses to consent, copying them — I would argue that this is just creating a consenting participant, and not unethical (where that person is concerned).
MaxBarraclough 3y ago
What kind of experimental set-up do you have in mind? I'm skeptical it could be of deep interest to philosophers. It might tell you something about the current state of AI technology, but that would be it. Why would I care what answer the LLM gives to a question like, say, Are you conscious? A one-line Bash script can claim to be conscious, but offers no insight whatever into the nature of consciousness. We've known for some time that general anesthetics can suspend consciousness. 'Neural correlate' studies give a more detailed understanding of the relationship between brain activity and consciousness. These are of limited value to philosophy of consciousness, though. AI experimentation strikes me as having even less applicability.

notamy 3y ago

> Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-introspect all the way down to the most basic level. If a hypothetical AGI is truly believed to be conscious, how could it ever possibly be ethical to experiment on such a thing?

randallsquared 3y ago
Consent plus the ability to reset make it at least possible to respect ethics in such experiments, unlike with biological organisms.
- notamy 3y ago
  > Consent Which we could likely easily engineer into whatever system eventually exists, once that point is reached. I doubt anyone who makes such a thing would intentionally engineer it to NOT consent to their experimentation. > Consent plus the ability to reset For a hypothetical example: If I said I would perform <some psychological experiment> on you, but it's okay because I can force consent into you and then perfectly reset your brain and body back to how they were pre-experiment, would you still be okay with it? This may be a bit of an extreme way of looking at it, but the ethical concerns matter.
  - randallsquared 3y ago
    If you use force to obtain “consent”, then I would argue that it isn’t ethical and maybe that it’s a contradiction in terms. If you know how to create a person who would be enthusiastic about consenting, doing that doesn’t seem unethical. For example, after someone chooses to consent, copying them — I would argue that this is just creating a consenting participant, and not unethical (where that person is concerned).

MaxBarraclough 3y ago

What kind of experimental set-up do you have in mind? I'm skeptical it could be of deep interest to philosophers. It might tell you something about the current state of AI technology, but that would be it. Why would I care what answer the LLM gives to a question like, say, Are you conscious? A one-line Bash script can claim to be conscious, but offers no insight whatever into the nature of consciousness. We've known for some time that general anesthetics can suspend consciousness. 'Neural correlate' studies give a more detailed understanding of the relationship between brain activity and consciousness. These are of limited value to philosophy of consciousness, though. AI experimentation strikes me as having even less applicability.