“sentience” vs “consciousness”
Source:
Sentience in Animals
“Many scientists studying animal welfare appear to hold a hedonistic concept of welfare -whereby welfare is ultimately reducible to an animal’s subjective experience. […] analysis showed welfare judgments depended on the objective features of the animal’s life more than they did on how the animal was feeling: a chimpanzee living a natural life with negative emotions was rated as having better welfare than a chimpanzee living an unnatural life with positive emotions. We also found that the supposedly more purely psychological concept of happiness was also influenced by normative judgments about the animal’s life. For chimpanzees with positive emotions, those living a more natural life were rated as happier than those living an unnatural life. Insofar as analyses of animal welfare are assumed to be reflective of folk intuitions, these findings raise questions about a strict hedonistic account of animal welfare. More generally, this research demonstrates the potential utility of using empirical methods to address conceptual problems in animal welfare and ethics.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0193864
“…sentience may go unnoticed for years, as was the case with Martin Pistorious [1] … Because brain death can be misdiagnosed [2], and because we have little understanding of the necessary and sufficient causes for consciousness and therefore cannot be certain of when someone might be in pain, some experts have called for the use of anesthesia [3] for organ donation procedures.”
Read more:
https://slate.com/technology/2016/04/the-challenge-of-determining-whether-an-a-i-is-sentient.html
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_pistorius_how_my_mind_came_back_to_life_and_no_one_knew?language=en
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/the-undead-by-dick-teresi.html?_r=0
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.2000.055002105.x
A Paris zoo is showcasing a mysterious creature dubbed the “blob,” a yellowish collection of unicellular organisms called a slime mold that looks like a fungus, but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on public display on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet can detect food and digest it.
The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
“The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,” said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.
“It surprises us, because it has no brain but is able to learn (…) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David said.
The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.
“We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really [know] if it’s an animal or a fungus,” said David.
“It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom … it has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn.”
Source:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-zoo-blob-1.5325747
There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory‐heavy, theory‐neutral and theory‐light. Theory‐heavy and theory‐neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory‐light approach. At the core of the theory‐light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness‐linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking.
I have the intuition that voluntary suffering might not be bad. This is primarily due to personal experience: I often feel sad (sympathy) when I encounter sad stories or sad situations, but I don’t have the intuition that this is bad for me, because I don’t feel like I ought to look away or stop feeling sad in response to these and I often feel like thinking/learning/reading more about these situations even if I feel more sadness because of it (and I usually do). This happens to me with both real and fictional situations (I was a fan of tragedies for a while). Furthermore, sometimes in the past, when I’ve been depressed about my own life, I didn’t want to be happy and even preferred to be miserable.
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It’s suffering that’s bad, intrinsically (though suffering can be instrumentally good)
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I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point.
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Buddhism would say that if you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you don’t suffer from it.
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My intuition is that suffering is bad, but sometimes (all things considered) I prefer to suffer in a particular instance (e.g. in service of some other value). In such cases it would be better for my welfare if I did not suffer, but I still prefer to.
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I think we don’t quite have the words to distinguish between all these things in English, but in my mind there’s something like
- pain – the experience of negative valence
- suffering – the experience of pain (i.e. the experience of the experience of negative valence)
- expected suffering – the experience of pain that was expected, so you only suffer for the pain itself
- unexpected suffering – the experience of pain that was not expected, so you suffer both the pain itself and the pain of suffering itself from it not being expected and thus having negative valence
Of them all, unexpected suffering is the worst because it involves both pain and meta-pain.
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I noticed that reading only “positive” and “joyous” stories eventually feel empty. The answer seem that sad elements in a story bring more depth than the fun/joyous ones. In that sense, sadness in stories act as a signal of deepness, but also a way to access some deeper part of our emotions and internal life.
We have a pretty good sense of how digestion works. And our grasp of thermodynamics is excellent. We know that there are three bones – the smallest in our bodies – in the middle ear, and that stars produce light because of thermonuclear fusion. While I’m skeptical of “progressionist” claims that the human condition has inexorably improved since the Neolithic revolution (the proliferation of technology-related existential risks being one reason for skepticism), it seems that science has made genuine progress.
The knowledge we now have about what the universe is like and how it works1 far exceeds that of our ancestors – even just a few generations ago.
One finds the exact opposite situation in philosophy. There has been little to no significant progress on many of the most fundamental issues, such as the nature of causation, the self, knowledge, the a priori, meaning, and even consciousness. (Note that a causal explanation is not the same as a constitutive one; brain-thought correlations do not tell us what consciousness is!) Why would this be?
Does the stagnation of philosophy suggest that its problems are intrinsically hard – perhaps even more difficult to apprehend than, say, black holes and quantum tunneling? Some philosophers answer “No – or at least not necessarily.” It might be that the question of what exactly causes are is incredibly easy to answer, except that the answer includes one or more concepts that our three pound Jell-O brains simply can’t grasp ahold of. Not in the sense that an ancient relative of ours would find it hard to grasp what “radioactive decay” refers to, but in the sense that a dog could never, in principle, make sense of the concept of a stock market – or a quark, or a palindrome. The mental machinery pumping out thoughts in the dog’s tiny skull simply doesn’t have the conceptual resources to get these ideas.
Philosophers call this ineluctable situation “cognitive closure,” and we may distinguish two versions of it. The first involves having the mental capacity to ask a question but not to answer it. It appears that this is the case with a range of philosophical topics, from causation to consciousness, knowledge to meaning. The answers seem to dangle in front of our minds’ eyes, yet no matter how hard we struggle to clutch them they continually evade our reach.
The second kind of closure is defined by the inability to even ask the question, much less answer it. This is the cognitive prison our canine friends find themselves in with respect to quarks and palindromes. Their predicament is marked by a second-order ignorance – ignorance of their ignorance of concepts X, Y, and Z. In Rumsfeldian terms, the concepts aren’t merely “unknown unknowns” but “unknowable unknowns.” They lie forever beyond the horizon of intelligibility.
As just alluded to, the boundary between “mysteries” (perennial unknowns) and “problems” (in principle knowable even if currently unknown) is entirely relative to types of minds. It is, in other words, a species-specific distinction: the boundary line is drawn differently for Canis lupus than for Homo sapiens. It follows from this relativism that a superintelligence – whether taking the form of a cognitively enhanced cyborg or a wholly artificial machine – could potentially have access to a vastly expanded library of concepts that are permanently unavailable to us.
As such, it could grasp a range of ideas, beliefs, theories, hypotheses, explanations, and so on, that we can’t even begin to fathom. Thus if “we” – meaning us and our posthuman progeny – want to actually make some progress in philosophy, it may be that the only way forward is through the creation of minds that are superintelligent. This is essentially what the transhumanist philosopher Mark Walker has proposed: rather than dumb down the questions, smarten up the thinker.2 In his words, “The idea … is that it is not we who ought to abandon philosophy, but that philosophy ought to abandon us.” Call this inflationism.
The transhumanist literature distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” supersmarts, where the former is qualitative and the second quantitative.3 The situation above involves superintelligence of the strong variety (although it doesn’t preclude the other kind). But weak superintelligence could also be incredibly useful for philosophy. Why? Because – they are institutionally permitted to examine the “big picture”— to work towards an understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term,” as Wilfrid Sellars put it.
The difficulty in achieving this stems from the word “broadest.” While collective human knowledge has undergone an exponential climb in the past several centuries, our individual capacities have remained more or less fixed. The result is that the relative ignorance of individuals is at an all-time high.4 You and I and even the most polymathic scholar are pathetically unaware of truly oceanic realms of “known knowables.”5 This prevents us from seeing the big picture. The two primary constraints here are memory – use it or lose it! – and time – even with eidetic abilities the day just ain’t long enough.
But a weak superintelligence could rectify this problem of “size.” Although it would not be able to think any new (in kind) thoughts about the peculiar nature and workings of reality, it could potentially “remember” every fact, theory, and notion that humanity has so far registered as knowledge. Furthermore, since an AI would by definition be running on hardware in which components communicate at roughly the speed of light, it could easily overcome the time constraint as well.
Putting this all together, a mind that’s superintelligent in both the weak and strong senses has the potential to satisfy Sellars’ aim of “seeing the whole picture,” as well as to solve the still-unanswered, age-old philosophical questions about life, the universe, and everything. Perhaps the transhumanist agenda offers the only path to philosophical enlightenment.
1 I.e., the properties of objects that exist in the cosmos and their various causal relations.
2 A superintelligence might also make progress in scientific areas like fundamental physics, where a “theory of everything” still eludes us, and the best proposed idea so far posits spatial dimensions beyond the three of length, width, and height – dimensions that are, at best, only vaguely intelligible to even the brightest minds.
3 I’m expanding the definition of a weak superintelligence to including not only information processing speed but information organization and retention as well.
4 That is, precisely because our collective knowledge is at an all-time high.
5 We are thus forced to rely on a complex hierarchy of divided cognitive labor to navigate the intellectual landscape, since we can’t do it on our own.
Source: https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/torres20141003
Individuals with congenital indifference to pain have painless injuries beginning in infancy but otherwise normal sensory responses upon examination. Perception of passive movement, joint position, and vibration is normal, as are tactile thresholds and light touch perception. There is intact ability to distinguish between sharp and dull stimuli and to detect differences in temperature. The insensitivity to pain does not appear to be due to axonal degeneration, as the nerves appear to be normal upon gross examination (8). The complications of the disease follow the inability to feel pain, and most individuals will have injuries to lip or tongue caused by biting themselves in the first 4 years of life. Patients have frequent bruises and cuts, usually have a history of fractures that go unnoticed, and are often only diagnosed because of limping or lack of use of a limb. The literature contains very colorful descriptions of patients with congenital inability to perceive any form of pain.
Plants are not usually thought to be very active behaviorally, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover, in stressful situations, plants produce numerous chemicals that have painkilling and anesthetic properties. Finally, plants, when treated with anesthetics, cannot execute active behaviors such as touch-induced leaf movements or rapid trap closures after localizing animal prey
Only humans can report feeling pain. In contrast, pain in animals is typically inferred on the basis of nonverbal behaviour. Unfortunately, these behavioural data can be problematic when the reliability and validity of the behavioural tests are questionable. The thesis proposed here is based on the bioengineering principle that structure determines function.