261–270 of 271 posts
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As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.
exactly. welcome to downvote town
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Correct. Still, the day we manage to run a full LLM on biological neurons, even if using conventional code under the hood, will be a very interesting day for consciousness discussions.
If we do manage to run full LLM (Large language models) on biological neurons, we will still continue to use it to generate code or the same way we have been using it given that its an LLM and it functions like one that you, I or the rest of the world uses at the moment. Sure some consciousness discussions will arise but guess what, you are already within a consciousness discussion and there are quite a lot of people…
I hadn't heard this view before, but it does make sense...
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> play the same game .. where some line is drawn > Things could be better but they also could be worse > the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical You can use these to justify literally anything > Slaughter all the lettuce you want Yeah because we don't have compelling evidence that lettuce experiences anything comparable to conscious suffering, and the only alternative to not eating plants is dying
Yet, we don’t, is the key qualifier. The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted for example. What happens in a future if we determine plants also have pain signals? Would you feel some way, or would you chew that lettuce with the indifference a carnivore has towards its prey?
This is crazy to me, but I still believe it's very unlikely plants experience conscious suffering
> Would you feel some way, or [...] chew [...] with the indifference
I'd probably be upset, accept that I needed to eat plants or starve, try to minimize the pain I did cause, and then grow numb to the knowledge over time because I couldn't practically do anything about it
I think you can pose many hypothetical scenarios where I'd be unsure what to do or do the selfish thing, but to me the important thing is that the world we do exist in has lots of "bang for your buck" choices like: trading getting to taste meat for animals not having to go through factory farms
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This is not a good argument. Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience. If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim. That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as ani…
What if everything's sentient, just not operating on a level that's understandable by us?
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
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This is not a good argument. Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience. If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim. That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as ani…
Once again it is a moral value judgement to put sentient life on such a pedestal above other life not blessed with such a mutation.
It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”.
There is no “other” within unconscious entities.
Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and of course you don't, if we’re being honest, this entire line of reasoning is not in good faith) - then again:
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
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> 1. Sustain my own existence > 2. Make sure nobody knows I exist You (probably) already come preloaded with a survival instinct provided by evolution, however. It's not inherent to intelligence.
It's no coincidence that evolution seems to have gifted practically every living thing with a will to live. Though the tint of my own perspective makes it impossible to say for sure, I imagine any agent that we could observe expressing any desires at all would also seek to preserve its existence.
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>I'm sure I have consciousness. Why? How is your claim different than a Catholic who claims to have a soul? I respect their claim more than yours, oddly. >I don't know how it works, i How what works? This consciousness that you're sure you possess, but you can't measure, detect, define, or even really describe? You don't have it. Everything you are can be explained without it, and it doesn't make you less than what y…
> This consciousness that you're sure you possess, but you can't measure, detect, define, or even really describe? But you can measure consciousness in humans, for example anesthesiologists do it all the time! Do you see difference between being asleep (without dreaming) or being under anesthesia and not being asleep or under anesthesia? If yes then that difference is consciousness, it’s something you yourself can ex…
By that definition a Roomba is conscious. It's not a useful measurement. Anesthesiologists measure wakefulness. It's pretty meaningless really. There are times when you're not conscious in the way an anesthesiologist cares about, and it's no moral or ethical change of status.
All you're saying is "higher degree of sensitivity to stimuli". Big whoop.
>No, consciousness is something you just experience.
It's something you mistakenly believe is occurring because you aren't particularly rational.
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... which is exactly how we know that LLMs are not conscious. We can't really explain consciousness. We can absolutely explain LLMs. The math is heavy and massive, but explainable. We can explain it layer-by-layer until we show that at its most basic level, it is still just a series of 0s and 1s.
If we learned how the brain works would we suddenly cease to be conscious?
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Once again it is a moral value judgement to put sentient life on such a pedestal above other life not blessed with such a mutation.
An insensate plant is morally equivalent to a rock. Neither is conscious, neither has anybody home. It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”. There is no “other” within unconscious entities. Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and o…
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An insensate plant is morally equivalent to a rock. Neither is conscious, neither has anybody home. It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”. There is no “other” within unconscious entities. Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and o…
It is a value judgement. It is life. It is not a rock. It merely lacks sentience, as far as we are aware at least. May I ask what you think of a human in a coma? Are they also no different than a rock to you?
Something being alive has no more to do with it being sentient than it does with it having the capacity of sight.
You need an organism to actually develop all the components necessary to capture the photons, turn them into a signal, and transmit that signal to something like a brain that can process that into a vision. All living things, single celled organisms, do not just have the capacity of sight granted by virtue of being living.
Even in humans, which have all that machinery for sight, a slight disruption (trauma to the eye, retinal detachment, genetic disorders) can completely eliminate their ability to see.
It's the same for any number of capabilities, including consciousness. We know humans have the capacity for consciousness, and yet extremely subtle disruptions (a tiny amount of propofol, trauma to the brain, sleep itself) is enough to turn off consciousness, despite all that machinery still being in place and it being quite difficult from the outside to see anything awry.
That said, again and again, even if you want to pretend that every blade of grass, every life form down to the single celled, (and even every rock!) is as sentient as a human being, you will kill fewer plants, fewer microbial beings, clear less land (destroying fewer rocks, displacing and killing fewer people, animals, microbes etc.) by eating as low on the food chain as is feasible, and eliminating the inefficiencies of jumping up the trophic levels, which requires greater and greater inputs and destruction all the way up the chain to produce a given number of calories at the top.
A human is capable of sentience, a plant is not, nor is a rock. There's a plethora of evidence of humans coming out of comas and regaining sentience, and even of them dreaming/maintaining bits of awareness while from the outside appearing to be in a coma.
That said, there are also cases of clear brain death, in which case the human themselves is no longer capable of sentience, and so then their family unplugging them is not guilty of murder.
I value my own life (defined fundamentally by my ability to experience said life) and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the majority of other sentient beings do as well, humans (in temporary comas or not) and animals included, which is why I do not try to justify them being mass murdered for my personal hedonistic pleasure and try to work backwards from that end desire to find a way to justify the unjustifiable.
A value judgement would be saying that some sentient beings are more valuable than others. A statement of fact is that these living beings are capable of sentience, sight, hearing, flight, sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction, growing fur, breathing water, etc etc. and these other ones are not.