Salmon is incredibly unlikely to have qualia, there’s approximately nothing in its evolutionary history that correlates with what qualia could be useful for or a side-effect of.
Can you elaborate on this? I ask because this is far from obvious to me (in fact quite implausible), and I think you probably have beliefs about qualia that I don’t share, but I want to know if I’m missing out on any strong arguments/supporting facts (either for those foundational views, or something salmon-specific).
Sure! Mostly, it’s just that a lot of stuff that correlates with specific qualia in humans doesn’t provide any evidence about qualia in other animals; reinforcement learning- behavior that seeks the things that when encountered update the brain to seek more of them, and tries to avoid the things that update the brain to avoid them- doesn’t mean that there are any circuits in the animal’s brain for experiencing these updates from the inside, as qualia, the way humans do when we suffer. If I train a very simple RL agent with the feedback that salmon get via mechanisms that produce pain in humans, the RL agent will learn to demonstrate salmon’s behavior while we can be very confident there’s no qualia in that RL agent. Basically almost all of the evidence Rethink and others present are of the kind that RL agents and don’t provide evidence that would add anything on top of “it’s a brain of that size that can do RL and has this evolutionary history”.
The reason we know other humans have qualia circuits in their brains is that these circuits have outputs that make humans talk about qualia even if they’ve not heard others talk about qualia (this would’ve been very surprising if that happened randomly).
We don’t have anything remotely close to that for any non-human animals.
For many things, we can assume that something like what led to humans having qualia has been present in the evolutionary history of that thing; or have tests (such as a correct mirror test) that likely correlates with the kinds of things that lead to qualia; but among all known fish species we’ve done these experiments on, there are very few that have any social dynamics of the kind that would maybe correlate with qualia or can remotely pass anything like a mirror test, and salmon is not among those species.
Can you elaborate on this? I ask because this is far from obvious to me (in fact quite implausible), and I think you probably have beliefs about qualia that I don’t share, but I want to know if I’m missing out on any strong arguments/supporting facts (either for those foundational views, or something salmon-specific).
Sure! Mostly, it’s just that a lot of stuff that correlates with specific qualia in humans doesn’t provide any evidence about qualia in other animals; reinforcement learning- behavior that seeks the things that when encountered update the brain to seek more of them, and tries to avoid the things that update the brain to avoid them- doesn’t mean that there are any circuits in the animal’s brain for experiencing these updates from the inside, as qualia, the way humans do when we suffer. If I train a very simple RL agent with the feedback that salmon get via mechanisms that produce pain in humans, the RL agent will learn to demonstrate salmon’s behavior while we can be very confident there’s no qualia in that RL agent. Basically almost all of the evidence Rethink and others present are of the kind that RL agents and don’t provide evidence that would add anything on top of “it’s a brain of that size that can do RL and has this evolutionary history”.
The reason we know other humans have qualia circuits in their brains is that these circuits have outputs that make humans talk about qualia even if they’ve not heard others talk about qualia (this would’ve been very surprising if that happened randomly).
We don’t have anything remotely close to that for any non-human animals.
For many things, we can assume that something like what led to humans having qualia has been present in the evolutionary history of that thing; or have tests (such as a correct mirror test) that likely correlates with the kinds of things that lead to qualia; but among all known fish species we’ve done these experiments on, there are very few that have any social dynamics of the kind that would maybe correlate with qualia or can remotely pass anything like a mirror test, and salmon is not among those species.