Any proposal that sentience is the key defining factor in whether or not something can experience things needs to explain why people’s emotions and disposition are so easily affected by chemical injections that don’t appear to involve or demand any part of their self awareness.
Presumably such a explanation would look like this:
Pain happens when your brain predicts that bad things are going to happen to it in the future. Morphine interferes with the body’s ability to make such predictions therefore it decreases the ability to feel pain.
One pleasurable feeling is the ability to correct predict input stimuli. Cocaine causes the brain to experience a single overwhelming stimuli which is easy to predict and therefore pleasurable.
Note: I am not saying either of these theories are correct (I don’t known nearly enough neurobiology). But these are the types of theories someone who thinks that qualia (pleasure/pain) are purely computational would assert. Namely, chemicals alter our qualia by altering the way that we compute different types of information.
There’s a difference between saying that pleasure/pain accompany (mis)prediction , and saying that they are identical. The former doesn’t guarantee anything about an AI .
Presumably such a explanation would look like this:
Pain happens when your brain predicts that bad things are going to happen to it in the future. Morphine interferes with the body’s ability to make such predictions therefore it decreases the ability to feel pain.
One pleasurable feeling is the ability to correct predict input stimuli. Cocaine causes the brain to experience a single overwhelming stimuli which is easy to predict and therefore pleasurable.
Note: I am not saying either of these theories are correct (I don’t known nearly enough neurobiology). But these are the types of theories someone who thinks that qualia (pleasure/pain) are purely computational would assert. Namely, chemicals alter our qualia by altering the way that we compute different types of information.
There’s a difference between saying that pleasure/pain accompany (mis)prediction , and saying that they are identical. The former doesn’t guarantee anything about an AI .