Thank you for the post, I found it very informative on Suleyman’s views.
Serious decisions which have consequences that will effect billions of lives, and potentially billions more minds, should not be made on the basis of “Invisible” concepts which cannot be observed, measured, tested, falsified, or even defined with any serious level of rigor.
I don’t think that the difficulty of ascertaining whether something results in qualia is a valid basis to reject its importance. I would say that one has to extrapolate from oneself to the entity in question and evaluate whether its features suggest associated qualia.
(Some reject that substrate could be a relevant feature and others claim that substrate is the only relevant feature… I have not yet undersood why people hold these beliefs. Prima facie, behavior, algorithm and substrate all seem like they could be relevant.)
I don’t think that the difficulty of ascertaining whether something results in qualia is a valid basis to reject its importance
I’m not arguing consciousness isn’t “important”, just that it is not a good concept on which to make serious decisions.
If two years from now there is widespread agreement over a definition of consciousness, and/or consciousness can be definitively tested for, I will change my tune on this.
Thank you for the post, I found it very informative on Suleyman’s views.
I don’t think that the difficulty of ascertaining whether something results in qualia is a valid basis to reject its importance. I would say that one has to extrapolate from oneself to the entity in question and evaluate whether its features suggest associated qualia.
(Some reject that substrate could be a relevant feature and others claim that substrate is the only relevant feature… I have not yet undersood why people hold these beliefs. Prima facie, behavior, algorithm and substrate all seem like they could be relevant.)
I’m not arguing consciousness isn’t “important”, just that it is not a good concept on which to make serious decisions.
If two years from now there is widespread agreement over a definition of consciousness, and/or consciousness can be definitively tested for, I will change my tune on this.