One example immediately comes to mind: Eliezer … is highly confident that animals have no moral patienthood.
This is because he thinks they are not sentient, because of a personal theory about the nature of consciousness. So, he has the normal opinion that suffering is bad, but apparently he thinks that in many species you only have the appearances of suffering, and not the experience itself. (I remember him saying somewhere that he hopes animals aren’t sentient, because of the hellworld implications if they do.) He even suggests that human babies don’t have qualia until around the age of 18 months.
Bentham’s Bulldog has the details. The idea is that you don’t have qualia without a self, and you don’t have a self without the capacity to self-model, and in humans this doesn’t arise until mid-infancy, and in most animals it never arises. He admits that every step of this is a fuzzy personal speculation, but he won’t change his mind until someone shows him a better theory about consciousness.
These views of his are pretty unpopular. Most of us think that pain does not require reflection to be painful. If there’s any general lesson to learn here, I think it’s just that people who truly think for themselves about consciousness, ethics, AI, philosophy, etc, can arrive at opinions which no one else shares. Having ideas that no one else agrees with, is an occupational hazard of independent thought.
what AI alignment means for non-human welfare
As for your larger concern, it’s quite valid, given the state of alignment theory. Also, if human beings can start with the same culture and the same data, but some of them end up with weird, unpopular, and big-if-true ideas… how much more true is it that an AI could do so, when it has a cognitive architecture that may be radically non-human to begin with?
What would be the evolutionary advantage of the appearances of suffering, in a world before humans?
Let’s first consider a related question that is independent of any theories of consciousness: Think of all the postures and behaviors by which we infer that an animal is suffering. Why are those postures and behaviors what they are? I would think that generally they have a functional value as a response to damage, danger, etc. The injured paw is pulled back so it won’t be damaged further. The cry of terror causes an animal’s kin to also go on alert.
I suppose the idea would be, that all of this evolves purely for its functional advantages, and without any qualia present. Note that nervous systems would still be processing information and forming representations—it’s just that none of this would have any associated qualia.
Then at some point the brain evolves the capacity of self-representation, and apparently according to Eliezer’s intuition, this is when qualia first come into being. A slogan could be, no qualia without a self to feel them, and no self without self-representation.
Also, wouldn’t that be an argument in favor of p-zombies? I mean, if appearances of qualia can evolve...
Within this framework, a p-zombie would be something that had self-representations but no qualia.
Trying out this theory suggests two fundamental questions to me. Can you have qualia without a self? And if you can, do qualia without a self have ethical significance? I think a theory of consciousness that is proposed in the context of alignment theory ought to be able to answer those two questions, and provide some kind of argeument in favor of its answers.
Thanks for the explanation, but I am not completely satisfied with it. You can explain a lot of what humans do by functional advantages, so… to put it bluntly, is it morally okay to torture people who are insufficiently introspective? Are Buddhist meditators utility monsters?
This is because he thinks they are not sentient, because of a personal theory about the nature of consciousness. So, he has the normal opinion that suffering is bad, but apparently he thinks that in many species you only have the appearances of suffering, and not the experience itself. (I remember him saying somewhere that he hopes animals aren’t sentient, because of the hellworld implications if they do.) He even suggests that human babies don’t have qualia until around the age of 18 months.
Bentham’s Bulldog has the details. The idea is that you don’t have qualia without a self, and you don’t have a self without the capacity to self-model, and in humans this doesn’t arise until mid-infancy, and in most animals it never arises. He admits that every step of this is a fuzzy personal speculation, but he won’t change his mind until someone shows him a better theory about consciousness.
These views of his are pretty unpopular. Most of us think that pain does not require reflection to be painful. If there’s any general lesson to learn here, I think it’s just that people who truly think for themselves about consciousness, ethics, AI, philosophy, etc, can arrive at opinions which no one else shares. Having ideas that no one else agrees with, is an occupational hazard of independent thought.
As for your larger concern, it’s quite valid, given the state of alignment theory. Also, if human beings can start with the same culture and the same data, but some of them end up with weird, unpopular, and big-if-true ideas… how much more true is it that an AI could do so, when it has a cognitive architecture that may be radically non-human to begin with?
What would be the evolutionary advantage of the appearances of suffering, in a world before humans?
Also, wouldn’t that be an argument in favor of p-zombies? I mean, if appearances of qualia can evolve...
Let’s first consider a related question that is independent of any theories of consciousness: Think of all the postures and behaviors by which we infer that an animal is suffering. Why are those postures and behaviors what they are? I would think that generally they have a functional value as a response to damage, danger, etc. The injured paw is pulled back so it won’t be damaged further. The cry of terror causes an animal’s kin to also go on alert.
I suppose the idea would be, that all of this evolves purely for its functional advantages, and without any qualia present. Note that nervous systems would still be processing information and forming representations—it’s just that none of this would have any associated qualia.
Then at some point the brain evolves the capacity of self-representation, and apparently according to Eliezer’s intuition, this is when qualia first come into being. A slogan could be, no qualia without a self to feel them, and no self without self-representation.
Within this framework, a p-zombie would be something that had self-representations but no qualia.
Trying out this theory suggests two fundamental questions to me. Can you have qualia without a self? And if you can, do qualia without a self have ethical significance? I think a theory of consciousness that is proposed in the context of alignment theory ought to be able to answer those two questions, and provide some kind of argeument in favor of its answers.
Thanks for the explanation, but I am not completely satisfied with it. You can explain a lot of what humans do by functional advantages, so… to put it bluntly, is it morally okay to torture people who are insufficiently introspective? Are Buddhist meditators utility monsters?