What is necessary? It’ll pay off for us to get this on the table.
If we knew exactly, someone would have a nobel for it and the nonperson predicate would be a solved problem by now, along with the Hard Problem of Consciousness and a throng of other things currently puzzling scientists the world over.
However, we do have a general idea of the direction to take, with an example here of some of the things involved. There’s still the whole debate and questions around the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, but overall it doesn’t even seem as if the ability to communicate is required for consciousness or sentience, let alone hold the ability to parse language in a form remotely close to ours or that allows anything akin to an argument as humans are used to the word.
But past that point, the argument is no longer about UCMAs, and becomes about morality engines (and whether morality or something akin to it must exist in all minds), consciousness, what constitutes an ‘argument’ and ‘being convinced’, and other things humans yet understand so very little about.
Okay, I see the problem. Let’s say this: within the whole of mind-space there is a subset of minds capable of morally-evaluable behavior. For all such minds, the UCMA is true. This may be a tiny fraction, but the UCMAist won’t be disturbed by that: no UCMAist would insist that the UCMA is UC for minds incapable of anything relevant to morality. How does that sound?
This sounds like a good way to avoid the heavyweight problems with all the consciousness debates, so it seems like a good idea.
However, it retains the problem of defining “morality”, which is still unresolved. UCMAists will argue from theories of morality where UC is an element of the theory, while E.Y. already assumes a different metaethics where there is no clear boundaries of human “morality” and where morality-in-the-way-we-understand-it is a feature of humans exclusively, and other things might have things akin to morality that are not morality, and some minds would be able to evaluate moral behaviors without caring about morality in the slightest, while some other minds we might consider morally-important and yet would completely ignore any “UCMA” that would otherwise compel any human.
If we knew exactly, someone would have a nobel for it and the nonperson predicate would be a solved problem by now, along with the Hard Problem of Consciousness and a throng of other things currently puzzling scientists the world over.
However, we do have a general idea of the direction to take, with an example here of some of the things involved. There’s still the whole debate and questions around the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, but overall it doesn’t even seem as if the ability to communicate is required for consciousness or sentience, let alone hold the ability to parse language in a form remotely close to ours or that allows anything akin to an argument as humans are used to the word.
But past that point, the argument is no longer about UCMAs, and becomes about morality engines (and whether morality or something akin to it must exist in all minds), consciousness, what constitutes an ‘argument’ and ‘being convinced’, and other things humans yet understand so very little about.
Okay, I see the problem. Let’s say this: within the whole of mind-space there is a subset of minds capable of morally-evaluable behavior. For all such minds, the UCMA is true. This may be a tiny fraction, but the UCMAist won’t be disturbed by that: no UCMAist would insist that the UCMA is UC for minds incapable of anything relevant to morality. How does that sound?
This sounds like a good way to avoid the heavyweight problems with all the consciousness debates, so it seems like a good idea.
However, it retains the problem of defining “morality”, which is still unresolved. UCMAists will argue from theories of morality where UC is an element of the theory, while E.Y. already assumes a different metaethics where there is no clear boundaries of human “morality” and where morality-in-the-way-we-understand-it is a feature of humans exclusively, and other things might have things akin to morality that are not morality, and some minds would be able to evaluate moral behaviors without caring about morality in the slightest, while some other minds we might consider morally-important and yet would completely ignore any “UCMA” that would otherwise compel any human.