If some means could be found to estimate phi for various species, a variable claimed by this paper to be a measure of “intensity of sentience”, it would the relative value of the lives of different animals to be estimated and would help solve many moral dilemmas. Intensity of suffering as a result of a particular action would be expected to be proportionate to the intensity of sentience, however whilst mammals and birds (the groups which possess neocortex, the parts of the brain where consciousness is believed to occur) can be assumed to experience suffering when doing activities that decrease their evolutionary fitness (natural beauty etc. also determine pleasure and pain and are as yet poorly understood, but they are likely to be less significant in other species anyway, extrapolating from the differences in aesthetics from humans with high vs low IQ). However for AI it is much harder to determine what makes it happy or whether or not it enjoys dying, for which we will need to find a simple generalisable definition of suffering that can apply to all possible AI rather than our current concept which is more of an unrigorous Wittgensteinian family resemblance.
If some means could be found to estimate phi for various species, a variable claimed by this paper to be a measure of “intensity of sentience”, it would the relative value of the lives of different animals to be estimated and would help solve many moral dilemmas. Intensity of suffering as a result of a particular action would be expected to be proportionate to the intensity of sentience, however whilst mammals and birds (the groups which possess neocortex, the parts of the brain where consciousness is believed to occur) can be assumed to experience suffering when doing activities that decrease their evolutionary fitness (natural beauty etc. also determine pleasure and pain and are as yet poorly understood, but they are likely to be less significant in other species anyway, extrapolating from the differences in aesthetics from humans with high vs low IQ). However for AI it is much harder to determine what makes it happy or whether or not it enjoys dying, for which we will need to find a simple generalisable definition of suffering that can apply to all possible AI rather than our current concept which is more of an unrigorous Wittgensteinian family resemblance.