He’s saying that it’s extremely hard to answer those questions about edge detectors. We have little agreement on whether we should be concerned about the experiences of bats or insects, and it’s similarly unobvious whether we should worry about the suffering of edge detectors.
Being concerned implies 1) something has experiences 2) they can be negative / disliked in a meaningful way 3) we morally care about that.
I’d like to ask about the first condition: what is the set of things that might have experience, things whose experiences we might try to understand? Is there a principled or at least reasonable and consistent definition? Is there a reason to privilege edge detectors made from neurons over, say, a simple edge detector program made from code? Could other (complex, input-processing) tissues and organs have experience, or only those made from neurons?
Could the brain be logically divided in N different ways, such that we’d worry about the experience of a certain sub-network using division A, and not worry about a different sub-network using division B, but actually they’re composed mostly of the same neurons, we just model them differently?
We talk about edge detectors mostly because they’re simple and “stand-alone” enough that we located and modeled them in the brain. There are many more complex and less isolated parts of the brain we haven’t isolated and modeled well yet; should that make us more or less concerned that they (or parts of them) have relevant experiences?
Finally, if very high-level parts of my brain (“I”) have a good experience, while a theory leads us to think that lots of edge-detectors inside my brain are having a bad experiences (“I can’t decide if that’s an edge or not, help!”), how might a moral theory look that would resolve or trade-off these against each other?
Being concerned implies 1) something has experiences 2) they can be negative / disliked in a meaningful way 3) we morally care about that.
I’d like to ask about the first condition: what is the set of things that might have experience, things whose experiences we might try to understand? Is there a principled or at least reasonable and consistent definition? Is there a reason to privilege edge detectors made from neurons over, say, a simple edge detector program made from code? Could other (complex, input-processing) tissues and organs have experience, or only those made from neurons?
Could the brain be logically divided in N different ways, such that we’d worry about the experience of a certain sub-network using division A, and not worry about a different sub-network using division B, but actually they’re composed mostly of the same neurons, we just model them differently?
We talk about edge detectors mostly because they’re simple and “stand-alone” enough that we located and modeled them in the brain. There are many more complex and less isolated parts of the brain we haven’t isolated and modeled well yet; should that make us more or less concerned that they (or parts of them) have relevant experiences?
Finally, if very high-level parts of my brain (“I”) have a good experience, while a theory leads us to think that lots of edge-detectors inside my brain are having a bad experiences (“I can’t decide if that’s an edge or not, help!”), how might a moral theory look that would resolve or trade-off these against each other?