No, they are not. Animals can feel e.g. happiness as well.
Yeah but the problem here is that we perceive happiness in animals only in as much as it looks like our own happiness. Did you notice that the closer an animal to a human the more likely we are to agree it can feel emotions? An ape can definitely display something like a human happiness, so we’re pretty sure it can experience it. A dog can display something mostly like human happiness so most likely they can feel it too. A lizard—meh, maybe but probably not. An insect, most people would say no. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s an argument that animals can experience happiness which is not based on their similarity to us, in that case I’m very curious to see this argument.
Sentience
For the record, I believe we do have at least crude mechanistic model of how consciousness works in general, and yes what’s with the hard problem of consciousness in particular (the latter being a bit of a wrong question).
Otherwise, I actually think it somewhat answers my question. One my qualm would be that sentience does seem to come on a spectrum—but that can in theory be addressed by some scaling factor. The bigger issue for me is that it implies that a hardcore total utilitarian would be fine with a future populated by trillions of sentient but otherwise completely alien AIs successfully achieving their alien goals (e.g. maximizing paperclips) and experiencing desirable-state-of-consciousness about it. But I think some hardcore utilitarians would bite this bullet, and that wouldn’t be a biggest bullet for a utilitarian to bite either.
Like the post! I was wondering along similar lines myself, although wrt surface area of Moon and planets rather than Sun energy output. I wonder if the concept of staking (analogous to crypto staking) would be useful here? Where instead of “renting” it to the highest bidder, you directly say—I want to invest my fraction of Sun output in e.g. the Alpha Centauri colony project, or Mars terraforming, or whatever.
The reasoning is as follows. Neither 10E-10 of Suns energy output nor a few acres on Mars are directly usable by an individual on Earth. And in case of Mars they are not really commercially very useful to anyone at all, at least not for a long long time probably even after we have space industry. In case of Sun energy, 10E-10 of it is just such a huge amount that if used for personal consumption it would create a life of absurd luxury and hedonism beyond any reason.
On the other hand, both of those things are extremely useful for the kind of very long-term projects that we envision to build out the Solar system to its full potential—terraforming, continent-sized space habitats, giant power collectors and transmitters, large-scale interplanetary transport, that sort of thing. So the idea is—why not skip the middle part where such a project needs to come up with a way to monetize or fund what they are doing to pay people for their fraction of the resource, and instead allow people to directly choose which project to support? Especially since these resources are not practically useful to people anyway until after a number of such projects are completed! And you incentivize people to spend their “cosmic endowment” building something great, instead of trying to come up with ways to spend it hedonistically.
Of course you loose the numerous advantages of market economy with this approach. But realistically, with astronomical-scale UBI, the economy is not very market-based anyway. And at this point the operations are probably mostly run by the AGI(s), in which case capitalism, or at least human-based capitalism, is probably completely out the window. Another issue is that plots of Mars are not as interchangeable, but that you can easily solve with some market for leasing the plots acting between different projects.