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Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
I don't think this is generally valid. What makes x86 and an ethernet cable different from grey matter and a spinal cord?
Nothing, the parent is simply wrong. Unless we want to argue some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains makes us extremely special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram. For all intents and purposes if we could simulate a human brain down to the chemical reactions and electrons and voltage potentials doing their thing it would be a human WITH qualia. It's hardware will just be different.
TL;DR that one episode of Startrek where they argue if Data has Qualia
Nothing that I've said implies this.
Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.
There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.
If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?
Yes. You're simulating a human -- you can have a conversation with them, and ask them what they see, and they could describe to you the various hues that they perceive, or else be surprised that they are blind. They could ask where they are, and be upset to learn that they're being simulated through a pile of rocks and that you don't believe they are conscious. Anything less would be an incomplete simulation.
That's the beauty of the Turing machine, is that it's universal. Given enough time and space, even something as dumb as rule 110 can compute any other computable function. And the materialist perspective is that the human mind is such a function.
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I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
Fair. Rocks being conscious or at least representing something that is was more or less a default for belief in many cultures across time. Ruling it out so casually is a result of a particular unique, historically rare socialization.
I think it's very unlikely that individual rocks are conscious, just as I think it's very unlikely that individual neurons are conscious, but a collection of neurons, rocks, or transistors arranged in a particular way and executing a particular algorithm may well be conscious.
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Agreed, but in my opinion enough ram and the proper algos + processing power would be enough.
I would argue that yes. But this stems from what I consider to be a bog standard materialist position taken to its logical conclusion. If everything we are is contained in our brains and the state of neurons, neuron connections, their internal state, all of this backed by chemical reactions and molecules, all of this underpinned on the laws of chemistry and electro-magnetism. If we could "simulate that" in varying degrees of precision we could theoretically recreate a consciousness and it would be just as "real" as the genuine thing.
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Given enough time and sufficient memory, you could simulate a human brain or the entire universe on a phone. It's not obvious, at least, that the hardware/software system wouldn't be generating qualia. (That's true even with Penrose-ish quantum consciousness.) They could be p-zombies, but those are controversial.
I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.
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