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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
To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.
If we did understand all this then we could perhaps replicate it in software m. But we don’t.
What we can say is that the software behind ChatGPT is as likely to have qualia as a calculator app on your phone.
Where are you getting all this amazing scientific data about qualia and in which organs they're felt? Up to this moment I thought qualia were a completely made up philosopher's concept with no empirical basis whatsoever.
You might be a zombie, I feel qualia. So I think that’s worth explaining.. Sure the definitions are loose, and not very scientific but qualia exist.. If it helps you understand humanity better, i could perhaps replace qualia with emotions here - since that’s what I was really getting at, not how we experience the colour red but fear and anxiety and so on. Which needs the heart and stomach involved, or at least the simulation of them.
Could you expand on this? I'm not sure why the heart and stomach need to be involved, even as simulations. To use the example of fear, it's hard to nail down exactly what "fear" feels like, but vaguely, I might feel it through my heart racing faster or a "knot" in my stomach. But that doesn't require me to have a heart or a stomach or even a simulation of them; whatever causes me to experience qualia (which may be the brain, the soul, or the heart and stomach or all of them or something else entirely) could just cause me to experience the feeling of my heart racing faster and my stomach getting cramped. I don't see why those organs would need to be simulated in order to bring about that qualia.
I don’t see much of a difference between a simulated qualia of feeling the heart racing and having a simulated heart that races. Maybe there’s some shortcuts. 🤷♂️ it’s all very theoretical.
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