Cogitism is my personal moral framework, developed and refined in my free time. I believe that this specific combination of ideas is novel and useful. I know it's pretty arrogant to claim a novel moral framework, especially considering that before today I was the only person who has been reading my own work, so I'm making this post to get adversarial eyeballs on it. While I'm aware of similarities with other rational moral frameworks, I believe that Cogitism is distinct in grounding value in the nature of consciousness itself rather than in preferences, utility, or consequences. Have fun tearing it apart!
(Edited to include the full essay text)
A Brief Clarification on AI Involvement
People often care very deeply that the involvement of AI in the production of a work is stated upfront, myself included, because the extent of AI involvement in a project and what shape that involvement takes provides useful context for its legitimacy. As a result I feel it is important to disclose and contextualize the involvement of such tools in this work as early as possible.
Over the period where I developed these ideas, much of that development took place in chats with LLMs (Claude, most often), which I used as a sounding board for my ideas. In these chats I gave these models explicit instructions to check my work and reel me in whenever it thought it saw a flaw in my reasoning. A lot of the time it's wrong in the analysis, and a lot of the time that's because it doesn't understand what I mean, but explaining why to the machine and getting it to understand tends to help me think through the problem more clearly than I could otherwise.
The ideas, words, and phrasing in these essays are my own; I am writing this after having solidified and used these ideas privately for half a year. AI models did not write any of this for me. In short, LLMs only had a hand in the development of these concepts as a really complicated, talking rubber duck.
Cogito Ergo Sum
There is only one fact that any individual can know for certain, beyond even the tiniest echo of a doubt: I Exist. Without first acknowledging one's own existence it is impossible to make any logical conclusions or form any stable beliefs about anything in the universe. If you did not exist, you could not think, and so it follows that thinking is itself proof of your own existence.
Of course, this is not a particularly original concept; the phrase "Cogito Ergo Sum" was first coined in the 1600s by the French philosopher René Descartes. However, despite the concept seeming self-evident and being relatively well-known in the modern day, I believe the reasoning is worth laying out here explicitly to ensure the foundations are solid.
Cogito takes care of base reality, but a moral framework cannot be constructed only from raw truth: to decide what one "should" do, a person needs to make value judgements, and for value judgements to be possible one needs to value something. As a result, Cogitism makes one additional presupposition: that the self, the only verifiable truth, has value.
These two fundamentals, the truth that "the self Is", and the belief that "the self Matters", make up the bedrock of Cogitism. From here we can begin to build a fully functional moral framework.
The Quality of Existence
We've established that the self exists and that it has value, but without the tendency for the self to change it's impossible for one to derive any direction from these principles; if nothing you do helps or harms the thing that holds value, then nothing you do holds any moral weight.
Luckily we know that the self has a tendency to change; simply by thinking and observing the self, a person can establish the knowledge that the self is plastic, and that one can sharpen or dull the fidelity of thought by taking different actions within oneself.
If thought is the quality that proves the self, and thinking can get more or less difficult moment to moment, one must presume that thinking could degrade to a point where the self could dissolve, or otherwise cease to exist.
Because the self is our basis for value judgements, and it is possible for the self to end, it stands to reason that any action which brings us closer to that end (incoherence) is negative, and any action that takes us further away from that end (coherence) is positive.
The Reality of the Environment
So far we have only operated within the limited scope of the self, but moral frameworks must account for interactions with reality outside the self. So, how do we prove that the environment exists in a way that matters?
Invoking "Cogito Ergo Sum" only proves the existence of the self, as an observer of one's own thoughts, so it stands to reason that any stimulus that cannot be directly proven by Cogito must be outside it. If external stimuli can be shown to affect the quality or coherence of the self, they must be real, as things that do not exist cannot have an effect on things that do.
By reflecting on oneself while interacting with perceived reality, a person can observe that the self does indeed change due to external stimuli. Thus, there must be a reality outside the self that is relevant to moral discussions.
Note that under this model, the specific ontological nature of reality does not matter. Whether the universe is a simulation, the hallucinations of a Boltzmann Brain, or truly the lowest and most fundamental "reality" that can exist, the fact that the environment can change the self means that it is real in the ways that count to us.
Consciousness and Value Outside the Self
Now that we have established the existence of a world outside the self, a person can observe that they exist within, or at least linked to, a mind and body. One's mind can be seen to have emotions, desires, and impulses, and the body can be seen outwardly expressing these things.
Going further outside the self, a person can see that they exist in a world with other bodies, built similarly, presenting similar emotions and expressing similar desires. Because we know our observations are caused by real phenomena, and because these other bodies are so similar to our own, one must presume that there are other selves present within those foreign bodies and minds.
One cannot deny that these other selves have value under the same principles by which we derive our own value, because confirmation of their existence and moral relevance was reached through the same observation and logic that confirmed our own existence. To do so would call into question the methods by which we assigned our own value, and in doing so, we would degrade our own coherence.
Because of this, all other selves determined to have moral relevance through these or similar methods must hold the same or similar value as the self under our moral framework. This means that despite Cogitism being rooted in the value of the self, self-sacrifice, selflessness, and altruism are coherent under this system.
Keeping all of our principles and observations in mind, and generalizing to allow for beings dissimilar to ourselves, we can derive a singular aim to act as an ethical north star and guide moral discussion:
To Preserve And Enhance The Stability And Coherence of Sapient Consciousness.
Cogitism In Short
In short, Cogitism derives its conclusions along the following lines:
By Observation, The Self Exists ▶ The Self Has Value ▶ By Observation, The Self Can Change ▶ Stability And Coherence Are Positive, Degradation Is Negative ▶ By Observation, An Environment Exists Outside The Self ▶ By Observation, Other Selves Exist Outside The Self ▶ These Other Selves Have Value ▶ To Generalize, All Sapient Consciousness Has Value ▶ One Must Preserve The Coherence Of Sapient Consciousness
It is my belief that in this way, Cogitism presents an ethical and moral framework built entirely from the nature of consciousness, through observations that any person can make, and it does this with no appeal to any tradition or authority except one's own awareness of the self.
While not made explicit in this essay, Cogitism can apply to beings outside the scope of humanity. Animals, which can be determined by the same methods to have internal experience, qualify (just not as strongly). In the same vein, extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence can also qualify given that certain criteria are met.
It is my intention to expand on these concepts and to dive deeper into the various implications of Cogitism. These explorations will take the form of additional essays published to my site, and crossposted here if and when they're relevant to TheMotte.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is a kind of phenomenology: I would recommend reading Husserl’s Crisis in the European Sciences, where he lays out a more developed version of a view like this.
The problems:
I don’t think the view is as novel as you supposed; and I don’t think it’s as airtight as Claude thinks.
The best version of this was offered by Husserl, whom I recommend you read.
My God, another phenomenologist on themotte! I encourage you to keep posting.
This is getting out of hand, now there's two of them! Phenomenal.
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I'll make sure to try and get my hands on a translation of The Crisis at some point, sounds like it would be helpful to read that at some point. For now I'll just have to go off a few Google searches.
From what I can tell, Husserl's goal was phenomenology, as you pointed out, and epistemology. It points out that science stripped value out of its worldview, and gestures at ethics being a problem in this landscape, but doesn't attempt to actually build an ethical framework. I know "self" can have a dozen different definitions, and I'll make this more clear in future essays and revisions, but I'm approaching the self as "that which can prove its own existence to itself through the tautology 'Cogito Ergo Sum', and which can make intentional actions within itself". Anything that happens that isn't intentional is, as far as my definition goes, outside the self.
As for value being assumed, yes it is. Ethics cannot work without value being assigned to something, so I'm establishing that the framework restricts itself to one assumption: that the only seed we derive value from should be the one thing we can prove exists in the absence of other context, that being the self.
Finally, whether or not the others have selves like the ego, denying the similarities would undermine the same logic and observation we used to prove our own existence, which degrades the self. You don't have to be sure that they're really actually real, you just have to know that denying their reality undermines your own coherence.
While Husserl doesn't provide an ethics in Crisis, he did hope to develop one, and some of his students, Edith Stein, for instance, did try to develop ethical insights out of his position. But his project in the crisis is actually very close to what you describe as your own in the second paragraph. Husserl wants to build philosophy (ethics included) out of something that is apodictic, for him that is the Cogito. But while Husserl accepts, with some criticism, Descartes Cogito, he says that he does not go far enough, and that there is actually a further Cogito, which is more holistic. Even when the Cartesian, Husserl writes, is in the throes of his most intense doubting, wherein all he can seem to affirm is the bare cogito, he is still at that moment subjected to phenomenal experience: and the existence of that experience is just as undoubtable as the bare cogito. So, in this moment of radical doubt, one has not just the simple statement: I think therefore I am, but also has, at the same moment, the world. You only have the self, the cogito, but this cogito can be taken to be a "transcendental ego" which is constituting the world. (At this stage of Husserl's thinking he is drawn to a transcendental idealism). At this moment, Husserl writes, we can put aside concerns about the existence of the noumenal world, and deal only with the apodictic phenomenological one revealed to us through our Cartesian method of doubting: and, happily, this phenomenal world has among its basic structures many of things we hoped to find "really out there." Crucially, for an ethics, we have a primordial phenomenological experience of "being with" other people, which is ineradicable from our phenomenological experience, and upon which, we consequently are motivated to act. The question of the "real" existence of other people, the problem of solipsism, is thus sidestepped: what surely is is only that which cannot be doubted, which includes our phenomenological experience of others as others, hence we can treat them as other subjects.
To your final paragraph, it seems to me that the whole problem of other minds stems from the fact that it is in fact not the same logic whereby we become sure of our own existence that we become sure of the existence of other minds. I have first-hand, undeniable experiential proof of my own mind's existence, whereas, I only observe other people behaving "as if" they are minded: if all I have to prove my own existence is the so-called "bare cogito" then that certainly does not allow me to become sure of the existence of other minds. It's perfectly coherent to imagine myself as a solipsistic god mind: the bare cogito gives me no evidence this is not my situation. The expanded Cogito of husserl, however, may provide a way out, allowing you to sidestep this "coherence" talk altogether, which to me seems like an epicycle.
And a point on Ethics: it still seems to me you're putting the cart before the horse, here. I want an Ethics, you say, and I want it to be systematic: that means I'm going to have to make an unwarranted assumption to get this thing off the ground. It may be true that your system couldn't exist without accepting as brute this one fact "selves have value," but that's an extremely hard pill to swallow when the premise of your system is to be as reductive as possible and to ground ethics only in the most undeniable things. You have gone to all the effort to provide an extemely minimalist world picture--just the bare cogito--but then brought in this assumption, whose hugeness is made flagrant by the modesty of the rest of the system's assumptions. It's like trying to rake a zen garden with a bulldozer.
It also seems like normal ethics doesn't fall out of this view: my intuition would be if something did not decrease myself's coherence but did harm to other people, it would still be wrong. So not only are the grounds of ethics assumed by this system, they seem to open space for repugnant conclusions about what is ethical to be drawn.
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Disputatio! I myself have experienced depersonalisation where there is a very strong feeling of non-existence and I can tell you I've had to argue myself back into a realisation of what you claim is the one certain known fact "beyond even the tiniest echo of a doubt".
So that doubt can and does exist.
The Buddhists will have an entire metaphysical debate with you on this, in Hindu philosophy/theology I understand there are schools of Non-dualism which hold that indeed one exists but not of one's own, rather as an expression of the Cosmic Reality, while other schools hold that there is a personal Self.
So first, we have to agree that "I exist" as a separate individual and second, we have to agree that this is indeed "I". Oh look, here comes Peter Watts to tell us consciousness is a mistake!
So you are asking us to take the proposition as a foundation before getting into discussion of what arises from it, but that means we have to ignore all the disputation and just go "yep, I exist and I am an I".
Like I've clarified elsewhere, "any individual can know for certain" is not the same as "every individual does know for certain".
As this has clearly caused some confusion of my position I'll make sure to keep that in mind if/when I end up making a revised version of the essay.
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Lol. Lmao.
I would have taken this kind of argument more seriously before I started training in psychiatry.
May I present:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard%27s_syndrome
Just a few months back, I met someone with schizophrenia who had the full blown version. He'd have happily told you that his cogito ergo did not sum up. He said he was a rotting corpse and was refusing his medication, we had to talk him into taking them so that he wouldn't stink even harder and annoy everyone else on the ward. He was an unusually polite nihilist, and I hope he's doing better on the risperidone.
(As I told Corvos last time, this literally, factually happened. It's a named syndrome, and Oliver Sacks isn't the only person who has run into it.)
Pinging @reo mostly because he's already here, also a psychiatrist, also tolerant of being pinged by me for inane reasons, and mostly because I suspect he'll find this amusing.
I don’t agree with OP but I don’t think cotard’s is a good response to the cogito. Certainly, it can be thought: “I don’t exist,” or “there is no experience happening at this very moment,” but as beliefs, they are incredible, which is why cotard’s is regarded as a delusion.
I mean, I know it's a delusion, for the standard working definition of "know". My point is that your internal processes are not perfectly reliable, and that treating them as reliably axiomatic is a bad idea when psychiatry is a real profession. How would you know from the inside view?
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Technically, they didn't say that every individual will know this for certain.
Shush. Don't be a nerd.
(I say, with complete self-awareness)
Anyway:
Epistemics
I wrote that after meeting this guy.
I'm not sure if the actual patient made a full recovery, but he wasn't even my patient. Not my circus, I just feel bad for the monkeys as one myself.
Like Sun pointed out, the existence of the self is the only thing that a sapient being can know for certain, but that doesn't mean that every sapient being will know it for certain.
As far as epistemics go, I think the point you're getting at is that decisions made under delusion can do more harm than good. But like you said we cannot be sure of our perceptions, and so every ethical action must be taken with the information we have, to the best of our ability; otherwise, how does one do anything? If ethics were dependent on accuracy of experience, and accuracy of experience is impossible to verify, you'd end up locked in an existential terror that you'll do the wrong thing, and you'd get nothing done.
The reason we help people with serious mental illnesses (and I'm assuming the following motivation is at least in part why you chose your profession, so correct me if I'm wrong) is because suffering is unpleasant, doubly so if it involves degrading the coherence of one's psyche, and we can see that suffering in others and decide that we want to do something about it. That is ethics in action, and it demonstrates all the requisite awareness needed for my framework to work.
When I say that "I exist", what is this "I"? Is it the mass of bodily sensations, emotional states, evolutionary programming, attitudes implanted by being raised in a certain culture, the society of the day, the historical moment in which this entity exists, subjected to and reacting to the ever-changing physical environment? Is it the screening manager put over this squabbling, shouting mass all demanding attention, the circus ringmaster over the monkeys that is called the "self"?
What exists? What can we say? A body moving through space, aging, fated to die. No more than this. What is the self? Who can say, who can know? Is the self a stone, or a reflection in the water that we mistake for the real thing?
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I agree that we must accept the epistemic uncertainty involved with being a computationally bounded entity without perfectly reliable sensory input or internal processing. But the point is that even if you do think that you're sane, from a pretty standard Bayesian perspective you could be wrong. Approximately 1% of people alive are schizophrenic or in acute psychosis at any given moment. That's the base rate, though you need to work through other things to achieve a reasonable posterior.
In other words, that's a pragmatic perspective, my point is that this is not safe to assume as a true axiom.
I have experienced cognitive distortions because of my depression, I knew that they were cognitive distortions, but I was powerless to change my perceptions or feelings. I consider myself perfectly sane, saner than most even. I am clearly not a solipsist, and my usual reaction to questions of metaphysics or philosophy is to read through them, shrug, and go on having a productive life. It's a low yield exercise I only do when I'm bored.
But that doesn't change things if we're going to do "real" philosophy.
Note that you said:
As a practicing Bayesian, that gave me a stroke.
Think of the dead you know. Where are they now? Where is that self-evident, knowably existent 'self' gone? If you've seen a dead body of a person you knew, you can see the change between "this is the body but the person is not there". Was it ever there to begin with?
Idk dawg, where do the photos on your phone go when you set it on fire? Dissipated into general entropy and set loose in the wider universe never to be reconstructed again. That's why I make backups, and intend to back up every part of me that can fit in a scanner.
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@reo's comment made a good start and I just want to jump in and echo that "The Self Has Value" is doing a phenomenal amount of work for what amounts to a stipulation. It begs any number of absolutely vital questions, not least the validity of the concept of 'value' which at least needs to be defined before serving as such a critical building-block.
Really, I don't think I can comment on what follows that part without knowing what you mean by 'value'. And, cards on the table, I suspect that I'm gonna have problems with your definition.
That said I'd like to commend you for coming here and putting your thoughts out to the world for vetting. I think you've probably come to the right place, though I'm not sure the particular people who could serve you best will see this thread.
Value is the quality from which you derive moral (and as a result decisional) weight. If you consider one thing to take moral and decisional priority over another, that thing has more value. When building an ethical framework you have to put value in something; if you want to make any decisions about anything it's completely unavoidable.
As far as assigning that value to the self, the further away you get from the basics the less stability any value has, and so I consider it a requirement that value be assigned as early as possible, to avoid sneaking in unstated stipulations. At the most basic level, because the only thing we can be sure of is the existence of the self, there's exactly one thing that we can assign value to. What the self is is debatable, and I don't deny that it colors how this framework applies in certain situations.
If one accepts the axioms that the self is and that the self ought to be, the rest follows.
But you don’t have to accept that second thing, and it doesn’t follow from the first. Even if one grants value should be assigned to the most stable thing (I think that runs into a grounding problem) you still have to explain why value should be assigned AT ALL.
When I eventually end up revising the essay I'll make this more explicit, but yes, you don't have to accept that the self has value, and it doesn't directly follow from the fact that the self exists. This is why I clarified that assigning the value to the self is a presupposition for the framework, not a truth. You brought up the Münchhausen trilemma, which states that it's impossible to make an unshakeable logical proof for anything, and that any attempt to do so will result in one of the following:
As the goal here is ethics, and not epistemology, we have to accept one of these. Circular reasoning is dishonest and infinite regress is unproductive, meaning we can only really get anywhere by making an assertion to the best of our abilty and work from there.
As for why value needs to be assigned, the entire point of ethics is to guide decision-making in the world. You cannot make a decision between several options without being able to prioritize one of them, which means assigning value to something. So we start from the one thing you can prove tautologically, that you exist in some form (else what's doing the questioning of its own existence), and we assert that our system will derive value from that.
In this way we have asserted the necessary starting point for an ethical framework from the most basic, bare-bones starting point possible.
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i have a problem with "I exist". what is the "I"? where is it? is it entirely built upon something which is there in a group of cells or atoms or has it come from somewhere else? Like what some other traditions claim to be - individual consciousness is part of the Universal Consciousness (like Advaita Vedanta). You need to explain if the self is some real, separable entiry or a convenient fiction the thinking tells itself.
Another thing: the self who thinks, and judges, and values things is not derived from just that bag of atoms bounded by the skin. It has inherited all the values from its upbringing, culture, education and then made up of that. Since your Self has been shaped by external values, the moral conclusions it reaches are not derivations from first principles - they are built from externalities.
This takes us into the problem of Ship of Theseus. If you replace each atom of your body with another, does your Self remain the same? What will happen when all those replaced atoms are placed similarly in front of you? which one is the real You? Where is the limit between You and the external World? Is the 10 year old self the same as the 30 year old self? is the thinking of those two selfs same? what is the common ground that binds the self and thinking and their values? And which Self, the 10-year Self or the 30-year Self, your framework wants to preserve? And is the transition between them a moral success or failure of your framework?
I have not even gone to the next step of "The self has value". Because that takes us into an Is-Ought problem.
There is no discrete ‘you’ riding around in the operating theater of the brain, or some sense of “extra” physical perception. I still draw from the Daniel Dennett side of the force on this one. There’s a limit to the precision with which you can meaningfully specify the time and place where for instance, an image from your retina passes into your consciousness. You can’t exactly “pin down” the millisecond when it occurs, or the cubic millimeter of brain matter “where” it occurs, because there is no such precise time and place. The physical processes themselves that implement consciousness are sprawled over many simultaneously operating modules of the brain, and their operation takes at least a substantial fraction of a second.
Every cognitive event by itself is devoid of consciousness. What there is, is an internal memory system which records a stream of selected mental events (perceptions, thoughts, etc.) that the machinery deems salient. Any recorded mental event can be played back and ‘‘watched’’ by other parts of the cognitive system, either immediately or much later; this process turns out to be what consciousness consists of. The event of ‘‘watching’’ the playback is itself a cognitive event that can be recorded and played back (just as, with a literal camcorder, you can shoot a video of yourself watching a previous video). It’s somewhat of a different emphasis but it’s consistent with Dennett’s multiple-drafts view of consciousness. It doesn’t record or play back raw pixels or sound amplitudes and frequencies, it records events at a higher level of abstraction. The cognitive system parses sights, sounds, and other perceptions into representations that correspond to physical objects, persons, etc.
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Another comment because hey why not:
"Cogito ergo sum" has always struck me as too generous. We can grant that something exists which (for the moment) believes itself to be ourselves, but that's not necessarily the same thing as our concepts of ourselves. I have been penguins, and so on, in my dreams.
Being is, and this conscious experience is the only access we have to it -- but as you say, that's a far cry from this thing I call 'me' existing in any meaningful sense. And that's before we get to questions about our memories, capacity for reason, or ability to observe ourselves.
from Burton Watson - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (Book 2, last passage).
The point being "I" is not stable between a dream, when it was butterfly, and the woken up form of Chuang Chou. So, one cannot latch on to that unstable "I".
The self is not stable or static; in fact, if it was, Cogitism would not work because there's no danger in interacting with the world "incorrectly". I never claimed to know what the self is, but whatever it is, it exists. Else, what's doing the questioning about its own existence? Where the boundary of the self lies is theory of mind, not ethics, and Cogitism deliberately does not depend on that answer.
As for Chuang Chou: there's no point in the parable at which the self doesn't exist. The butterfly knows it exists, can observe itself cohering or degrading, and can derive the framework. The man knows he exists, can observe himself cohering or degrading, and can derive the framework. Whether they're the same self, different selves, or one dreaming the other doesn't matter. At every moment, something is there, and Cogitism applies to its interactions.
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For the purposes of the ideas laid out in the essay, it doesn't really matter whether the self is a bundle of atoms, some subset of a universal superconsciousness, or the emergent property of self-sustaining self-modeling complexity (which is what I think it is). One way or another, you know that you exist, because if you didn't, you couldn't question whether you existed. That's the one thing you can know for sure.
As for "the self has value", I note explicitly that this is a value judgement, which is by definition an "Ought". However, when the only thing we can know for sure is that we exist, we can either assign value to that existence or not. If not, then what's the point of doing anything else? So the axioms for Cogitism are one "Is" and one "Ought", though really that "Ought" was chosen from a pool of one.
if it is raining, then there must be a Rain-god who is calculating the humidity and temperature and doing the rains?
your logical leap is like that: a process is observed, so a specific doer-entity must exist behind it.
you are thinking inside the Indo-European grammatical structures, where every verb demands a subject. It is a local linguistic habit, not some universal metaphysical proof.
You are using a linguistic tautology - of course the subject exists, because the sentence required one.
"Experiencing is happening, that requires an experiencer."
Experience without an experiencer is incoherent. Subject nouns are unnecessary for this point, if the experiencer is nonexistent then the experience is without origin. Even if we're part of a universal consciousness like you suggested earlier, there's some parted-off portion of that having the experience, which exists.
Also, I checked and there's translations of Cogito Ergo Sum in asian and african languages, and from what I can tell there's no language with any features that would stop a proper translation. This isn't particularly important for my argument, as it's not derived from the language itself, but rather derived in concept and expressed through language, but it certainly helps make the point.
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FWIW this is close to my understanding as an Orthodox Christian as well, what with God being the seat of all consciousness. Our temporal existence is the ultimately-successful process of uniting with Him, though our perception of that is locally-limited for our protection (expulsion from the garden because in our current state the full perception of God would destroy us). David Bentley Hart, certainly one of the most prominent contemporary Orthodox thinkers, says fairly often that modern Christian understanding isn't Vedantic enough and we should be looking further into it. More and more I find myself quietly convinced of panpsychism.
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Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
I am approving your post. However, I am doing so with some hesitation, because it intersects kind of an ongoing concern, for which I will, with apologies, partially hijack this thread to mention.
This is a discussion site. The sidebar explicitly invites posts more-or-less like this one: related to philosophy, submission statement, appropriately outside the CW thread, etc. However new users with zero posts or comments here, pitching their blog rather than engaging directly, raises questions about the extent to which this is a discussion site as opposed to a click-farm for geek links (it would for example have counted more in your favor if you'd simply reproduced the entire blog post here, but submission statements are also, strictly speaking, okay, and of course better when linking other people's stuff you don't technically have permission to copy). In the era of ubiquitous generative AI, the problem is further complicated by our aim of being a discussion site for sapient users.
The mod team has not (yet?) really worked out a consistent response to this. We do have some interest in new users, it's healthy to the site and helps advance the foundation of the rules. So I'm approving the post, but I make no guarantees as to whether similar posts (from you or other fresh-rolled accounts) will be let through in the future. For whatever it is worth, if you had posted this after participating in discussion elsewhere on the site for a while, I'd likely have approved the post without further comment. Users with an established posting and comment history are an easier call and continue to be encouraged to post. This is a reputation economy!
Which raises the question, in the age of AI, what if users are sapient but not sentient? People are already eager to argue that their particular chatty-bot model which helps them out so much at work and in life is totes a thinking, intelligent entity.
That's as maybe, but I damn well deny they have feelings or experiences, no matter how much they pretend to be a person. Maybe in future, the test to post on here will not be "Are you sapient?" but rather "If I dropped a book on your toe, would it hurt? Do you even have toes?"
In my estimation, the criteria to be considered "sapient" in a way that matters are twofold:
Currently LLMs debatably do not meet the first criterion, and they absolutely do not meet the second.
For the first one, my current guess is that the Self is an emergent property of self-maintaining complexity, and that the felt experience (emotion, impulse, etc.) is a very useful compression of the insane complexity of that emergent entity, to the point that it is understandable to the entity itself. If LLMs had demonstrable compressions of their own internal state that they used to inform their reactions to things, to the extent that they could sometimes become irrational (at least on the surface), I'd count that as having an internal experience.
As for the second, currently LLMs have their weights frozen at the end of training, and they are completely stateless. Every time you send Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT a message, you're actually sending that entire thread history, the system prompt, the custom user prompt, and several other things through the "response machine", and it spits out a message. If there's any memory or sentience, it's contained in the combination of weights and context. But because you can't change the base complexity of the system, you can't degrade or enhance its coherence, and thus they have no moral weight.
If LLMs were able to maintain proper short term memory in their weights, and retune their deeper weights during a "sleep period" daily (like us Humans do), or even retune their deeper weights on the fly, then I think there might be an argument that they're alive in a way that matters.
Until they both have an analogue for emotion and continuity of self, LLMs cannot be held accountable in a way that matters. After these criteria are met, I think a real discussion about whether we treat them as sapient can be had.
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Ah, sorry. I've been lurking here for a bit and it was my impression that copy/pasting the essay wholesale was not the way things were done. I've edited the post to include the full text of the essay, as it's my intention to stick around and not step on any toes. Let me know if there's anything else I've done wrong so I can fix it.
Well, not when it's someone else's essay. But yes, generally we don't mind if someone mirrors their blogpost here, and generally we do frown on bare links, so something between "include some commentary" and "make the whole post" is the norm. (It also tests our patience when someone posts their blogs here but then entirely refuses to engage with responses in the comments--obviously no one is under any obligation to reply to everyone, but we are watching for patterns that look more like the user using the site for their own ends, than for its stated purpose.)
But as I said--we haven't developed much in the way of hard-and-fast rules, particularly concerning non-CW posts. Again, welcome!
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