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Qualia are an unhelpful posit at the best of times to the extent we can't be truly certain anyone or anything does or doesn't experience them. Should we be kind to rocks because pansychism could be true and they too might experience qualia?
A better reason to object to causing people pain is because it's viscerally distressing and suggests the inflicter might do the same to us or our loved ones. I personally think this ai torment experiment is only distressing to the extent it indicates the people behind it might do similar to people or animals, and it only slightly shifts my expectations there.
The thing is that you are human, so it's a much smaller leap to assume all humans are conscious than everything is. But that said, Shintoism is coherent.
I think a big mistake functionalists make that even animists did not is to assume that if a rock and a human are conscious, it means the same thing.
Maybe Wittgenstein is right and if an LLM can speak to us, that doesn't mean we can understand it.
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