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rfmcdonaldThis morning, I quoted Nadeau's phrasing of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment against the existence of artificial intelligences. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leex was kind enough to point out this article criticizing Searle's argument, while the other commenters noted that the existence of consciousness in an individual can't be confirmed. Were I a psychopath, I might quite readily conclude that no one in the universe apart from me was truly sentient. We know this to be wrong, or at least we assume this to be wrong, because every conceivably sentient being we've been able to converse with belongs to a single species composed of multiple intermingling and interfertile populations with certain basic behavioural commonalities.
What happens, though, when things begin breaking down? Researchers increasingly discover that a vast range of species can not only make use of various forms of symbolic communication, but that individuals in many species have complex internal existences intimately related to wider group dynamics. These aren't societies, we think, but there seems to be something there. None of this has kept us from engaging in factory farming, though. Empathy has certain limits. In my most recent news posting at Century 22 PBEM, I point out the consequences of this. It seems that France was allowing private business to experiment freely in uplift experiments on animals without actually imposing any ethical safeguards. The expected horrors happened, and the people are outraged.
I've stated before that I'm worried by transhumanism in part because transhumanists don't seem to have thought of the proper ethical safeguards, relating to uplifted animals and radically altered human beings and other sophonts, potential and otherwise. Francis Fukuyama is annoying, but at least in his Our Posthuman Future he has tried to set up some safeguards.
We really, really, need to think about what we're doing.
leex was kind enough to point out this article criticizing Searle's argument, while the other commenters noted that the existence of consciousness in an individual can't be confirmed. Were I a psychopath, I might quite readily conclude that no one in the universe apart from me was truly sentient. We know this to be wrong, or at least we assume this to be wrong, because every conceivably sentient being we've been able to converse with belongs to a single species composed of multiple intermingling and interfertile populations with certain basic behavioural commonalities.What happens, though, when things begin breaking down? Researchers increasingly discover that a vast range of species can not only make use of various forms of symbolic communication, but that individuals in many species have complex internal existences intimately related to wider group dynamics. These aren't societies, we think, but there seems to be something there. None of this has kept us from engaging in factory farming, though. Empathy has certain limits. In my most recent news posting at Century 22 PBEM, I point out the consequences of this. It seems that France was allowing private business to experiment freely in uplift experiments on animals without actually imposing any ethical safeguards. The expected horrors happened, and the people are outraged.
I've stated before that I'm worried by transhumanism in part because transhumanists don't seem to have thought of the proper ethical safeguards, relating to uplifted animals and radically altered human beings and other sophonts, potential and otherwise. Francis Fukuyama is annoying, but at least in his Our Posthuman Future he has tried to set up some safeguards.
We really, really, need to think about what we're doing.
