sure, it just doesn’t particularly matter to me which parts are more or less conscious
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On its face, this position is genuinely baffling. Consciousness is arguable the thing that matters most, as its presence or absence almost exclusively drives our ethics and morality. If an AI is conscious, we probably shouldn’t torture it.
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I’m struggling to empathize with a view that’s essentially yes I care about physics just not the part that is the sole base of ethics and morality and feeling
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this is the part i think is deeply confused. i don't think consciousness has anything to do with the basis of ethics and morality and feeling
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do you think that any of the following have anything to do with the basis of ethics?
pain
suffering
desire
-maybe- consciousness doesn't have anything to do with those things, but it's an open question
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yeah sure. i'm not convinced consciousness has much to do with any of these things, except maybe suffering
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does this change if you switch out consciousness for qualia? Eg studying the qualia of desire and it’s causes (tanha etc) and how to alleviate it
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the concept of qualia feels confused to me in the same way that consciousness does. i don't think you can know that anything in the universe experiences qualia except you so it doesn't make any sense to me to use whether *other things* experience qualia as a foundation for ethics
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that comes down to how you know anything, and epistemology. I don’t think you can know anything for sure, including that you’ve experienced anything in the past. Best you can do is find good explanations. It’s hard to explain why this current frame exists w/o disproving solipsism
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by the time you’re deciding to discount consciousness you’ve already implicitly decided to know tons of things, that’s way past just directly seeing this frame of experience. You had to use some sort of implicit epistemology to decide those things too, it’s not different in kind
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yeah fair. i am sort of deliberately overstating my real objection in an inflammatory way and at some point i should say something more precise but again, i am really unsure how to put it into words, something just feels really off to me about the way other people talk about this
i often feel like people who talk about qualia are...shady. up to something. you ever get that sense?
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