Iâm having trouble imagining what it would mean to have moral value without consciousness or sentience. Trying to put it together from the two posts you linked:
The definition of sentience from your post:
Sentience: a specific subset of phenomenal consciousness, subjective experiences with positive or negative valence. Pleasures like bodily pleasures and contentment have positive valence, and displeasures like pain or sadness have negative valence.
The key claim in Nico Delonâs post:
Step 1. We can conceive of beings who lack sentience but whose lives are sites of valence;
Is the idea here that you can subtract off the experience part of sentience and keep the valence without having anyone to experience it (in the same way that âenergyâ is a physical property that doesnât require someone to experience it)? Or do you think about this in another way (such as including moral theories that are not valence-based)?
Iâm having trouble imagining what it would mean to have moral value without consciousness or sentience. Trying to put it together from the two posts you linked:
The definition of sentience from your post:
The key claim in Nico Delonâs post:
Is the idea here that you can subtract off the experience part of sentience and keep the valence without having anyone to experience it (in the same way that âenergyâ is a physical property that doesnât require someone to experience it)? Or do you think about this in another way (such as including moral theories that are not valence-based)?
I grasped it more like you can have experience but not connected to other processes enough to form a thing/âprocess weâd call sentience.
Maybe Iâm aligning the explanation to my own writeup on that topic too much..:)