I take this as meaning that you agree that accepting functionalism is orthogonal to the question of whether suffering is “real” or not?
Ah, the opposite actually- my expectation is that if ‘consciousness’ isn’t real, ‘suffering’ can’t be real either.
What something better would look like—if I knew that, I’d be busy writing a paper about it. :-) That seems to be a part of the problem—everyone (that I know of) agrees that functionalism is deeply unsatisfactory, but very few people seem to have any clue of what a better theory might look like. Off the top of my head, I’d like such a theory to at least be able to offer some insight into what exactly is conscious, and not have the issue where you can hypothesize all kinds of weird computations (like Aaronson did in your quote) and be left confused about which of them are conscious and which are not, and why. (roughly, my desiderata are similar to Luke Muehlhauser’s)
Thanks, this is helpful. :)
The following is tangential, but I thought you’d enjoy this Yuri Harari quote on abstraction and suffering:
In terms of power, it’s obvious that this ability [to create abstractions] made Homo sapiens the most powerful animal in the world, and now gives us control of the entire planet. From an ethical perspective, whether it was good or bad, that’s a far more complicated question. The key issue is that because our power depends on collective fictions, we are not good in distinguishing between fiction and reality. Humans find it very difficult to know what is real and what is just a fictional story in their own minds, and this causes a lot of disasters, wars and problems.
The best test to know whether an entity is real or fictional is the test of suffering. A nation cannot suffer, it cannot feel pain, it cannot feel fear, it has no consciousness. Even if it loses a war, the soldier suffers, the civilians suffer, but the nation cannot suffer. Similarly, a corporation cannot suffer, the pound sterling, when it loses its value, it doesn’t suffer. All these things, they’re fictions. If people bear in mind this distinction, it could improve the way we treat one another and the other animals. It’s not such a good idea to cause suffering to real entities in the service of fictional stories.
The quote seems very myopic. Let’s say that we have a religion X that has an excellent track record at preventing certain sorts of defections by helping people coordinate on enforcement costs. Suffering in the service of stabilizing this state of affairs may be the best use of resources in a given context.
I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
Ah, the opposite actually- my expectation is that if ‘consciousness’ isn’t real, ‘suffering’ can’t be real either.
Thanks, this is helpful. :)
The following is tangential, but I thought you’d enjoy this Yuri Harari quote on abstraction and suffering:
The quote seems very myopic. Let’s say that we have a religion X that has an excellent track record at preventing certain sorts of defections by helping people coordinate on enforcement costs. Suffering in the service of stabilizing this state of affairs may be the best use of resources in a given context.
I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
Yeah, S-risk minimizer being trivially exploitable etc.