I guess I’m confused about the relationship between digital sentience & invertebrate sentience.
Indeed, all research on sentience is helpful for doing research on any other kind of sentience.
Could you expand on this more?
Seems like you’re saying something similar to “doing work on one philosophical question is helpful to all other philosophical questions”, which I probably disagree with though haven’t thought about closely.
Work on digital sentience probably has to think a lot about e.g. the Chinese room, whereas I imagine invertebrate sentience work as thinking more about the border between animals that seem clearly sentient and animals that we’re unsure about.
I think it’s somewhat stronger than “doing work on one philosophical question is relevant to all other philosophical questions.”
I guess if you were particularly sceptical about the possibility of digital sentience then you might focus on things like the Chinese room thought experiment, and that wouldn’t have that much overlap with invertebrate sentience research. I’m relatively confident that digital sentience is possible so I wasn’t really thinking about that when I made the claim that there is substantial overlap in all sentience research.
Some ways in which I think there is overlap are that looking at different potential cases of sentience can give us insight into which features give the best evidence of sentience. For example, many people think that mirror self-recognition is somehow important to sentience, but reflecting on the fact that you can specifically design a robot to pass something like a mirror test can give you perspective as to what aspects if any other test are actually suggestive of sentience.
Getting a better idea of what sentience is and what theories of it are most plausible is also useful for assessing sentience in any entity. One way of getting a better idea of what it is is to research cases of it that we are more confident in such as humans and to a lesser extent other vertebrates.
I guess I’m confused about the relationship between digital sentience & invertebrate sentience.
Could you expand on this more?
Seems like you’re saying something similar to “doing work on one philosophical question is helpful to all other philosophical questions”, which I probably disagree with though haven’t thought about closely.
Work on digital sentience probably has to think a lot about e.g. the Chinese room, whereas I imagine invertebrate sentience work as thinking more about the border between animals that seem clearly sentient and animals that we’re unsure about.
I think it’s somewhat stronger than “doing work on one philosophical question is relevant to all other philosophical questions.”
I guess if you were particularly sceptical about the possibility of digital sentience then you might focus on things like the Chinese room thought experiment, and that wouldn’t have that much overlap with invertebrate sentience research. I’m relatively confident that digital sentience is possible so I wasn’t really thinking about that when I made the claim that there is substantial overlap in all sentience research.
Some ways in which I think there is overlap are that looking at different potential cases of sentience can give us insight into which features give the best evidence of sentience. For example, many people think that mirror self-recognition is somehow important to sentience, but reflecting on the fact that you can specifically design a robot to pass something like a mirror test can give you perspective as to what aspects if any other test are actually suggestive of sentience.
Getting a better idea of what sentience is and what theories of it are most plausible is also useful for assessing sentience in any entity. One way of getting a better idea of what it is is to research cases of it that we are more confident in such as humans and to a lesser extent other vertebrates.
Reflecting on the mirror test—nice pun!
I see – I was imagining more skepticism about the possibility of digital sentience.
This recent book review about octopus consciousness on LessWrong might be helpful.
Thanks for the link! I’m a pretty big fan of that book.