Thanks for taking the time to expose your view clearly here, and explaining why you do not spend a lot of time on the topic (which I respect).
If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to “I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)”.
While nobody disputes that, I find it weird that your conclusion is not “I’m very uncertain about other systems”, but “other systems that cannot tell me directly about their inner experience (very small children, animals) probably don’t have any relevant inner experience”. I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion. At the very least, this would justify extreme uncertainty.
Personally, I think that the fact that animals display a lot of behaviour similar to humans in similar situations should be a significant update toward thinking they have some kind of experience. For instance, a pig is screaming and trying to escape when it is castrated, just as humans would do (we have to observe behaviours).
We can probably build robots that can do the same thing, but that just means we’re good at mimicking other life forms (for instance, we can also build LLMs which tell us they are conscious, and we don’t use that to think humans are not sentient).
If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to “I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)”.
I don’t think this is what Jeff believes, though I guess his literal words are consistent with this interpretation.
Thanks for taking the time to expose your view clearly here, and explaining why you do not spend a lot of time on the topic (which I respect).
If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to “I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)”.
While nobody disputes that, I find it weird that your conclusion is not “I’m very uncertain about other systems”, but “other systems that cannot tell me directly about their inner experience (very small children, animals) probably don’t have any relevant inner experience”. I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion. At the very least, this would justify extreme uncertainty.
Personally, I think that the fact that animals display a lot of behaviour similar to humans in similar situations should be a significant update toward thinking they have some kind of experience. For instance, a pig is screaming and trying to escape when it is castrated, just as humans would do (we have to observe behaviours).
We can probably build robots that can do the same thing, but that just means we’re good at mimicking other life forms (for instance, we can also build LLMs which tell us they are conscious, and we don’t use that to think humans are not sentient).
I don’t think this is what Jeff believes, though I guess his literal words are consistent with this interpretation.