Thank you! Links in articles such as this just weren’t working.
This is the relevant David Pearce comment I was referring to which Yudkowsky just ignored despite continuing to respond to less challenging comments:
Some errors are potentially ethically catastrophic. This is one of them. Many of our most intensely conscious experiences occur when meta-cognition or reflective self-awareness fails. Thus in orgasm, for instance, much of the neocortex effectively shuts down. Or compare a mounting sense of panic. As an intense feeling of panic becomes uncontrollable, are we to theorise that the experience somehow ceases to be unpleasant as the capacity for reflective self-awareness is lost? “Blind” panic induced by e.g. a sense of suffocation, or fleeing a fire in a crowded cinema (etc), is one of the most unpleasant experiences anyone can undergo, regardless or race or species. Also, compare microelectrode neural studies of awake subjects probing different brain regions; stimulating various regions of the “primitive” limbic system elicits the most intense experiences. And compare dreams – not least, nightmares – many of which are emotionally intense and characterised precisely by the lack of reflectivity or critical meta-cognitive capacity that we enjoy in waking life.
Anyone who cares about sentience-friendly intelligence should not harm our fellow subjects of experience. Shutting down factory farms and slaughterhouses will eliminate one of the world’s worst forms of severe and readily avoidable suffering.
Thank you! Links in articles such as this just weren’t working.
This is the relevant David Pearce comment I was referring to which Yudkowsky just ignored despite continuing to respond to less challenging comments: