Regarding paperclippers: in addition to what Pumo said in their reply concerning mutual alignment (and what will be said in Part 2), I’d say that stupid goals are stupid goals independent of sentience. I wouldn’t altruistically devote resources to helping a non-sentient AI make a billion paperclips for the exact same reason that I wouldn’t altruistically devote resources to helping some human autist make a billion paperclips. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your objection; possibly your objection is something more like “if we unmoor moral value from qualia, there’s nothing left to ground it in and the result is absurdity”. For now I’ll just say that we are definitely not asserting “all agents have equal moral status”, or “all goals are equal/interchangeable” (indeed, Part 2 asserts the opposite).
Regarding ‘why should I care about the blindmind for-its-own-sake?’, here’s another way to get there:
My understanding is that there are two primary competing views which assign non-sentient agents zero moral status:
1. Choice/preference (even of sentient beings) of a moral patient isn’t inherently relevant, qualia valence is everything (e.g. we should tile the universe in hedonium), e.g. hedonic utilitarianism. We don’t address this view much in the essay, except to point out that a) most people don’t believe this, and b) to whatever extent that this view results in totalizing hegemonic behavior, it sets the stage for mass conflict between believers of it and opponents of it (presumably including non-sentient agents). If we accept a priori something like ‘positive valenced qualia is the only fundamental good’, this view might at least be internally consistent (at which point I can only argue against the arbitrariness of accepting the a priori premise about qualia or argue against any system of values that appears to lead to it’s own defeat timelessly, though I realize the latter is a whole object-level debate to be had in and of itself).
2. Choice/preference fundamentally matters, but only if the chooser is also an experiencer. This seems like the more common view, e.g. (sentientist) preference utilitarianism. a) I think it can be shown that the ‘experience’ part of that is not load-bearing in a justifiable way, which I’ll address more below, and b) this suffers from the same practical problem as (b) above, though less severely.
#2 raises the question of “why would choice/preference-satisfaction have value independent of any particular valenced qualia, but not have value independent of qualia more generally?”. If you posit that the value of preference-satisfaction is wholly instrumental insofar as having your preferences satisfied generates some positive-valence qualia, this view just collapses back to #1. If you instead hold that preference-satisfaction is inherently (non-instrumentally) morally valuable by virtue of the preference-holder having qualia, even if only neutral-valenced qualia with regard to the preference… why? What morally-relevant work is the qualia doing and/or what is the posited morally-relevant connection between the (neutral) qualia and the preference? Why would the (valence-neutral) satisfaction of the preference have more value than just some other neutral qualia existing on it’s own while the preference goes un-satisfied? It seems to me like at this point we aren’t talking about ‘feelings’ (which exist in the domain of qualia) anymore, we’re talking about ‘choices and preferences’ (which are concepts within the domain of agency). To restate: The neutral qualia sitting alongside the preference or the satisfaction of the preference isn’t doing anything, or else (if the existence of the qualia is what is actually important) the preference itself doesn’t appear to be *doing* anything in which case preference satisfaction is not inherently important.
So the argument is that if you already attribute value to the preference satisfaction of sentient beings independent of their valenced qualia (e.g. if you would, for non-instrumental reasons, respect the stated preferences of some stranger even if you were highly confident that you could induce higher net-positive valence in them by not respecting their preferences), then you are already valuing something that really has nothing to do with their qualia. And thus there’s not as large of an intuition gap on the way to agential moral value as there at first seemed to be. Granted, this only applies to anyone who valued preference satisfaction in the first place.
I see where you’re coming from.
Regarding paperclippers: in addition to what Pumo said in their reply concerning mutual alignment (and what will be said in Part 2), I’d say that stupid goals are stupid goals independent of sentience. I wouldn’t altruistically devote resources to helping a non-sentient AI make a billion paperclips for the exact same reason that I wouldn’t altruistically devote resources to helping some human autist make a billion paperclips. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your objection; possibly your objection is something more like “if we unmoor moral value from qualia, there’s nothing left to ground it in and the result is absurdity”. For now I’ll just say that we are definitely not asserting “all agents have equal moral status”, or “all goals are equal/interchangeable” (indeed, Part 2 asserts the opposite).
Regarding ‘why should I care about the blindmind for-its-own-sake?’, here’s another way to get there:
My understanding is that there are two primary competing views which assign non-sentient agents zero moral status:
1. Choice/preference (even of sentient beings) of a moral patient isn’t inherently relevant, qualia valence is everything (e.g. we should tile the universe in hedonium), e.g. hedonic utilitarianism. We don’t address this view much in the essay, except to point out that a) most people don’t believe this, and b) to whatever extent that this view results in totalizing hegemonic behavior, it sets the stage for mass conflict between believers of it and opponents of it (presumably including non-sentient agents). If we accept a priori something like ‘positive valenced qualia is the only fundamental good’, this view might at least be internally consistent (at which point I can only argue against the arbitrariness of accepting the a priori premise about qualia or argue against any system of values that appears to lead to it’s own defeat timelessly, though I realize the latter is a whole object-level debate to be had in and of itself).
2. Choice/preference fundamentally matters, but only if the chooser is also an experiencer. This seems like the more common view, e.g. (sentientist) preference utilitarianism. a) I think it can be shown that the ‘experience’ part of that is not load-bearing in a justifiable way, which I’ll address more below, and b) this suffers from the same practical problem as (b) above, though less severely.
#2 raises the question of “why would choice/preference-satisfaction have value independent of any particular valenced qualia, but not have value independent of qualia more generally?”. If you posit that the value of preference-satisfaction is wholly instrumental insofar as having your preferences satisfied generates some positive-valence qualia, this view just collapses back to #1. If you instead hold that preference-satisfaction is inherently (non-instrumentally) morally valuable by virtue of the preference-holder having qualia, even if only neutral-valenced qualia with regard to the preference… why? What morally-relevant work is the qualia doing and/or what is the posited morally-relevant connection between the (neutral) qualia and the preference? Why would the (valence-neutral) satisfaction of the preference have more value than just some other neutral qualia existing on it’s own while the preference goes un-satisfied? It seems to me like at this point we aren’t talking about ‘feelings’ (which exist in the domain of qualia) anymore, we’re talking about ‘choices and preferences’ (which are concepts within the domain of agency). To restate: The neutral qualia sitting alongside the preference or the satisfaction of the preference isn’t doing anything, or else (if the existence of the qualia is what is actually important) the preference itself doesn’t appear to be *doing* anything in which case preference satisfaction is not inherently important.
So the argument is that if you already attribute value to the preference satisfaction of sentient beings independent of their valenced qualia (e.g. if you would, for non-instrumental reasons, respect the stated preferences of some stranger even if you were highly confident that you could induce higher net-positive valence in them by not respecting their preferences), then you are already valuing something that really has nothing to do with their qualia. And thus there’s not as large of an intuition gap on the way to agential moral value as there at first seemed to be. Granted, this only applies to anyone who valued preference satisfaction in the first place.