I think perhaps the reason you don’t think your argument was properly considered in my comment is because I’m perhaps not understanding core parts of it? To be honest, I’m still quite confused after reading your response. It’s possible I just addressed the parts that I could understand, which happened to be what you considered to be more supplementary information. I’ll respond to your points here:
The “specifically” part is not precise, as it’s not just the presence of pain receptors but also behaviour to seek, avoid, make trade-offs, etc., and many other things. There’s a specific way I consider the inference people are making to be invalid.
I thought I listed all the ways in which you mentioned ways people infer sentience. The additional examples you give generally seem to fall under the “shallow behavioral observations” that I mentioned so I don’t see how I misconstrued your argument here.
I would like them to be what people consciously understand to be the reason of certain facts being evidence one way or another. Those are not specific factors, it was an attempt to describe possible indirect evidence.
I am very unclear on what these sentences are trying to convey.
I think if something talks about qualia without ever hearing about it from humans, you should strongly expect it to have qualia. I wouldn’t generalise this to the automatic inclusion of the whole species, as it would be a weaker statement and I can imagine edge cases.
I broadly do agree with this being strong support for possessing qualia. Do you agree with my point that talking about qualia is a very human-centric metric that may miss many cases of beings possessing qualia, such as all babies and most animals? If so, then it seems to be a pretty superfluous thing to mention in cases of uncertain sentience.
It is not just about a lack of evidence, it is about a fundamentally invalid way of thinking shrimp have subjective experience in the first place, and I don’t think there’s enough valid evidence for subjective experience in shrimp. The evidence people tend to cite is not valid.
And it was not what I was trying to say, but it might still be valuable to reply to your comment.
I would really appreciate if you would lay out the evidence that people cite and why you think it is invalid. What I saw in the post were the weakest arguments and not reflective of what the research papers cite, which is a much more nuanced approach. At no point in the post did you bring up the stronger arguments so I figured you were basing your conclusions off of things that EAs have mentioned to you in conversation.
I’m guessing the thing you are saying was “not what I was trying to say,” was referring to “It’s OK to eat shrimp.” I’m only 80% certain this is what you were trying to say so forgive me if the following is a misrepresentation. For me, it seemed reasonable to infer that was what you are trying to say since it is in the title of your post and at the end you also state, “I hope some people would update and, by default, not consider that things they don’t expect to talk about qualia can have qualia.” That last statement leads me to believe you are saying, “since you wouldn’t expect shrimp to talk about qualia, then just assume they don’t and that it is OK to eat them.”
The first time I wanted to write this post was a couple of years ago when I saw Rethink Priorities research using many markers that have approximately nothing to do with meaningful evidence for the existence of experience of pain.
I don’t understand how the evidence is not meaningful. You did explain any of their markers in your post. Presenting the context of the markers seems pretty important too.
I’ll skip some parts I don’t have responses to for brevity.
It’s maybe okay to defer to them and feel free to eat biological organisms from Earth without [neuroanatomical structures], although I’m not a biologist to verify.
Note that the presence of these things doesn’t say much unless you have reasons to believe their evolutionary role is tied to the role of qualia. It is Bayesian evidence if you didn’t know anything about a thing and now know it has these properties, but most of it is probably due to (8 billion humans + many mammals and maybe birds) : all things with it compared to all things without it, including rocks or something.
I’m not a biologist either, but I do defer to the researchers who study sentience. It seems reasonable to assume that the role of some neuroanatomical structures are evolutionarily tied with the evolutionary role of qualia since the former is necessary for the later to exist. I’m not clear on the point that the later half of the second paragraph is making with regards to the Bayesian evidence.
Long-term behaviour alterations to avoid what got you an immediate big negative reward is a really helpful adaptation, but how is also having qualia more helpful? Taking the presence of things like that as meaningful evidence for subjective experience is exactly what shows confusion about ways to make valid inferences and surprised me about Rethink’s research a couple of years ago. These things are helpful for a reinforcement learning agent to learn; you need to explain how having qualia is additionally helpful/makes it easier to implement those/is a side effect of implementing those adaptations. Until you have not, this does not provide additional evidence after you know you’re talking about an RL adaptation, if you screen off the increased probability of talking about humans or mammals/birds/things we have other evidence about. (And I think some bacteria might have defensive behaviour and fighting back and moving away from certain things, though I’m not a biologist/might be wrong/didn’t google sources for that background sort-of-maybe-knowledge.)
I don’t think that Rethink was trying to say that long term behavioral adaptations were on their own meaningful evidence for subjective experience. It is usually considered in context with other indicators of sentience to tip the scales towards or away from sentience. In one of their reports, they even say, “Whether invertebrates have a capacity for valenced experience is still uncertain.”
Starting from the part where you mention reinforcement learning is where I start to lose track of what your argument is.
Indicators are correlated, and a lot of them are not valid evidence if you’ve already conditioned on states of valid evidence.
I’m not sure what “conditioned on states of valid evidence” means here.
Yep. I want people to make valid experiments instead.
Perhaps it would be more epistemically accurate to say that you want people to make experiments that are up to your standard. Just because some experiments fall short of your bar doesn’t mean that they are not “valid”.
I don’t have reasons to believe newborn babies experience pain, but it is probably a good idea to use anaesthesia, as the stress (without any experience of pain) might have a negative impact on the future development of the baby.
Well I commend you on your moral consistency here.
Wanna bet fish don’t talk about having subjective experiences?
“Talking” is a pretty anthropocentric means of communication. Animals (including fish) have other modes of communication that we are only starting to understand. Plus, talking is only a small part of overall human communication as we are able to say a lot more through nonverbal signals.
I think for most of the UK history, the existence of god is also recognised by law (at least implicitly? and maybe it is still?). How is that evidence?
Also, I don’t eat octopuses.
This seems like a pretty bad faith argument and false analogy. The process of getting legal recognition of invertebrate sentience and the historical legal recognition of God relied on different evidence and methodology.
Nope, I have read a bunch of stuff written by Rethink and I think they should rethink their approach.
Why not reference Rethink more in your post then? The very first sentence talks about conversations you’ve had and some pretty ridiculous things people have mentioned like the possibility of balloons having sentience. Also, the title references “EA’s” who make invalid inferences. I think this misleads the reader into thinking that conversations with EA’s are what make up the basis of your argument. If you want to make a rebuttal to Rethink, then use their examples and break down their arguments.
If I were to make my best attempt to understand your core argument, I would start from this:
TL;DR: If a being can describe qualia, we know this is caused by qualia existing somewhere. So we can be pretty sure that humans have qualia. But when our brains identify emotions in things, they can think both humans and geometric shapes in cartoons are feeling something. When we look at humans and feel like they feel something, we know that this feeling is probably correct, because we can make a valid inference that humans have qualia (because they would talk about having conscious experiences). When we look at non-human things, this recognition of feeling in others is no longer linked to a valid way of inferring that these others have qualia, and we need other evidence.
To me, this essentially translates into:
Valid Method of Inference: subject can describe their qualia, therefore have qualia Invalid Method of Inference: subject makes humans feel like they have qualia, therefore have qualia
Your argument here is that EA’s cannot rely on these invalid methods of inference to determine presence of qualia in subjects, which seems reasonable. However, it seems like a pretty large leap to then go on to say that the current scientific evidence (which is not fully addressed in the post) is not valid and we should believe it is ok to eat shrimp.
Research compiled by Rethink has only been used to update the overall estimated likelihood of sentience, not as a silver bullet for determining the presence of sentience. For example, the thing that has pain receptors is more likely to be able to experience pain than the thing without pain receptors. And if there is reasonable uncertainty regarding sentience, then shouldn’t the conclusion be to promote a cautious approach to invertebrate consumption?
Apologies again for not understanding the core of your position here. I tried my best, but I am probably still missing important pieces of it.
I think perhaps the reason you don’t think your argument was properly considered in my comment is because I’m perhaps not understanding core parts of it? To be honest, I’m still quite confused after reading your response. It’s possible I just addressed the parts that I could understand, which happened to be what you considered to be more supplementary information. I’ll respond to your points here:
I thought I listed all the ways in which you mentioned ways people infer sentience. The additional examples you give generally seem to fall under the “shallow behavioral observations” that I mentioned so I don’t see how I misconstrued your argument here.
I am very unclear on what these sentences are trying to convey.
I broadly do agree with this being strong support for possessing qualia. Do you agree with my point that talking about qualia is a very human-centric metric that may miss many cases of beings possessing qualia, such as all babies and most animals? If so, then it seems to be a pretty superfluous thing to mention in cases of uncertain sentience.
I would really appreciate if you would lay out the evidence that people cite and why you think it is invalid. What I saw in the post were the weakest arguments and not reflective of what the research papers cite, which is a much more nuanced approach. At no point in the post did you bring up the stronger arguments so I figured you were basing your conclusions off of things that EAs have mentioned to you in conversation.
I’m guessing the thing you are saying was “not what I was trying to say,” was referring to “It’s OK to eat shrimp.” I’m only 80% certain this is what you were trying to say so forgive me if the following is a misrepresentation. For me, it seemed reasonable to infer that was what you are trying to say since it is in the title of your post and at the end you also state, “I hope some people would update and, by default, not consider that things they don’t expect to talk about qualia can have qualia.” That last statement leads me to believe you are saying, “since you wouldn’t expect shrimp to talk about qualia, then just assume they don’t and that it is OK to eat them.”
I don’t understand how the evidence is not meaningful. You did explain any of their markers in your post. Presenting the context of the markers seems pretty important too.
I’ll skip some parts I don’t have responses to for brevity.
I’m not a biologist either, but I do defer to the researchers who study sentience. It seems reasonable to assume that the role of some neuroanatomical structures are evolutionarily tied with the evolutionary role of qualia since the former is necessary for the later to exist. I’m not clear on the point that the later half of the second paragraph is making with regards to the Bayesian evidence.
I don’t think that Rethink was trying to say that long term behavioral adaptations were on their own meaningful evidence for subjective experience. It is usually considered in context with other indicators of sentience to tip the scales towards or away from sentience. In one of their reports, they even say, “Whether invertebrates have a capacity for valenced experience is still uncertain.”
Starting from the part where you mention reinforcement learning is where I start to lose track of what your argument is.
I’m not sure what “conditioned on states of valid evidence” means here.
Perhaps it would be more epistemically accurate to say that you want people to make experiments that are up to your standard. Just because some experiments fall short of your bar doesn’t mean that they are not “valid”.
Well I commend you on your moral consistency here.
“Talking” is a pretty anthropocentric means of communication. Animals (including fish) have other modes of communication that we are only starting to understand. Plus, talking is only a small part of overall human communication as we are able to say a lot more through nonverbal signals.
This seems like a pretty bad faith argument and false analogy. The process of getting legal recognition of invertebrate sentience and the historical legal recognition of God relied on different evidence and methodology.
Why not reference Rethink more in your post then? The very first sentence talks about conversations you’ve had and some pretty ridiculous things people have mentioned like the possibility of balloons having sentience. Also, the title references “EA’s” who make invalid inferences. I think this misleads the reader into thinking that conversations with EA’s are what make up the basis of your argument. If you want to make a rebuttal to Rethink, then use their examples and break down their arguments.
If I were to make my best attempt to understand your core argument, I would start from this:
To me, this essentially translates into:
Valid Method of Inference: subject can describe their qualia, therefore have qualia
Invalid Method of Inference: subject makes humans feel like they have qualia, therefore have qualia
Your argument here is that EA’s cannot rely on these invalid methods of inference to determine presence of qualia in subjects, which seems reasonable. However, it seems like a pretty large leap to then go on to say that the current scientific evidence (which is not fully addressed in the post) is not valid and we should believe it is ok to eat shrimp.
Research compiled by Rethink has only been used to update the overall estimated likelihood of sentience, not as a silver bullet for determining the presence of sentience. For example, the thing that has pain receptors is more likely to be able to experience pain than the thing without pain receptors. And if there is reasonable uncertainty regarding sentience, then shouldn’t the conclusion be to promote a cautious approach to invertebrate consumption?
Apologies again for not understanding the core of your position here. I tried my best, but I am probably still missing important pieces of it.