Mikhail gave me a chance to read this ahead of time, but I didn’t get it together to give comments before he posted it. He should get credit for that.
On the whole it seems like this is argument about burden of proof or what we should assume given that we don’t know the real answer. Mikhail seems to say we’re jumping to conclusions when we attribute qualia to others when only talking about qualia is really good evidence. I think most animals between humans and cnidarians on the tree of life should be assumed to have qualia because there isn’t a clear function for qualia in humans that isn’t shared with other animals with brains. (It’s possible qualia are a weird, unnecessary part of the way the mammal brain works, but not, say, the insect brain, but I see no reason to think qualia are only part of the human brain.) I think we should assume other animals phylogenetically close to us also have qualia, and there’s a legitimate question of how far that assumption should go. (“Sentience indicators” are a way of systematizing whether or not other animals are close enough to the only example we know of qualia, humans.) Should it cover shrimp? I think we can’t rule out shrimp qualia, and there are just so many individual shrimp that are harvested because of their small size, so even very diminished experiences seem like they might add up.
Note that we don’t infer that humans have qualia because they all have “pain receptors”: mechanisms that, when activated in us, make us feel pain; we infer that other humans have qualia because they can talk about qualia.
Yeah we look to criteria like this because we can’t talk to animals. I would be much more skeptical that something without physical receptors for tissue damage feels pain. There are many life forms that do not have pain receptors and they are generally ruled out as having meaningfully negative experience even though we don’t know the relationship of qualia and sentience to sensory perceptions for sure.
Having reactions to positive and negative rewards in ways that make the brain more likely to get positive rewards in the future and less likely to get negative rewards in the future is a really useful mechanism that evolution came up with. These mechanisms of reacting to rewards don’t require the qualia circuits.
Yeah, but qualia could just accompany reinforcement learning mechanisms for some reason we don’t yet know (we don’t yet know any reason qualia are necessary or useful over mere unconscious reinforcement), or they could be like a form of common currency for weighing various inputs and coming to a decision. Qualia are not required for anything as far as we know so I don’t think there’s any principled reason to say humans have them but no one else does.
when we see animals reacting to something, our brains rush to expect there’s something experiencing that reaction in these animals, and we feel like these animals are experiencing something. But actually, we don’t know whether there are neural circuits running qualia in these animals at all, and so we don’t know whether whatever reactions we observe are experienced by some circuits. The feeling that animals are experiencing something doesn’t point towards evidence that they’re actually experiencing something.
This is one reason we may be biased to interpret animals as having qualia. But I have a strong presupposition that at least species phylogenetically close to me have qualia as well. Why would qualia only start with humans? Humans do some unusual things but I have no reason to think qualia are particularly involved in them.
might give evidence for whether fish feel empathy (feel what they model others feeling), something I expect to be correlated with qualia[4]
I’m surprised this would change your mind. Why is empathy in the brain any different than pain receptors? We don’t know the relationship of either to qualia/sentience.
Mikhail gave me a chance to read this ahead of time, but I didn’t get it together to give comments before he posted it. He should get credit for that.
On the whole it seems like this is argument about burden of proof or what we should assume given that we don’t know the real answer. Mikhail seems to say we’re jumping to conclusions when we attribute qualia to others when only talking about qualia is really good evidence. I think most animals between humans and cnidarians on the tree of life should be assumed to have qualia because there isn’t a clear function for qualia in humans that isn’t shared with other animals with brains. (It’s possible qualia are a weird, unnecessary part of the way the mammal brain works, but not, say, the insect brain, but I see no reason to think qualia are only part of the human brain.) I think we should assume other animals phylogenetically close to us also have qualia, and there’s a legitimate question of how far that assumption should go. (“Sentience indicators” are a way of systematizing whether or not other animals are close enough to the only example we know of qualia, humans.) Should it cover shrimp? I think we can’t rule out shrimp qualia, and there are just so many individual shrimp that are harvested because of their small size, so even very diminished experiences seem like they might add up.
Yeah we look to criteria like this because we can’t talk to animals. I would be much more skeptical that something without physical receptors for tissue damage feels pain. There are many life forms that do not have pain receptors and they are generally ruled out as having meaningfully negative experience even though we don’t know the relationship of qualia and sentience to sensory perceptions for sure.
Yeah, but qualia could just accompany reinforcement learning mechanisms for some reason we don’t yet know (we don’t yet know any reason qualia are necessary or useful over mere unconscious reinforcement), or they could be like a form of common currency for weighing various inputs and coming to a decision. Qualia are not required for anything as far as we know so I don’t think there’s any principled reason to say humans have them but no one else does.
This is one reason we may be biased to interpret animals as having qualia. But I have a strong presupposition that at least species phylogenetically close to me have qualia as well. Why would qualia only start with humans? Humans do some unusual things but I have no reason to think qualia are particularly involved in them.
I’m surprised this would change your mind. Why is empathy in the brain any different than pain receptors? We don’t know the relationship of either to qualia/sentience.