Multiheaded comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: Bakkot 02 January 2012 03:46:55AM 2 points [-]

One rough effort at such definition would be: "any post-birth member of a species whose adult members are intelligent and conscious", where "birth" can be replaced by an analogous Schelling point in the development in an alien species, or by an arbitrary chosen line at a similar stage of development, if no such Schelling point exists.

Problem: There's no particular reason to expect speciation to be as widespread or as clear-cut as it is in the case of Earth and humans in particular. Certainly not for machine intelligences.

It might so happen that there could be software written for the computer I'm typing this on which could give it intelligence and consciousness. (Unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility.) Should this machine be considered a person?

The reason I'm being so nit-picky is that what I consider the natural definition (namely, "an agent capable of intelligence and consciousness", or something like that) doesn't have this problem at all. I think it's a problem your definition has only because you were forced to deviate from the natural definition to include something that doesn't really seem like it belongs in that group - namely, newborns.

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 January 2012 08:33:32AM -1 points [-]

Should this machine be considered a person?

Well, yes. This seems obvious to me.

Comment author: Bakkot 02 January 2012 06:49:05PM 2 points [-]

I think I must have been unclear - the machine I'm currently typing on should obviously be a person, just because it has the potential to become a person? That seems absurd to me.

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 January 2012 08:53:14PM 0 points [-]

Oh, of course. I've taken it that you were asking about a case where such software had indeed been installed on the machine. The potential of personhood on its own seems hardly worth anything to me.