hen comments on Why Bayes? A Wise Ruling - Less Wrong
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Bizarre. In lieu of a reply by Eliezer himself clarifying things, I am left to understand he thinks that some portion of humans otherwise possessing the structural and anatomical necessities for sensation don't experience anything even when all their sense organs are working fine, and that animals in general are basically just meat-automata with no inner life at all. Even when they're communicating about those inner states and have the same structural correlates of various sensations we'd expect to see, and react in ways that sure look like expression of sensation or emotion (even if you sometimes need to be familiar with their particular body language).
That feels a lot more like a strawman than anything, because it's just so obviously bollocks. If I step on my cat's tail by mistake, she doesn't yowl and run from me because "Nociceptor activation threshold met; initiate yowl-and-run subroutine." She does it because it's painful and it startled her. I know there are people who honestly believe something like that about nonhuman life across the board, but I hadn't gotten the impression Eliezer was one.
Someone clear this up for me?
People often use 'sentient' to mean 'sapient', and it may be that Eliezer intends the latter. It's at least pretty plausible that animals and very young infants are not sapient, namely not capable of judgement, and that this capacity is what would endow one with a certain autonomy.
"Soul", gotcha. Binary personhood marker. Reified concept not sufficiently unpacked. Okie.
That's a rather uncharitable misinterpretation of what hen wrote, caused by anger and frustration, I'm guessing.
No, just the expressed befuddlement.
I respectfully disagree, sapience is an acquired subjective quality, therefore it is trivial to disregard. Now sentience is orders of magnitude more complex. I was going to say “inherent” to the species, but is it? Now this is supposed to be “the easy problem” go figure that.