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Desrtopa 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?
Sentient vs. Sapient is one of the most common word confusions in the English language. If someone says "sentient," but the context appears to suggest "sapient," they probably mean sapient.
The bit about that that's bothering me is "sapient" is a term of art -- it's science fiction shorthand employed with a purpose (it denotes personhood for the reader, in a field where blatantly-nonhuman but unambiguously-personlike entities are common). It divides the field of hypothetical entities into two neat, clean categories: people no matter what their substrate, appearance, anatomy or drives, and everything from animals of every sort to plants and grains of sand.
It just seems like a weird way of dividing up the world, and more of a cultural artefact than anything; a marker on the map which corresponds to nothing in the territory.