I know all about philosophical zombies.
Agreed. I don't have any easy answer to this question.
Do you have any answer at all? Or anything to say on the matter? Would you at least agree that it is of critical ethical importance, and hence worthy of discussion?
And it's possible that you and I would disagree on how to carve reality in to that which has preferences we consider meaningful vs that which doesn't.
Of course, but I assume you agree with me about the program I wrote?
In any case, I think it would be nice to try and forge some agreement and/or understanding on this matter (as opposed to ignoring it on the basis of our disagreement).
Do you have any answer at all? Or anything to say on the matter?
Regarding modern video game NPCs, I don't think they matter in most cases--I'm moderately less concerned about them than Brian Tomasik is, although I'm also pretty uncertain (and would want to study the way NPCs are typically programmed before making any kind of final judgement).
Of course, but I assume you agree with me about the program I wrote?
Yes, that was what I meant to communicate by "Agreed". :)
Having thought about this further, I think I'm more concerned with things t...
Panpsychism seems like a plausible theory of consciousness. It raises extreme challenges for establishing reasonable ethical criteria.
It seems to suggest that our ethics is very subjective: the "expanding circle" of Peter Singer would eventually (ideally) stretch to encompass all matter. But how are we to communicate with, e.g. rocks? Our ability to communicate with one another and our presumed ability to detect falsehood and empathize in a meaningful way allow us to ignore this challenge wrt other people.
One way to argue that this is not such a problem is to suggest that humans are simply very limited in our capacity as ethical beings, and that we are fundamentally limited in our perceptions of ethical truth to only be able to draw conclusions with any meaningful degree of certainty about other humans or animals (or maybe even life-forms, if you are optimistic).
But this is not very satisfying if we consider transhumanism. Are we to rely on AI to extrapolate our intuitions to the rest of matter? How do we know that our intuitions are correct (or do we even care? I do, personally...)? How can we tell if an AI is correctly extrapolating?