Firstly, it seems more accurate to say that the standard default belief is that video characters possess awareness. That the vast majority rationalize their default belief as false doesn't change that.
Secondly, that's argumentum ad populum, which is evidence -- Common beliefs do seem to be usually true-- but not very strong evidence. I asked why you're as confident in your belief as you are. Are you as convinced of this belief as you are of most beliefs held by 99.99% of people? If you're more (or less) convinced, why is that?
Thirdly, you seem to be descri...
I said no such thing.
There is a way in which people believe video game characters, tigers, and human beings to be conscious. That doesn't preclude believing in another way that any of them is conscious.
Tigers are obviously conscious in the no-nonsense sense. I don't think anything is conscious in the philosobabble sense, i.e. I don't believe in souls, even if they're not called souls; see my reply to arundelo. I'm not sure which sense you consider to be the "ordinary" one; "conscious" isn't exactly an everyday word, in my experience.
Vid...
But saying that e.g. rats are not sentient in the context of concern about the treatment of sentient beings is like saying that Negroes are not men in the context of the Declaration of Independence. Not only are the purely semantic aspects dubious, but excluding entities from a moral category on semantic grounds seems like a severe mistake regardless.
Words like "sentience" and especially "consciousness" are often used to refer to the soul without sounding dogmatic about it. You can tell this from the ways people use them: "Would a ...
It seems that you anticipate as if you believe in something that you don't believe you believe.
It's in that anticipatory, non-declarative sense that one believes in the awareness of tigers as well as video game characters, regardless of one's declarative beliefs, and even if one has no time for declarative beliefs.
"Is a human mind the simplest possible mind that can be sentient?" Of course not. Plenty of creatures with simpler minds are plainly sentient. If a tiger suddenly leaps out at you, you don't operate on the assumption that the tiger lacks awareness; you assume that the tiger is aware of you. Nor do you think "This tiger may behave as if it has subjective experiences, but that doesn't mean that it actually possesses internal mental states meaningfully analogous to wwhhaaaa CRUNCH CRUNCH GULP." To borrow from one of your own earlier argume...
Eliezer suggested that, in order to avoid acting unethically, we should refrain from casually dismissing the possibility that other entities are sentient. I responded that I think that's a very good idea and we should actually implement it. Implementing that idea means questioning assumptions that entities aren't sentient. One tool for questioning assumptions is asking "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" Or, in less binary terms, why do you assign things the probabilities that you do?
Now do you see the relevance of ask... (read more)