Comments on Sentient Developments: Guest blogger David Pearce answers your questions ...

I see a very obvious problem with an ecosystem tha...

2009-05-01T13:47:17.145-04:00

I see a very obvious problem with an ecosystem that lacks predators, it would depend on highly advanced technology and there seems to be a direct relationship between how new a technology is and it's odds of catastrophic failure. All organisms are essentially Von Neuman machines, they seek to consume all available resources and replicate as much as possible. In the natural world there are two major limiting factors that prevent populations from increasing so high that the environment can't support them, predators and limited prey. Humans are capable of imposing limits on our population growth through means of our sapience and technology, but once the Industrial Revolution began and our natural limits began to disappear our world population doubled within a century, and in the century after that went from 2 billion to over 6 billion. An ecosystem without suffering would not only require every organism with even rudimentary nerves to be sapient but also require massive cultivation to support them, effective methods of birth control, and probably space travel. Of course you could upload everyone into a virtual universe but what happens if it crashes.

Hi Michael, The methods employed by evolution als...

2009-05-01T02:25:11.631-04:00

Hi Michael,

The methods employed by evolution also precluded input from its victims. This universal "blind selection" method which arbitrarily creates minds which undergo immense suffering is mind boggling.

If we have the ability to much with the genomes of...

2009-04-30T20:53:59.943-04:00

If we have the ability to much with the genomes of predators and replace them with something more to our liking, couldn't we much more easily provide them with stand in prey? Something that appears to be sentient, but is not? (Or do you object to video game violence too?)

Your ideas seem to me to necessarily preclude input from your victims. You argue for making fundamental changes to the nature of a being without its consent or even consultation. It's monstrous enough when applied to a single species, but this universal "abolitionist project" to preempt any future sapiences from evolving is mind boggling.

If some other species had done that to Earth a million years ago, there would be no homo sapiens to consider the idea

I've never understood what the difference could po...

2009-04-30T18:39:53.700-04:00

I've never understood what the difference could possibly be between "two" functionally identical monisms. That is to say, I reject the dichotomy between idealist and materialist as question-beggingly dependent on post-theoretical conceptions of material and ideal. If the units of microqualia interact in a manner identical to units of matter, then they're the same thing. Physics is just a formalization of observed dynamics, after all, supposing nothing about (apparently-inaccessible) essence.

Similarly, Chalmers' four-step proof of the falsity of materialism (The Conscious Mind, p123) based on the putative logical possibility of phenomenal zombies falls apart on step two if one accepts any reductive account of consciousness as workable. Not proven, just workable. If consciousness is a dance instead of a dancer, i.e. something that 'materials' instantiate rather than constitute, then once we describe how something is done, we're finished with explanation. If a neurologist can exhaustively discover how it is that something seems to us the way it seems, she's not only shown (assuming she's correct, of course) that the 'qualia' are entirely functions of neurological interactions, but she's also shown that any time that same dynamic is present in someone's brain, they are veridically experiencing the qualia. It's logically impossible for something to have the same dynamic while leaving out experience, or consciousness, or whatever the psychological phenomenon is. I think we really confuse ourselves by insisting on the wrong kinds of explanations.

In a similar vein, I've always thought the main attraction of Penrose's solutions to the supposedly incalculable function of the mind were that they were extremely weird, and everyone knows consciousness is really weird. But the incredible frequency with which animals have approached consciousness makes me think that consciousness is weird like thermodynamics, not weird like a Calabi-Yau manifold. It seems the maths of the Universe keeps causing systems to develop protointelligences and even intelligences under rather different circumstances, because it's just a feature that information is useful.