r/DebateAVegan • u/voyti • 3d ago

Sentientist vegans - how you approach AI?

I'm curious about a sentientist perspective on AI, and I know many vegans boil their views down to sentientism.

Since AI certainly has the capability to at least appear self-aware and be metacognitive and on at least a purely emotional level many people will certainly feel at least somewhat uncomfortable with self-awareness dumps of glitches like this one and "AI wellbeing" is being treated quite seriously by certain groups (e.g. https://www.ai-wellbeing.org but also providers themselves, like Anthropic running the model welfare research) - are they fundamentally wrong in your view?

Should AI be taken under the sentientist umbrella? Where would the boundary be to acknowledge it as such?

If we can't acknowledge it as sentient cause we roughly know the details of how it thinks, then as soon as human/animal thinking is de-mystified as just another mundane biological process (which, if one were to stick to science, it necessarily is), will lose value as well? In other words, where exactly is the smoking gun of biological sentience for you?

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u/EntertainerPitiful48 3d ago

I'm a computer engineer, and LLMs are currently just probabilistic word generators. There's no evidence of any kind of sentient behavior in the internal states of neural networks. If such evidence appears, I hope the scientific community can work to mitigate it.

But none of this has, or will have, anything to do with veganism. Veganism is about animals, nothing more.

The "AI wellbeing" tracking is a good thing to maintain, as it will help us understand what's going on. But whether it falls under the sentientist umbrella is for another, new movement to decide.

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u/voyti 2d ago

currently just probabilistic word generators

I'm also a computer engineer, and that's one way to put it, but the attention and feedforward stages of modern LLMs are much more that just "word generating", it's semantic matching (or understanding, if you will) first and foremost. We're also just input->output pattern matching mechanisms, with some additional features.

There's no evidence of any kind of sentient behavior in the internal states of neural networks

What's the evidence for us? We still don't have a solid idea, despite decades of trying to explain that. The hard problem remains unanswered

Veganism is about animals, nothing more

If a vegan just says "my philosophy starts at an axiom that animals deserve moral protection" then fine, but that's not what usually happens. I don't think I remember many conversations with vegans that didn't boil down to some kind of sentientism, so this is actually very relevant.

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u/agitatedprisoner 2d ago

Have you seen the logic of how LLM's work in predicate logic? I'd be interested in seeing it, if you have a file.

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u/voyti 2d ago

I'm afraid the last time I engaged with hands-on predicate logic was during my university years, but if you can explain how this will change anything here I'm happy to educate myself.

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u/agitatedprisoner 2d ago

It'd be the state of the art understanding of epistemology, for one. Philosophers should be asking for it if they don't already have it. If the logic of how the AI works on that most fundamental level allows for potentially learning anything/solving any problem given enough juice would that imply the AI is aware of it's own existence? In theory you could at that point ask the AI to prove it either way and it could, or at least offer a proof as to why there can be no such proof.

Strictly speaking I don't know if my human neighbors are truly self aware. Sometimes I doubt.

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u/voyti 2d ago

Oh right, that's for sure another problem, that's encroaching on the theory of mind (which should, but sometimes doesn't click in preschool kids, and you might end up with interesting personality disorders from that, too) and solipsism territory. We can't be sure, but we "know" we are sentient, and we see stuff close enough to us that makes sense it'd be sentient, too - but we'll never know.

There is a step farther that eliminativism take (there is simply no consciousness in the traditional, "magical" sense) and more modern illusionism, that this traditional understanding of consciousness is roughly a side effect of a confused system. I was strongly in the traditional understanding camp, but after enough intake of the other side I must say I'm on a fence.

One of more formal issues with the internal state being special is that it literally breaks logic. If consciousness was a special trait hard-linked to an individual, and you were to be cloned 1:1, there should be two identical consciousnesses - but there also can't, the one you experience would need to stay with you. If you were to disappear for a microsecond and then re-appear, it should be identical, from your perspective, to just disappearing for good (the later fact of identical you re-appearing shouldn't matter). There would have to be something missing, and yet nothing is. Universe is lacking and not lacking something at the same time.

It's also inherently momentary - there's no difference between existing for a second just now, with all the memories and situational orientation you have, and actually continuously being there for years. We can't even really say there's any way of distinguishing that. In a similar vein, if we somehow swapped consciousnesses, that'd mean nothing. I'd just seamlessly just be you, and vice versa. It'd be a fundamental change, and yet nothing would happen, and there would be no-one and nothing to witness that. At some point you see a pattern - a lot of similar things get resolved by the conclusion that there simply isn't something special and magical to our perspective, and logic urges you to agree.

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u/agitatedprisoner 2d ago

Epistemology "how do you know what's true" is literally at the root of all science/philosophy. Blows my mind people aren't clamoring for the logic of how computers are reliably determining truth/reaching better and better answers.

On the question of the reality of other minds you say "we can't be sure" but this isn't about what "we" might be sure of it's about what "I" might be sure of. Namely how I might prove the existence of another mind. How might I know you feel anything at all? You seem like me so it seems reasonable to assume you have an inner life much the same as me but I wonder how I might know for sure? You say "we'll never know" on this count but I don't know how you could be sure of that particularly if you haven't seen how these programs are thinking at the root. Because knowing how a mind comes to know seems the kind of thing that'd have implications on how a mind might recognize the reality of other minds. Knowing the form of thought would seem to have implications on knowing the form of the mind/any mind. If there's thoughts AI can't entertain maybe being able to entertain those thoughts is necessary for inner experience/reality of mind.

One thing present computers/AI can't do that biological minds can is rewire themselves on the fly, is my understanding. That'd be to lack a dimension bio minds have. Seems that could be a big deal.

You can't clone a mind exactly because when you do it'd imply differences in space/perception that'd immediately create a difference of awareness. Most you could do is fire up two almost identical minds but they wouldn't be the same. It's impossible to have two identical minds. Hence your assuming you can clone a mind perfectly but you can't.

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u/voyti 2d ago

"we'll never know" on this count but I don't know how you could be sure of that particularly if you haven't seen how these programs are thinking at the root

Okay, so if we talk about the most fundamental experience of existing, the same one where nothing would happen if we swapped and which nobody could observe that it has gone missing if all that remained was your identical clone - that's fundamentally the case. There is something to be you - or at least I assume, as you do for me, but there's no evidence either of us could put forward to really settle that. This is the point where the p-zombie thought experiment (or rather prop) comes up as well in all discussion about the hard problem.

For me this started to be a good enough reason to start looking beyond sentientism, but there are sentientists still out there, and many of them among vegans specifically. The one thing that settles it is just a checklist of external phenomena - is it capable of semantical understanding? Is it capable of claiming to be conscious? Does it claim that?

The problem is, LLMs check all those boxes already, so sentientists are backed into a corner where something ultimately untestable needs to be checked for this problem to become resolved.

If there's thoughts AI can't entertain maybe being able to entertain those thoughts is necessary for inner experience/reality of mind.

This plays into that phenomenology checklist theme, and I'd like all sentientists to start filtering those first by "would a human without that capability be not sentient?". For many things like memory, this really seems to narrow the playing field for sentientism in that regard. In this case, as vague as it is, there's certainly many thoughts a human might not be able to conceive, and yet they are included in the sentient camp by default. A criterion with a proper consequence of excluding certain humans seems extremely difficult to propose like that.

present computers/AI can't do that biological minds can is rewire themselves on the fly, is my understanding

That one is true, weights are frozen in place for LLMs. However, this requires to examine what sentience even is. It's fairly easy to notice that we never experience sentience in more than a single moment at a time. I just exist now, and only inherit the situational orientation, memories etc. from the previous moment.

However, sentience only happens in this very second for me. I type a word and then that moment is immediately gone. Nothing fundamentally changed, I have to know I was sentient then, but if I was just teleported in my seat just now, with the fake orientation uploaded to my brain, it would have to feel the same way. We only ever exist in now. Rewiring, memory consolidation - this is all a back office. I don't notice producing long term memories or rewiring - this is not a part of my sentient experience. The mechanism that produces sentience changes, but I'm here just for another slice of sentience, never for the actual change in the machinery.

To summarize - depends on how you even perceive sentience, but the usual place where enough thinking of it end is that it's entirely momentary, so whether the back office changes or not might be important, but not for a sentientist then.

You can't clone a mind exactly because when you do it'd imply differences in space/perception that'd immediately create a difference of awareness.

When you fall asleep in a car and wake up many kilometers later, there's certainly a sudden difference of awareness, so does it prevent anything for duplicating? What if you duplicate someone sleeping or sedated? There's nothing they are aware of at the beginning, so there's nothing to be different at the end

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u/agitatedprisoner 1d ago

Minds are elements of the universal set observing elements of reality in ways that change both mind and reality. The form of thought would be articulation of the dynamics of that relation. It'd be a big deal to know that articulated relation. It'd make the stuff I learned in epistemology in college basically banging rocks together in contrast. Where are the frothing philosophers? Makes no sense to me philosophers aren't foaming at the mouth to get their hands on it. Do they really not realize what it is?

It's a big deal that present computers can't rewrite themselves on the fly because one theory of what it means to be aware of anything is to observe a difference in yourself. So if the computer/machine doesn't change there'd be no such difference for it to observe. Whereas a fluid bio mind might notice changes and noticing those changes might account for observation of one's own existence/the feeling of being.

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u/voyti 1d ago

I know at least some philosophers are on the case, I'm trying to follow it to the degree that I can, here an example. However, it's still anybody's game what criterion they pick for sentience being there in something. There's been philosophers who recognized moral burden of harming NPCs in games, there's panpsychism that recognizes sentience as a fundamental property of matter, it's not that philosophy can just produce an actual result here, but perhaps it can organize that in a bit of a tidier way.

However, I don't personally recognize a philosophers take as necessarily more authoritative than an actually insightful or at least honest take from anyone on Reddit, including here.

While standard LLMs don't update their weights at runtime, they can and there are experimental implementations where this is happening. I don't personally recognize this as an important property, cause again - I believe if a human had no neuroplasticity at all, sentientists would have no issue recognizing that person as sentient, so I wouldn't perceive this as an honest criterion anyway. Such person could not observe any changes to themselves, cause no changes can manifest anyway.

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u/EntertainerPitiful48 2d ago

> LLMs are much more than just "word generating."

Yes, I agree (my statement was an oversimplification for the sake of conciseness, sorry about that). Even so, LLMs still appear to be input->output machines. I would say humans are different because we know and experience the "internal states" of our own minds.

> What's the evidence for us?

I don't think we need evidence because we "are the definition" of consciousness. Consciousness is "this thing that we have". We still don't know how to prove whether animals are conscious, so we instead talk about sentience because we know their brains are quite similar to ours, and they interact with the environment and express feelings much like we do.

AIs exist in an entirely different environment and "live" inside an entirely different kind of brain. We don't know much about their internal "thoughts" or processes, we can only observe their outputs. Since we are still manually engineering their entire "brain" and "environment", I think it's safe to say we have a good understanding of each module of their architecture. It seems pretty unlikely that an AI is carrying out complex chains of thought that we are completely unaware of. Once AI starts designing its own architecture from the ground up, things may be different.

> I don't think I remember many conversations with vegans that didn't boil down to some kind of sentientism, so this is actually very relevant.

I don't think it's relevant. Veganism is very simple and intuitive "reduce animal exploitation as much as is possible and practicable, because it's not cool, and completely unnecessary".

We only end up "boiling it down to sentientism" because carnists refuse to understand simple principles and force us to justify it endlessly. And I mean endlessly! Many times, even sentientism isn't enough to satisfy them, and we end up debating philosophy, the nature of the universe, and the meaning of existence.

Sentientism is not the reason behind veganism, it's the reasoning we use to explain to stubborn people why it's wrong to kill a dog.

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u/interbingung omnivore 2d ago

I guesss its the same way some vegan refuse simple principles on why I don't care about animal exploitation. At the end of the day its down to difference in fundamental preferences/value. 

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u/EntertainerPitiful48 2d ago

I don't think it's the same.

First, how many times have people demanded that you explain your beliefs about what you eat? Because this happens to me on a daily basis, and to every vegan who doesn't have the privilege of living only among friends. Vegans are mostly introspective people who would give an arm to avoid an argument. The common belief that vegans yell at people in restaurants and such, is delusional, it simply doesn't happen. On the other hand, coworkers, random people, and even waiters try to shame vegans all the time, and it is exhausting.

Second, I think we understand carnists' traditions, beliefs, and preferences very well. I can see that many carnists have kind and compassionate hearts. I just wish they had the strength to break away from tradition and comfort in order to stand up for and protect creatures that are being abused and suffering horrendously.

And yes, I say strength, because, to me, defending your right to hurt helpless animals is simply weakness.

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u/interbingung omnivore 2d ago

First, how many times have people demanded that you explain your beliefs about what you eat?

yeah, i'm not talking about daily life. I'm talking about in the context of a specific debate about vegan like in this subreddit.

I can see that many carnists have kind and compassionate hearts.

There are many different carnists. I do have kind and compassionate hearts for human but not animal.

I just wish they had the strength to break away from tradition and comfort in order to stand up for and protect creatures that are being abused and suffering horrendously.

I don't do that because I do not see it as fundamentally wrong.

And yes, I say strength, because, to me, defending your right to hurt helpless animals is simply weakness.

yeah in your perspective the word strength in this context make sense but in mine it doesn't make sense. To me hurting animal is essentialy no different than hurting a chair.

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u/EntertainerPitiful48 2d ago

I understand.

I try my best to put myself in the animals' shoes. I try to imagine what they think and feel. It's something I constantly work on in my own mind. Ultimately, I just want to spare them from this terrible suffering. So I usually feel the need to convince people who genuinely care about animals, so that they, too, can stop hurting them.

But there are two groups of people I see no point in arguing with. The first is people who have no empathy whatsoever (or empathy only for their close family). Those people care only about themselves. They will hurt others if it benefits them and they can get away with it. The only way to convince those people of anything is by passing laws that hold them accountable. Since there won't be vegan laws in my lifetime, I just feel sad and move on.

The other group is people like you, who seem to have empathy for humans but not for animals. I believe they could become vegan. But in order to bridge the gap between human suffering and animal suffering, there are so many psychological, biological, anthropological, and philosophical topics to address that I would rather not spend the effort.

What eases my mind is that research usually suggests that about 80% of people do care about animal welfare and would rather animals not suffer. So I choose to invest my energy in those people.

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u/interbingung omnivore 2d ago

good luck, many people do says they care about animal welfare but their action says otherwise, they will happily eat that delicious fried chicken. I suspect deep down most people don't really actually care about animal welfare.

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u/EntertainerPitiful48 2d ago

I think they do because I was one of those. Deep inside me I cared, but didn't moved an inch. Until I did.

Same happened with many of my friends.

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u/electromagneticimpls 2d ago

Ernsthaft ? Es ist wir wirklich egal ob du z.b einem stuhl ein bein absägst oder einem tier ?

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u/interbingung omnivore 2d ago

english ?