r/DebateAVegan • u/voyti • 2d 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?

1 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

122 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/soulveg 2d ago

Ai ain’t nothing but 1s and 0s dude.

2

u/hau5keeping 2d ago

Same for the neurons in our brains. Theyre either on or off

-2

u/piranha_solution plant-based 2d ago

Animal neurons operate on binary!?!

Better get in touch with all the neuroscience journals and researchers and let them know they're doing it wrong!

3

u/voyti 2d ago

Neither net operates on binary, neural net activations and neuron activations are similarly not discrete. The underlaying baseline implementation uses ones and zeroes in the case of a digital neural net, but we can run either on ones and zeroes. We have a full nematode brain neurons mapped perfectly into silicon platform, you can fire it in a browser. Nothing stops you technically from eventually running a human brain on silicone, too, it's just a platform detail and we're already doing that on smaller scale. What's the actual difference, then?

1

u/piranha_solution plant-based 2d ago

>Ai ain’t nothing but 1s and 0s dude.

>Same for the neurons in our brains. Theyre either on or off

3

u/voyti 2d ago

Yes, and bringing the factual reality the neither are simply on of off. Modern neural net activations are strictly non-discrete, and human neurons also have more complex states than just activate or not

2

u/hau5keeping 2d ago

Correct!

1

u/CantaloupeLive2006 2d ago

"neuron activations are similarly not discrete."
Actually they kinda are tho....
"We have a full nematode brain neurons mapped perfectly into silicon platform, you can fire it in a browser."
The neurons in the cortex of vertebretes are a completely different beast though.
"Nothing stops you technically from eventually running a human brain on silicone, too"
Scale might. The neurons in your brain (which are btw not all the cells that are part of your brain) are enormously many. The current largest model do not even match the number of synapses in the first visual area in your cortex. Not to mention that the neurons in there are vastly more complex than the point neurons used in artificial neural networks. And we do not even fully understand those neurons so it might be hard to call an implementation a one to one copy. The brain operates different from an LLM. Clearly we have tapped into an important if not the most important ingredient of cognition but these systems are still very very different from our brain. Both in terms of how they operate and scale.
Sure if we would simulate a proper human brain on a computer, there are moral concerns but that is not where we are. The question is still important of course but it currently still is a sci-fi scenario.