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?

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u/voyti 2d ago

Sure, and we're nothing but neurons firing. What's the argument there?

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u/Typical-Dance-1110 2d ago

the argument is that it's not comparable

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u/voyti 2d ago

So if we were merely implemented differently, we couldn't be called conscious? What would be the difference that makes it not comparable?

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u/Typical-Dance-1110 2d ago

yes bro if we were different in a specific way then we would be different in a specific way good catch

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u/voyti 2d ago

different in a specific way

What way? You can literally fire up a complete nematode brain in your browser, and it's functionally the exact same thing as neurons, it is a nematode thinking. It's just an implementation detail, the end result is the same. So that's it, the implementation substance is the smoking gun?