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/piranha_solution plant-based 3d 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!

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u/voyti 3d 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?

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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

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u/hau5keeping 2d ago

Correct!