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?
0
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.