[ExI] The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill

Darin Sunley dsunley at gmail.com
Thu May 4 23:34:40 UTC 2023


My model of identity is that I have a physical brain which encodes my
memories and personality and performs cognitive computations based on my
memories and sensory inputs from my body, /and/ an immaterial soul, that
has phenomenal conscious experiences. I do not believe that phenomenal
conscious experiences are reducible to or explainable solely in terms of
material physics. In this model I am alive as long as my soul is having
experiences based on the sensory data my body's sense organs are
transmitting to my brain. Anything that permanently disrupts the connection
between my soul and my brain (such as the irreversible physical destruction
of my brain) kills me, and is something I would wish to avoid having happen.

Sleep is not a problematic case. I continue to have phenomenal conscious
experiences based on the contents of my brain: dreams. Sometimes I even
remember them. The brain->soul connection is still operative.

Aging is not a problematic case. The brain->soul connection remains
operative even though the brain gradually rebuilds itself over time, ship
of Theseus style. So a train ride would definitely not constitute death.

General anesthetic is kind of weird. I suspect it /does/ disrupt the
brain->soul connection while it is in effect, in a fundamentally different
way than even deep sleep does. But the connection seems to resume when the
anesthetic wears off, provided the brain is otherwise intact. [This
constituted a novel discovery about the nature of brain->soul connections
that was only made possible by the invention of general anesthetic, and
was, frankly, an insanely dangerous and borderline unethical experiment to
perform.] It is this very phenomena that gives me some reason to think that
Star Trek style transporters might not be death-inducing - the soul may
plausibly be able to reconnect to a physically identical brain after a
brief interval of time during which the brain was too badly damaged to
support a connection to a soul. [I have no idea if this reconnection -
which clearly occurs in the case of general anesthesia - requires the brain
to be in the same general physical location as it was when the destruction
occurred - I suspect not. I anticipate that putting someone under general
anesthetic, loading them into a spaceship, and moving them hundreds,
thousands or even millions of miles, would not prevent them from waking up
once the anesthetic-induced incapacitation of the brain ceased, regardless
of the position or velocity of the brain at the time the anesthetic wore
off.]]

Under this model, destructive-scan uploading /would/ constitute death
unless souls are capable of attaching themselves to "brains" -
informational patterns in the memory of a computer - that are
/informationally/ identical to their destroyed biological brains, even if
they are physically radically different. I have no idea if this is the
case. It plausibly could be, or it plausibly could not - we simply have
insufficient information about the nature of souls and the brain->soul
connection to even speculate either way. Computer programs based on
emulated brain scans credibly reporting phenomenal conscious experiences
would be weak evidence in favor of this. Uploads that suddenly changed
their opinions about the immaterial nature of phenomenal conscious
experience, changing their personal theories of consciousness from dualism
to some form of the denial of phenomenal conscious experience at all, or
suddenly claiming that phenomenal conscious experience is an intrinsic
property of mere information processing or quantum effects. would be strong
evidence against this. [This follows from the semi-humorous observation, I
believe made by Robin Hanson, that P-zombies are indistinguishable from
"normal" human beings /unless/ they happen to be philosophers of
consciousness.]

Non-destructive uploading, in which the subject remains conscious
throughout the procedure and the end result is both a conscious human being
and a sentient computer program that remembers being that conscious human
being prior to the procedure, will be a very interesting experiment indeed.
I expect it to require significantly more advanced technology than
destructive-scan uploading though, so I anticipate destructive-scan
uploading to precede it by at least several years.

It is central to my understanding of the nature of human consciousness that
a particular person exists in only one place at any one time.
Definitionally, if it can watch me die, while not dying itself, it isn't me.

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 11:53 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 4, 2023, 12:38 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I would absolutely be amenable to the creation of a piece of software
>> that remembers being me, given reasonable assurances about its lived
>> experience, safety, welfare and comfort, etc...
>>
>> But I'd also really like to not die. And these aren't quite the same
>> thing.
>>
>
> What's the difference?
>
> Do you consider a "star trek style" transporter death or a form of
> transportation? What about a train ride (given the person who steps off the
> train is never completely identical with the person who stepped on)?
>
> If the same person can be said to exist in the same place at different
> times, then could the same person not exist in two different places at the
> same time?
>
> Jason
>
>
>
>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 4:16 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> One way to view Earth is that it's a system for turning sunlight into
>>> conscious experiences.
>>>
>>> But it is extremely inefficient at doing so.
>>>
>>> Only two parts in a billion of the sun’s light reaches Earth. Of the
>>> light that gets here, less than 2% is captured by plants. Of the energy
>>> captured by plants, even when it's eaten by humans, only a fifth goes to
>>> power the brain.
>>>
>>> When we consider how much energy the brain uses (about 20 Watts, vs. how
>>> much land (and sunlight) is needed to grow the food to power a brain, we
>>> find that with current technology, it takes an acre of farmland to feed
>>> each person. Over the 24 hour day, this acre of farmland receives an
>>> average of 663,684 watts of solar energy. If the land grows food to feed
>>> animals which then feed humans, this figure can easily extend to millions
>>> of watts to power each human.
>>>
>>> Millions of Watts to power something that uses less energy than a light
>>> bulb.
>>>
>>> If we could directly synthesize food from raw chemicals, it should only
>>> take some amount of energy roughly proportional to the caloric energy
>>> provided by said food. NASA funded research that found a way to make sugar
>>> from CO2 using electricity. We could then power tens of thousands of humans
>>> for the energy that today only powers a single human.
>>>
>>> But where would all these people fit?
>>>
>>> Future technologies, like mind uploading will not only provide each
>>> person unlimited space in virtual reality but also enable people to live
>>> anywhere. For instance: on the moon.
>>>
>>> The moon receives 13,000 Terawatts of solar energy. Since the human
>>> brains uses 20 watts of power, this is enough energy to power 650 trillion
>>> human souls. We could leave Earth and allow her environment to heal.
>>>
>>> Just some possibilities to consider..
>>>
>>> Jason
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 4, 2023, 2:51 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 04/05/2023 03:45, MB wrote:
>>>> > I'd be interested in the "energy/environmental footprint" of this
>>>> > lab-grown meat.
>>>>
>>>> Well, the problem of it being reliant on Bovine Foetal Serum seems to
>>>> be
>>>> just about solved, at least:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/scaling-clean-meat-serum-just-finless-foods-mosa-meat
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://www.styvalley.com/pub/magazines/torch/read/alternative-to-foetal-bovine-serum-fbs-in-artificial-meat-production
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://averyparkinson23.medium.com/alternatives-to-fetal-bovine-serum-for-cellular-agriculture-aec69475f9be
>>>>
>>>> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.538513v1
>>>>
>>>> The article about cultured meat being worse from the point of view of
>>>> emissions was just hand-waving 'maybeism'.
>>>>
>>>> We'll just have to wait and see. By the time it's resolved, we probably
>>>> won't need meat ourselves (as in Meat Bodies).
>>>>
>>>> Ben
>>>> _______________________________________________
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