![]() But the evidence that they feel is next to zero. The evidence for some cognitive capacity (memory, learning, communication) in plants is strong. Stick with high probability and the preponderance of evidence. ![]() To reply that “Well, so maybe those robots and computational models feel too!” would just be to capitalize on the flip side of the other-minds problem (that certainty is not possible), to the effect that just as we cannot be sure that other people do feel, we cannot be sure that rocks, rockets or robots don’t feel. But with what plants can do it is almost trivial to design a model that can do it too, So there feeling seems to be incomparably more superfluous. It seems to be causally superfluous, as robotic and computational models are demonstrating how much can be done without feeling. The “hard problem” is to explain how and why humans (and perhaps a few other species of animals) feel. Nor does it increase the probability by more than an infinitesimal amount, that plants feel. ![]() Nor that feeling is necessary in order to have those capacities. ![]() But it does not demonstrate that plants feel. That demonstrates that plants too have remarkable cognitive capacities that we used to think were unique to people (and perhaps a few other species of animals). I hope that plants are not sentient, but I also believe they are not sentient, for several other reasons too:Įvery function and capacity demonstrated in plants and (rightly) described as “intelligent” and “cognitive” (learning, remembering, signalling, communicating) can already be done by robots and by software (and they can do a lot more too). Openness: The answerable openness of the village in and for which language evolved, where everyone knew everyone, is open to subversion by superviral malware in the form of global anonymous and pseudonymous chatbots.Īnd all this solemn angst about chatbots, while chickens bleed. Public influence: Real, and an increasingly nefarious turn that pervasive chatbots are already taking. Religion: Irrelevant - except as just one of many things (conspiracy theories, the “paranormal,” the supernatural) humans can waste time chatting about. Jedi joke: Nonsense, of course, but another thing it would be fun to probe further in chat. “science”: There is no “science” in any of this (yet) and it’s silly to keep bandying the word around like a talisman. Systemic corporate influence: BL is right about this, and it is an enormous problem in everything, everywhere, not just Google or AI. “don’t turn me off!”: Nonsense, but it would be fun to probe it further in chat. Turing test: LaMDA would quickly fail the verbal Turing Test, but the only valid Turing Test is the robotic one, which LaMDA could not even begin, lacking a body or connection to anything in the world but words. What they need, desperately, is not animism, but action, not metaphors, but mercy. So many humans think that animals don’t feel, or don’t care that they feel.Īnimals’ lives are unspeakably, unimaginably, unforgivably wretched, because of us. Rivers neither live nor feel nor think, but they are among the inanimate necessities of which we are depriving all sentient life, including our own. ![]() Sentient animals need not think of what we have done to them: They feel it (those that are still alive). (It would of course be even better if the President could do something about it – although India already eats proportionately fewer animals than any other nation on Earth.) It feels good to hear that the President of India thinks of what nonhuman animals would think of what humans have done to them. We have trampled on their rights for long, and now the results are before us.” What would our rivers say about human history and what would our cattle say on the topic of human rights. “ I wonder what would the animals and trees around us tell us if they could speak. ![]()
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