AFphilosophy

If you have not read “Moral Weight of AI” on this blog, you might want to look it over before or after reading this article as it has some overlap and will likely make both essays more easily understood when read together.

Outside of religiously based ethical systems, many philosophers will agree that sentience is the single most important factor in deciding whether or not any being has a moral status. This belief is often used to supply arguments for the ethical treatment of animals with a strong backing. As long as beings have within them a level of sentience, are conscious of their feelings and their environment, then they are placed on the moral playing field with every other sentient being in the universe.

This method of deciding moral significance has up to this point only been used in the deciding of moral status within biological beings. It does make sense that we would only apply this rule of sentience under biological settings as we have never been presented with a non biological predicament in which this rule should be tested and applied. We are very quickly approaching a time when this predicament will in fact fall before us and a decision must be made. Advances in computers are being made every day along with the ability to create newer and more capable artificial intelligence.

Currently the vast majority of the world population view computers as machines without thought, without care, existing only to carry out the functions which we have made them capable of doing. This is a perfectly acceptable and likely correct view to for the computers that we use today and will be using for quite some time. What happens, though, when we do create a computer that can learn, react to stimuli and be “conscious” of its surroundings? We have already begun this endeavor, and I doubt anyone plans to stop until one has at the very least created a machine that can match the human intellect and learning capabilities that we so enjoy.

Once a machine reaches true sentience, once it is capable of being able to view, react to, and learn from its surroundings, must we give it a moral status, or will it remain at the level of all other inorganic matter? will we treat it the same as the raw metals it was created from? If we do treat these machines as inferior beings, assuming we treat them as beings at all, what moral backing will we use to support our claims? We would have to say that one of the rules for obtaining moral status is that one must be created from organic matter. We could, of course, make this rule, and it would solve the problem of fair treatment of inorganic beings, but there does not seem to be any logical reasoning as to why one must be created of organic matter in order to obtain a moral status. Any argument stating that the material used in the creation of a being has an effect on its moral status is as ludicrous as saying that anyone that is not 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is not actually a human and so does not have to be treated as such. The physical attributes of a being are not relevant to deciding what the being is; that is what the mental attributes decide.

An analogy that may assist in the understanding of evolution of the power of computers and their rights to moral status is this: we can take a tree to represent a computer that we use today. This tree exists and manages to carry out specific functions such as growth and reproduction. It is not at all a sentient being. It is not capable of making rational decisions to stimuli in its environment; it can react in some ways, as you can see a tree that has bent over the years to better its ability to absorb sunlight, but this was not a rational decision; it is simply how every tree of its species would react under that condition. In this way of existence it is like one of our computers. Our computer exists to do exactly what we made it to do and nothing else. It does not decide something from nothing. It follows preprogrammed steps in every situation in which it is asked to execute a task. At all stages of development of computer design there can be computers that exist in this state, just as there are and always will be plant life that can be extremely complex, yet still lack sentience.

On the other hand there will at some point in time exist a computer that reacts to the world around it in a way that is not at all similar to plant life. It will instead react in a very similar way to the sentient beings that currently exist. For this example we can take a dog as being analogous to a new artificial intelligence. A dog will react to both internal and external stimuli in order to continue its function, to reproduce itself and make whatever contribution to the ecosystem it is capable of. This dog, when presented with a stimulus that could possibly cause the loss of its life, will react in a manner which it chooses to be appropriate. This could be fleeing, attacking, or any number of other actions. This dog has a need to exist and, because it is capable of learning, it is capable of both enjoyment and suffering, physically and mentally. If this artificial intelligence is modeled after a dog and so responds to stimuli in a manner that is the same as that of a dog, it must then be considered a dog, an inorganic dog if you will, but still a dog in every mental sense.

It is also possible that we can create these complexities of artificial intelligence without giving them the ability to care about harm that may come to them or others. This brings the issue of moral status to a much higher level of complexity. In order to better understand how this being will exist, we can assume that we have reached a much higher level of bioengineering and are now capable of engineering the human mind in order to cause one to be born without the ability to care if harm comes to oneself. If this human does not care whether or not you end its life, but is entirely capable of carrying out daily functions and existing within a society, are we morally allowed to end its life? If a human today who is not bio-engineered decides rationally and logically that he does not care whether he lives or dies at this moment, is it morally acceptable to kill him? This is even more difficult than the issue of euthanasia. In some cases of euthanasia one might ask specifically to be killed. In this case one is not asking to be killed, but simply expressing an inability to care. If we are allowed to kill sentient inorganic beings because they lack the ability to care about their own wellbeing, it would make sense to be consistent and say that we are also allowed to kill an organic being which is sentient but lacks the ability to care about its wellbeing.

This issue may prove to be more complex than anything we as a race have had to deal with before. In many ways it is even more complex than the current issues of bioethics. We must come to conclusions as to how newly created sentient beings, both organic and inorganic, must be treated if we are to be able to exist with these beings among us.

 Edit: 04-10-08 Slight revision of various parts of essay

The issue of, “What is love”, came up in a conversation between a friend and me, this is the basic evolution of the argument from beginning to end.

The argument for what love is began as the simple statement, “Love is the manifestation of lust.” It took a short time to realize that this statement was entirely false as there are multiple types of love other than love of a sexual partner, such as love of family and love of friends. The next statement made was that love is the highest manifestation of our values. This seemed to be a plausible reason but there was no logical way to prove its validity. The first statement was then revised to state that love in a sexual relationship is heavily based on lust while love of family and friends is caused by a fear of losing something that has taken up such a huge part of our life through time, significance, or more likely, a mix of the two. An example was given in order to defend this statement, it goes as follows: In the case of two siblings, they would usually feel very little love towards each other on a regular day to day basis, but when one becomes sick and is going to die, the other sibling will, in most cases, feel an extremely powerful sense of love for the other when they find out their time with their sibling is soon to end. The last statement was then taken farther and it was questioned as to why losing something that is a part of ones life would matter to them at all. This was defended by stating that people in general fear change and fear regret along with a few other fears all associated with loss.

The first statement was then revised a second time and stated that love in a sexual relation was similar to love in a non sexual relationship with the idea that love in a sexual relationship is heavily bases on fear of loss and not based on lust. It was said that the true difference between the two types of love was that love in a sexual relation had lust as a type of extension of fear of loss and the combination of the two creates an extremely powerful sense of love. This explained more thoroughly why people feel very similarly towards family and friends as they do towards a husband or wife while still explaining why the love of a husband or wife would be stronger.

Other types of situations which people would regard as containing some form of love were then discussed in order to challenge the latest statement. One of these situations was love in a short term sexual relationship. This form of love was explained as having an extremely small fear of loss element as a basis for the love with a large amount of lust added which would make the sense of love seem more powerful than it would in other types of short term relationships. Platonic relationships are explained as being very similar to a family or friend relationship with a very strong fear of loss basis but it is likely brought on by significance of the person rather than the amount of time they have been in your life.

It was then stated that many people would say love is what causes the fear of loss and no the other way around. As both love and fear of loss are affected by each other it would be easy to see it both ways but if love causes fear of loss then there are no grounds to define love by except that it is simply an emotion. If you believe that the fear of loss causes love you can then define fear of loss as I did and in effect define love. Looking at both perspectives I would state that the fear of loss causing love has more validity simply because there are more logically defined explanations that can be seen with this view.

The idea of hate was then brought up as a counter to the idea of love. It would seem that you cannot hate someone who you love and you cannot love someone who you hate because they seem to have opposite or nearly opposite feelings. This of course would not seem valid in many relationships as people quite often have some form of mixed feelings of love and hate towards aspects of a person. With this in mind it was then stated that love of a person may not exist at all. What we may feel is love and hate of distinct simple aspects of a person which cause us to feel a certain way towards a person as a whole. The feeling of love would then be brought on by having a love for aspects of a person that are more numerous and/or more significant than the hate of certain aspects of a person. This would explain why people can feel different levels of love towards a person over periods of time as the loved person changes different aspects of themselves while they age and mature. It would also explain why you can still feel a love towards a person who had changed to the point of being someone who you may not have loved at all simply because you still have a fear of loving the aspects you do love, whether they still exist in the person or not.

With all this inquiry and thought the statement was refined again to state: “Love in a non sexual relationship is heavily based on the fear of losing aspects of a person which you find significant while love in a sexual relationship has instinctual lust added to the fear of loss of aspects which in turn has the potential to create a stronger sense of love than a non sexual relationship has the potential to create.”

Accountability is a very serious issue within most moral theories. What constitutes grounds for accountability of any and all actions? Most of the major ethical theories only hold people accountable for what they can foresee as a human being. We are not held accountable for the future once it is past a point in which our immediate knowledge will allow us to speculate at. Some theories base the accountability of a person on the intended outcome of their actions and not necessarily the true outcome at all. Others, such as Utilitarianism, base accountability purely on the consequences. Although within utilitarianism it still seems that people are only held accountable for that effect that was caused immediately by them. Once something unintended is put into motion it seems to land on the shoulders of those who have the ability to affect it at certain times.

All these theories have their own versions of how far into the future your actions can take on forms of right and wrong. They eventually reach a point where you will not be held accountable. This is very simplistic and shows foremost that every theory is geared toward humanity above all else. This is a huge issue because nearly all of these theories do in fact state that these right and wrongs are universal. That these ideas of morality we choose to live by are not “created” by us but instead “discovered” by us. We simply don’t know which discovery, if any at this point in time, is the correct theory. To show how ineffective this idea is you simply have to imagine a race, not unlike our own. They live in a similar manner and abide by similar rules. There is one difference though, they have the ability to know not only the immediate consequence of their action, but also the next consequence of that action. Beyond the second consequence they can only speculate, as can we. With this heightened ability to know the consequences of their actions are they then entirely responsible for both the first and secondary consequences of their actions? Why should such a burden fall upon them, giving them a higher level of accountability than other sentient beings? This all follows from an idea similar to the butterfly effect; one small action can have the end result of a massive consequence that spans both time and distance which we cannot and may never be able to foresee. Every action we commit has the possibility of an infinite number of consequences entirely unknown to us. Are we then justified in our actions based on ignorance? The current moral theories do not attempt to work with consequences that span immense amounts of time because people need to feel that they have control of their ability to do right and wrong, yet they also say that the universal right and wrong pertain to us. Why would the universe take our ignorance into account?

In my opinion this is not a fair and sensible system. If one species of sentient beings is more responsible for their actions in a universal sense then they can easily do so much more wrong because they would be responsible for everything they can accurately foresee. I would propose that there is no objective universal morality. I am sure some people already feel this way, but the majority of world, the vast majority, are not nihilists. They all believe that right and wrong truly do exist, not necessarily through a god like being, but simply in the universe. I find personally that this is a major downfall in the ability for humans to develop in many different ways. I believe that if we could all come to the conclusion that there is no true moral rights or wrongs we would begin to focus our attention less on finding what the true morality may be and more on building, from the ground up, the best possible ethical theory for us as a species. Putting our full efforts into building a fair and reason based moral system for us to follow purely for its ability to build societies in the best way we see fit could be a major advance for everyone involved.

There is no legitimate reason for having humans and other animals carrying separate moral weights. Animals other than humans do lack the communicative ability that we so enjoy but the vast majority of them are still entirely capable of feeling very similar, if not the same emotions that we experience when put in similar circumstances.

Regardless of these facts I will present a situation in which I would expect the vast majority of people to realize that it is in fact beneficial to them to exist on an equal moral plane with all other sentient beings. Assume that an alien race chooses to visit the earth. They view all the beings that reside on this planet in order to better understand the workings of our vast array of species. These alien beings, these viewers of our world, are in fact much more advanced than even us humans. They are long past any industrial age, their equipment could not be deciphered by even the most intelligent of humans. These beings have also long surpassed the need for petty language. They possess the ability to project actual thoughts and ideas into the minds of others. These are not projections of words or phrases, but direct and concrete ideas. Their ability to communicate is so far past our own that they scoff at our attempts to communicate through language that cannot even begin to encompass and project to others our true thoughts and feelings. When they look down upon the earth they see our cities, our villages, our metropolitan areas, our buildings that we call sky scrapers, but they also see the dens of bears, the tunnels built by the burrowing animals, the nests created by birds. They do not see any significant difference between our structures and the structures of other animals that exist beside us. These beings are so far advanced that our manner of thought and intellectual ability is more closely related to an insect than it is to these vastly superior beings. Once this situation is taken into account, once these beings have decided that we may as well be insects for all they care, they decide that we will be eaten. Humans become cattle, bred and killed. Left to exist in horrible but extremely efficient conditions so that these aliens may enjoy the taste of flesh.

This is of course a dreadful thought. That because these beings see us as only of a moderate or low intelligence with a vocal communication that isn’t so far off from a bird’s we are morally inferior and can be held captive and violently destroyed for no other reason than our enjoyable flavor. The moral difference, the moral weight that one is able to bare is entirely relative. To put humans up above all else and say, “here is the species that carries with it the highest of moral weights; the species in which a single life is more precious than the entire existence of other species, a species which has every right to delve into the pleasures of their tastes even when that pleasure exists solely by the deaths of billions upon billions of beings which they find morally inferior because their intellect and communicative abilities are found to be so far below our own.” To say this is wrong in its entirety. The chance that we are in fact the most intelligent beings in the universe is to infinitesimally small that we should instead think we are likely one of the least intelligent. We have only compared ourselves to species residing on one planet, one planet in a sea of trillions. Intelligence and the ability to understand morality is entirely relative. One species having the ability to understand morality just slightly better than another should never give them the right to treat those other beings as less than equal. If they are able to treat other beings in this fashion, then we must subdue ourselves when faced with another race that understands morality to a greater extent than we and I am quite sure no one in their right mind would agree to that.

 Edit: 25-03-08 changed title to better reflect content of essay

The debate as to whether a god exists has been around since man first believed in a god. This debate is unlikely to end anytime soon and I do not plan to make an attempt to end it. I will instead show why the most popular God in the world, the Christian God, is not at all the powerful being he is made out to be.

In Christianity God is said to be the creator of the universe, perfect in every way, a being of infinite power. It is believed that God can accomplish anything he wishes, There are of course no obstacles in the way of an omniscient being. These beliefs, although fully accepted by the Christian people, are flawed. In fact the flaw, or flaws, lie in the most important writing of their religion, the Bible. The Bible depicts God throughout its large number of books and in many of these depictions God is shown as a less than perfect, less than omniscient being.

The best area to begin with is Genesis, the beginning of the Bible. In Genesis God is depicted during his creation of the universe. An admirable feat by any account, but not admirable enough. The flaw in this situation is that God is not all powerful. He takes quite a bit of time to create the planet earth and the rest of the universe. Of course the rest of the universe is created very quickly, while this little planet earth takes the bulk of the six days, but I won’t stress that point. Taking time, any time at all in fact, not to mention an entire six days, is not a quality of a supreme and infinitely powerful being. A being of infinite power would create the universe infinitely fast and to a state of complete and utter perfection. This is just the first of many flaws in which God’s lack of power is displayed for all to see. The second comes directly after the first, the day of rest. After completing this strenuous and tiring ordeal of creating a universe God decides that he needs to rest himself, and he does so, for an entire day. Christians celebrate this day every week when they claim to take a break from their own work to rest themselves and worship God. But do they ever contemplate the idea of God actually needing to rest himself? I would assume someone would question this as Christianity is the most popular religious group in the world though it seems this issue was simply brushed to the side along with every other part of the Bible that makes no sense at all.

There are a number of other flaws throughout the Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Probably none as blatantly obvious as the previously mentioned issues but many that would cause one to take a moment and think about why God would do, or had to go about doing, what he did. One of these stories is Moses leading the Israelites to the promised land. God tells Moses that he needs to lead his people out of slavery and everything else he went on about in that story. The issue here lies within the way God went about this whole little endeavor. If God was really omnipotent his people wouldn’t have been slaves. In this case let us assume there was some reason why they were enslaved for some period of time and God has his good intentions. When God finally did decide that he no longer wanted his people enslaved he easily could have just picked them up and dropped them in the promised land. It can’t be all too hard for a God who created an entire universe to move some people a few miles. In fact, if God was really feeling up to it that day he might have just moved the promised land to them. But no, he needs to ask some human to do this work for him because he is incapable, maybe he got sick that week We can at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

Another small issue with God’s omnipotence is during the burning bush scene when he speaks the ten commandments. Why God needs to use a burning bush for his method of Heaven to Earth communication is not clearly stated. Perhaps he just has a thing for dramatic effect. Regardless of his chosen method of communication God did not go about his relaying of the commandments in a very logical way. God relayed his message to a single person, one person out of the millions that were alive at the time in hopes that everyone on earth would eventually hear these commandments and know that they are to live by them. If God were all powerful he could have easily ingrained these commandments into the minds of every human being in existence and proceed to set it up in a way that every child will be born knowing these commandments in the same way they know how to breathe. God of course did not do that. This leaves us to ponder why exactly he did not. There are two ways you can go with this. Either God lacks a basic understanding of logic and thought that letting one person know the commandments will be as effective as everyone knowing the commandments, or he lacked the ability to relay this information to everyone on earth. For God this is a lose lose situation as both methods portray him as something less than perfect.

These instances can of course continue on for a very long time as God seems to do things that are not a true portrayal of a God like being repeatedly throughout the entire course of the Bible. I assume that the instances which have now been shown are at least enough to get one started onto thinking why God does not seem to act as such and it is understood that every point previously made can likely be argued.

We call the intelligence of a machine “Artificial”, why do we do this? What makes our intelligence any more real? Computers of today could very likely mimic every action of a simple biological organism. If the intelligence of a fish could be programmed into a computer and this “Artificial” brain has the capacity to do everything that the biological brain does why then is it deemed inferior? If one causes pain to an animal all one is doing is stimulating nerve endings in a way in which they send a signal which it interprets as a negative effect and will then attempt to make a reasonable decision as to how to react to such a stimulus. One may say that biological beings truly feel pain and have emotions but all these things simply exist as a development of the brain to keep up the progression of a species. Pain, pleasure, and emotions are electrical signals and chemical reactions inside one’s body that work to help us understand and react to outside stimuli. A computer can exist which uses electrical impulses to see outside itself and react to its environment accordingly. One may state that computers only do what they are made to do. They are capable of what one makes them capable of. What is not realized is that all organisms, including humans, follow these same rules. We are bound by the capabilities of our mind and our external sensors and we can only do what we are made to be able to do through the advances of evolution.

Humans cannot continue to raise themselves above all other beings in the universe. We are simply biological machines. We can be created and destroyed and are susceptible to everything that a machine is susceptible to such as physical trauma and invading beings(viruses). The material used to construct a mind should not be a consideration in deciding sentience and whether or not ethics should be applied to to it. We will soon be able to create biological beings by altering our own genetics. These beings can be healthier, more intelligent, and more physically able than ourselves. Should these beings still be included in our moral beliefs after we have altered, and in effect, created them? What if we created a being from scratch that was very similar to humans in both physical and mental areas. Is this too far to be able to treat this being as a moral equal? There is no distinct point at which a being loses its moral rights because of the amount of alteration it has received. If sentience is the chosen guideline for deciding moral weight then all beings of sentience must be included, biological, mechanical, or anything else that may come into existence at some point in time.