I'd never heard of IOED! Thanks for sharing. Sounds like it's related to Dunning-Kruger.

So, I made up the term "causal projection" for this piece. I did look around for previous uses, but couldn't find any consistent usage that implied it was a term of art. Is there a technical definition that I'm missing?

> Are the conclusions epistemically sound? > Has a competent epistemic analysis of the various claims even been done? [As an aside: does it not seem more than a little strange to you that among all The Experts that guide us, nowhere are (genuine) philosophers to be found, particularly those who specialize in logic and epistemology?]

Have we done any analysis on our process for determining who is an expert on epistemology? Have we done analysis on that analysis?

It's epistemics all the way down!

(You might enjoy the short story No Particular Night or Morning by Ray Bradbury.)

> Sir, please use proper terminology: zygote.

> As for the question itself: it's a good question! Unfortunately, I have no idea about what the truth of the matter is.

Sorry I'm talking about after it's been born and raised. I think we should definitely assume that a grown adult born from an artificial womb has feelings. Though whether the zygote feels is definitely an interesting question too!

> Oh, I suspect the scenarios where your assumptions (or, metaphysical framework) break down are far less specific than it may seem.

Curious if you have any examples here. I have a pretty wide/open metaphysical view--I'm not even particularly committed to realism or physicalism. But a world with a hard wall against artificial consciousness would be especially weird. You'd need something along the lines of a divine decree to stop it, because you would somehow need to differentiate between brains grown in a human womb and brains grown in a laboratory. The lab can get arbitrarily close to recreating the human womb, up to and including cloning.

> True. But then: is what is "Clear" necessarily what is True? Take that whole January 6 coup attempt as an example - "both sides" are "clear" on what happened there that day (and what lead up to it, from a causality perspective), despite it being objectively unknown, and unknowable. > > I am very wary of predictions (of the future, or otherwise) based on clarity.

This seems like a very nihilistic view of truth. You could use the same argument to deny pretty much any line of reasoning. It's pretty clear the the earth is not flat, but there's plenty of disagreement there too. Should that stop us from discussing geophysics?

Same with Jan 6. There are a lot of facts on the table, and conclusions that can be drawn from them. Some people--even a majority--might loudly disagree with those conclusions, but that doesn't make them false or "unknowable". (Note that I'm not including political narratives, like who deserves punishment or blame, as these are statements based on values, not facts--value statements are indeed unknowable).

> A plausibly even bigger question: to what degree is it optimal that we are even pursuing this [particular goal in the first place, all things considered? Or maybe an even more important question: have we even stopped to consider that question? Just how is it that "humanity" "decides" what it is that we should be doing, and what we should not be doing, anyways? I don't recall that topic being covered.

I sympathize with this. But I tend much more towards descriptivism over prescriptivism. IMO these are things that will happen, no matter what you and I think should happen.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/040/653/goldblum-quote.jpeg

> Considering that, it kinda makes me wonder: how did it come about in the first place that The Science has seemingly ascended to The Throne of Authority (state-sanctioned, no less) on planet Earth? Was a vote of some sort held? Did I miss a news release? Because it sure seems to me that this is now considered A Fundamental Truth.

Very sympathetic to this feeling. We never vote on the Authority, but it does seem to be consensus-driven. Science is at least better than the Catholic Church, in that it doesn't physically torture dissenters. It just publicly ridicules them.

I'm hopeful a new Authority will emerge over the next century or so. One informed by science but not driven by it.

> Is this a reference to sex toys? Those can certainly make a person feel things, but the toy itself is inanimate and non-conscious....at least I think so!

No it's a reference to babies :) I realize calling a baby a "machine" is a little...odd. But I'm trying to point out that the line between artificial and natural life is a blurry one.

> Sure, but also not feeling, or conscious.

Are you saying that a baby created in an artificial womb wouldn't feel or be conscious?

> I don't think I catch your meaning?

I'm saying there are some very specific metaphysical scenarios (like a God who actively ensouls every new child) where my assumptions would break down. But under any kind of physicalist scenario (even weakly physicalist), there's a pretty clear (but long!) path to building an artificial brain.

The big question is, how will we know when we've done it? How will we be able to tell if that brain truly feels, even if it's functionally identical to a human brain? Can we rule out the possibility that God chose not to ensoul our artificial brain? Or that we haven't missed some crucial detail?

> From my vantage point, science seems to be not so interested in those sorts of questions, if not even sometimes downright hostile to them!

I agree. Most science-oriented people seem to think we'll have concrete answers to my questions above. I think we'll have concrete theories, but they'll rely on some big assumptions.

I mean, we already do it! We create feeling machines all the time. Sex is a pretty messy manufacturing process, but on the plus side it feels great.

Biotech has already started to encroach on this process. You don't need sex anymore, and fertilization can happen outside of the body. We still need a womb, but the road to an artificial womb seems pretty well-paved.

I do think there's an open question of how much we'll be able to wrap our arms around the process, and how fast we'll make progress. There's also a really interesting question around embodiment: do you have to make feeling machines out of meat? Or can you make them out of wires and metal?

Since we're in r/philosophy, I suppose I also have to admit the possibility that God endows each newborn with an immortal soul, and could choose not to ensoul children that were born of artificial processes. But barring a fairly extreme metaphysical scenario, it's only a matter of iteration.

Yeah agreed--I kind of slid over this one. To be fair, I did say "apparent" incompatibility :)

> The circuitry of intelligence and the circuitry of feelings are not the same.

I'm pretty sure this is true, but a lot of the scientifically-minded folks I talk to don't seem to agree. They especially don't think you can have feeling without a certain level of intelligence (e.g. a concept of selfhood).

A lot of emergentists I've debated with speak of feeling as something that arises in sufficiently sophisticated information processing systems. I suppose you could treat this as a necessary, but not sufficient condition--but that begs the question, what else is necessary? Any extra requirement seems to break the emergentist approach to consciousness.

I think you're right though--there are other ways of describing emergentism (e.g. a description that isn't based entirely on information processing) which are not in direct conflict with "intelligence that doesn't feel"

Not sure I follow--what are you getting at?

Yup--your brain!

Currently our only manufacturing process involves sexual intercourse, but hey, it's early days

Yup, this is 100% related to the Hard Problem.

> but as a coder, how could i write something that feels? It’s not possible.

What makes you so certain it's not possible?

We have a proof of concept that some configurations of matter feel--namely our brains. It's only a matter of time before we figure out how to reverse-engineer that system to create feeling machines. IMO, the question isn't if we will do this, but how will we know when we've done it?