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This is the fourth in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch’s book, The Edge of Sentience. This one covers the section on artificial intelligence. Birch begins the section by acknowledging how counter intuitive the idea might be of sentience existing in systems we build, ones that aren't alive and have no body. But he urges us to … Continue reading The edge of sentience in AI
This is the third in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch's book, The Edge of Sentience. This one covers the section on animal sentience. I think it's fair to say that this is the section Birch is most passionate about. It's definitely the one where I feel his activism most keenly. A concept he … Continue reading The edge of sentience in animals
This is the second in a series of posts on Jonathan Birch's book, The Edge of Sentience. This one is on borderline cases of sentience in humans. Birch looks at cases involving humans with disorders of consciousness, such as those in vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as fetuses, embryos, and neural organoids made … Continue reading The edge of sentience in humans
I'm currently reading Jonathan Birch's The Edge of Sentience, a book focusing on the boundary between systems that can feel pleasure or pain, and those that can't, and the related ethics. While this is a subject I'm interested in, I'm leery of the activism the animal portions of it attract. I have nothing in particular … Continue reading The semantic indeterminacy of sentience
SelfAwarePatterns 